Ginning Up The Next Big Thing
by digby
Chuck Todd, subbing for Matthews today, had John Harris on to discuss his comments from This Week (which I wrote about here.)
Todd: John you talked about this over the week-end. I saw some of your comments. And this feels like cynical base politics that some Republicans are playing. You heard former senator Istook there giving a very reasoned policy defense of this. What you don’t hear a lot of these elected Republicans doing… Is this a total cynical ploy?
Harris: Uh, it’s a strange one and even your conversation there Chuck, which was a good one, but kind of an abstract one, for three months out from an election going back to the history of the 14th Amendment passed a hundred and forty some years ago. I think members in the most competitive districts are not going to want to get into an abstract debate, which is what the 14th amendment is, even if you think illegal immigration is a huge problem, it doesn’t do anything to address the problem in the here and now. The best argument that Republicans have is that “look, we’ve had to act in Arizona because Washington hasn’t acted.” So this to my mind undercuts this argument because it makes them look like they’re engaged in an ideological argument or a base charging argument or even and abstract constitutional argument rather than address tangible problem in the here and now.
Let’s review what Harris’ comments were this week-end before we go any further. Former bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, hardly a bleeding heart liberal, was aghast at this 14th amendment move, on moral, legal and strategic grounds, and made an impassioned argument against it. Here’s Harris:
In fairness to the … I mean one argument you could make Michael is that uh, immigration reform is never going to happen unless this issue is at a boil. Perhaps that’s what Lindsay Graham is doing. Ok, let’s turn this up to a boil and only in that environment …
To which Gerson replied:
Gerson: That is a deeply cynical approach. To take an issue this sensitive and this symbolic to use that to leverage other political reform, I think that would be very cynical.
As I mentioned in the earlier post, Harris also went on about how the “problem” of illegal immigration is so important that politicians need to address it, which is, of course, nonsense. Illegal immigration has eased recently and there is no uptick in crime or public expenditures. There is no “reason” other than rank xenophobia for all this angst over border issues, something which Harris doesn’t seem to even be interested in knowing, much less reporting. If he were, then this 14th Amendment strategy wouldn’t seem so darned “abstract” would it? Indeed, he would realize that the whole thing is partisan demagoguery.
The guest just prior to Harris, former senator Ernest Istook simply said that the 14th amendment was never meant to cover people who are in the country illegally, full stop. You can call that abstract if you want, but it sounded like something those who want to deny citizenship to “anchor babies” will accept very readily. And those who are agitated over bogus tales of Mexicans terrorizing little old ladies are hardly likely to see this as an abstract concept.
As Allison Kilkenny points out here, this is mostly a move to appease the base and to move the goalposts on immigration to give the Democrats room to find “common ground” on conservative terms, hence her title “let’s just agree that Mexicans shouldn’t be publicly executed.” It’s how they roll. But after listening to Istook, I was carried back to a time when I was younger and I used to hear conservative kooks out there parsing the Second Amendment to create an inalienable right to bear arms out of an archaic phrase obviously intended to make it possible to muster a militia. We know where that went. Istook’s argument didn’t seem to be ridiculous on its face and once people hear it enough times many of them will see it as good old common sense.
It’s never a good idea to underestimate people’s willingness to deprive others of things they take for granted themselves. I think this is dangerous for both the reasons Kilkenny stated and on the merits of the amendment itself. If they can’t pass it now, I could easily see this becoming a long term cause that could find its way through the now thoroughly conservative federal legal system over the next couple of decades.
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