Republicans want their new weapon
With the 2022 Dobbs decision abolishing womens’s federal right to an abortion, Republicans lost a campaign issue they’d campaigned on reliably for decades. It was like the Pentagon’s identity crisis after the Cold War ended. The Pentagon spent the 1990s not knowing who it should be planning to fight.
Republicans have failed again and again since 2022 to block abortion protection amendments in the states, even as fringe right legislators all but lock women with doomed pregnancies into iron maidens as they bleed out. Abortion is on its way to being a third rail in Republican politics. The issue is now a political loser.
To replace abortion, the GOP settled on Great Replacement theory, an isotopic variant of the Southern Strategy. Republicans stoke fears of brown-skinned hordes of immigrants pouring across the U.S. southern border to knock white Americans off the top of the social ladder. It’s not about race as much as power and status. Race is just the icing.
Speaking with Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Greg Sargent reflects on the irony that in 2013 Republicans felt they could never win another presidential election if they did not fix the immigration system. Then they elected the most anti-immigrant president in history who now demands they not fix it after they spent months in negotiations with Democrats to arrive at the bill they killed this week at Donald “91 Counts” Trump’s bidding.
Steve Benen (MaddowBlog):
The senators who spent four months negotiating a bipartisan compromise on border policy and security aid probably didn’t see the political freight train coming. Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who took the lead in the talks on behalf of his party, predicted last month that the bill could garner up to 70 votes in the chamber, but within hours of unveiling the legislation, it was obvious that far-right opposition was simply too great.
On Monday, the day after the text of the bill reached the public, GOP officials lined up to condemn the package in no uncertain terms. By most measures, the odds that the legislation would fail were roughly 99%.
A day later, they reached 100%. NBC News reported:
Republican senators made it clear Tuesday that they will kill the border security bill their party negotiated with Democrats, a stunning turnaround less than 48 hours after it was released by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., and blessed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell, R-Ky. — overruled by his Senate GOP members, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and former President Donald Trump — conceded it has no path to passage.
The “Gang of Eight” in the Senate negotiated an immigration bill weighted toward Republican priorities. But now they won’t take yes for an answer.
Lankford/Murphy/Sinema: As part of a radical hostage strategy, Republicans told Democrats to embrace a bipartisan compromise on immigration and border policy or the GOP would make it easier for Russia to take part of Eastern Europe by force. The resulting deal received strong Democratic support, before being rejected by Republicans in both chambers.
Republicans privately say they would not likely get a more restrictive bill than this one, Bennet tells Sargent. Republicans just trashed it. They want their new weapon.
Sargent asks why Democrats don’t make more of the fact that our booming economy is dependent on immigrant labor. Immigrants disproportionally work in “essential” economic sectors. What needs fixing is how we manage the flow. Trump wants none of it. And none of Them.
Their conversation on the topic is here.
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