151 search results for ""14th amendment""

by tristero

For years and years, I’ve been saying that Scalia’s jurisprudence is incoherent, inconsistent, and bizarre, with a strong bias towards justifying the oppressive potential of the majority and and an equally strong contempt for the rights of minorities. But what do I know?

Here are two folks that do. Their conclusion: Scalia’s jurisprudence is incoherent, inconsistent, and bizarre, with a strong bias towards justifying the oppressive potential of the majority and and an equally strong contempt for the rights of minorities.

A taste of the op-ed. The entire thing is worth reading:

In a recent speech to law students at Georgetown, he argued that there is no principled basis for distinguishing child molesters from homosexuals, since both are minorities and, further, that the protection of minorities should be the responsibility of legislatures, not courts. After all, he remarked sarcastically, child abusers are also a “deserving minority,” and added, “nobody loves them.” 

Not content with throwing minorities under the bus, Justice Scalia has declared that Obergefell marks the end of democracy in the United States, stating in his dissent that “a system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.” 

The logic of his position is that the Supreme Court should get out of the business of enforcing the Constitution altogether, for enforcing it overrides legislation, which is the product of elected officials, and hence of democracy. The model he appears to be embracing is that of the traditional British Constitution; until recently, Parliament was deemed to be Britain’s “supreme court.” It could overrule judicial decisions, but courts could not invalidate parliamentary legislation. 

We doubt that Justice Scalia would go that far, for he has repeatedly voted to strike down statutes that he believes violate the First Amendment and various federalism provisions of the Constitution, as well as affirmative action measures that he thinks are in conflict with the 14th Amendment. 

But who knows? Maybe he’ll now cease voting to strike down statutes under any provision of the Constitution, as otherwise he might be thought of as one of those “unelected lawyers” who so threaten our democracy. Not only an unelected lawyer, but — a patrician. For he said in his Obergefell dissent that “to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.”

Deportation, beatings, torture, summary execution. What would you call it?

by digby

I wrote about Trump and “f” word today for Salon:

[I]t it was after Trump started calling for stronger surveillance of Muslim-Americans in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks that a handful of conservatives ventured to call Trump’s rhetoric something much more dangerous: fascism.

[…]

“Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it,” tweeted Max Boot, a conservative fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is advising Marco Rubio.

“Forced federal registration of US citizens, based on religious identity, is fascism. Period. Nothing else to call it,” Jeb Bush national security adviser John Noonan wrote on Twitter.

Conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace, who has endorsed Ted Cruz, also used the “F” word last week: “If Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump every conservative in the country would call it what it is — creeping fascism.”

“we’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule… And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago…”

More at the link.

He’s also encouraging his followers to beat up protesters and routinely claims the military should have summarily executed Bowe Bergdahl — which he says the country would have done in the past “when we were strong.” Call him whatever you want but it doesn’t change what he is.

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Preach it sister

by digby

Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post:

And you get a tax cut! And you get a tax cut! And you, and you, and you!

Unless you’re poor. Then pay up.

So says Bobby Jindal, Louisiana governor, Rhodes scholar and celebrated policy wonk, who through his newly released hack-job of a tax plan has achieved the impossible: He has made Donald Trump look like a grown-up.

In the months since Trump began hoisting himself upward in the polls, his fellow Republican presidential candidates have scrambled to spotlight what an unserious contender he is. It’s not just his frequent insults and puerile doxxing that demonstrate his unseriousness; it’s first and foremost his intolerably silly policy positions.

Jindal has been especially critical, calling Trump an “unserious and unstable narcissist,” who “has no understanding of policy. He’s full of bluster but has no substance.”

Yet again and again, the other 14 Republican presidential candidates have proved themselves to be no less silly on policy issues than Trump. On the occasions when he has staked out new territory on the craziness frontier, the other candidates have quickly tried to meet or surpass him. This was the case, for example, with his hateful comments about immigration (which led to me-too calls to unilaterally ignore the 14th Amendment, among other highlights). Trump says jump, and the other contenders say: How far right?

There’s more., specifically about their economic “policies.”

This problem really can’t be overstated. Trump and Carson’s campaigns may seem like jokes. But their lunatic presence is pushing the GOP even farther to the right on economics. That’s not good for anybody.  Too many people think they still make sense on that issue:

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Rolling back the Renaissance
by Tom Sullivan

“Gullibility is the new civic duty,” Charlie Pierce wrote in describing the Carly Fiorina SuperPAC, Carly For America. The Federal Election Commission rule against coordination between SuperPACs and campaigns they support is one “everybody knows but to which very few people pay attention.” It may look like a campaign, act like a campaign, and raise money like a campaign, but it’s not:

At a typ­ic­al Fior­ina cam­paign stop, a CARLY For Amer­ica staffer was sta­tioned at a table out­side of the event space to sign up at­tendees for the su­per PAC’s email list. An­oth­er staffer handed out CARLY For Amer­ica stick­ers to at­tendees as they ar­rived. When Fior­ina and her staff entered the event, they were usu­ally met by a room covered in red “CARLY” signs and tables covered in pro-Fior­ina lit­er­at­ure, all pro­duced by CARLY For Amer­ica.

If a reg­u­lar voter at­ten­ded every cam­paign stop and handed out fly­ers telling someone to vote for that can­did­ate, the cost of print­ing would count as an in-kind ex­pendit­ure. Both Fior­ina’s cam­paign and CARLY For Amer­ica main­tain that the work be­ing done by the su­per PAC does not con­sti­tute an in-kind con­tri­bu­tion to the cam­paign, but an in­de­pend­ent ex­pendit­ure. But elec­tion-law ex­perts say that, in ef­fect, the su­per PAC is provid­ing a ser­vice by staff­ing the events.

But evidence is so Enlightenment, you know? It is the enemy of gullibility. Faith, ideology? Those are now the coin of the realm. Mike Huckabee can claim that “the Dred Scott decision of 1857 still remains to this day the law of the land, which says that black people aren’t fully human,” in defending Kim Davis’ claims of religious persecution. He can ignore the 14th Amendment. It just muddies the ideological waters. Evidence is inconvenient like that. If might makes right, so does faith … in whatever.

In spite of “evidence-based policymaking” finding at least rhetorical bipartisan support in Washington, Politico reports there is “a quiet war on the idea” in Washington. In climate science, gun violence, violent crime, health care, and education research, Congress is either blocking funding or cutting it. Even the American Enterprise Institute is alarmed by proposed cuts to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), writes Harry Stein:

The decision by Congress to weaken its own ability to gather and process evidence might be the most troubling example of how Congress has lost interest in applying evidence to inform public policy. These budget cuts undermine vital nonpartisan institutions within the legislative branch, including the policy experts at the Congressional Research Service and the investigators at the Government Accountability Office. These institutions are critical sources for Congress to get credible research and evaluation of public policy from experts who are independent from the executive branch. Budget cuts also make it harder for members and committees of Congress to hire and retain their own top-notch policy staff to understand complex issues, which makes legislators more dependent on expertise from lobbyists and interest groups.

There you are. Because dependency on the government is bad for you. Government dependency on lobbyists is good for America. They prefer it that way.

The irony about evidence falling on hard times is that when I arrived here in the 1990s, the New Age was in full flower-power. As Larry Massett observed in “A Night on Mt. Shasta” (recorded during the Harmonic Convergence), “I met a lot of people I liked and almost no one I believed.” People following their spiritual journeys seemed alienated by modernity, and suckers for whatever snake oil came peddled by people who seemed genuine enough.

Twenty years later, it is time again. Donald Trump, a cross between P.T. Barnum and Minnesota Fats, is leading the Republican field for president because he seems genuine. Among Democrats, Joe Biden is the genuine non-candidate:

To be genuine would be a great strength at a time when Hillary Clinton seems all the more contrived for trying to be spontaneous and people are responding to Donald Trump no matter what he says simply because he seems to be saying what he really thinks at that moment.

In the past, the knock on Biden has been that he utters whatever pops into his brain. Trump has made this into a big positive and that could make it the same for Biden.

True, but not particularly comforting. A few years ago, I ran a series at Scrutiny Hooligans called Unmaking the American Century. I might have to re-title it. A large swath of America seems eager to roll things back further still. Past the Enlightenment. Past the Renaissance.

Welcome back, Middle Ages. They missed you.

Villagers reassure us that the Republican Party isn’t extreme

by digby

One of the scary aspects of the Trump candidacy is the fact that he’s moving the goalposts so far to the right that the beltway media, in their unending quest to portray the Republican Party as Real Americans who represent the great middle of the country, is redefining GOP “moderate” to mean people who don’t think we should start a mass deportation program:

Newly released numbers from the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll reveal not only the very clear differences between Iowans who back Donald Trump and those who support any of the other 16 GOP presidential candidates, but also how the real estate mogul’s call for a hard-line immigration policy has resonated with a certain sector of the electorate.

Asked whether rounding up the 11 million people in the country illegally and deporting them is a good or a bad idea, almost three in four Trump backers said it was a good idea. By contrast, just four in 10 Republicans who are supporting another candidate said the same.

See? Only 40% of Republicans who don’t back Trump think we should be deporting millions of people! Huzzah! Sanity reigns!

Here’s some more moderation from the PPP poll this week:

Republicans who say they’re with the real-estate kingpin and former reality show star were also substantially more supportive of changing the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all American-born children regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

About half of GOP voters told the survey they would support amending the Constitution to bar the children of undocumented immigrants from claiming “birthright” citizenship.

Only half of Republicans think the nation is threatened by babies born in America being citizens. It’s all good.

It’s just Trump, the crazy kooky guy whose entertaining everybody. It’s not serious. No need to worry that the party itself is becoming a far-right extremist political faction. Nothing to see here.

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The Great Whitebread Hope waffles again

by digby

Think Progress:

When George Stephanopoulos asked [Scott Walker] on ABC’s This Week, “You’re not seeking to repeal or alter the 14th Amendment?” Walker answered, “No, my point is any discussion that goes beyond securing the border and enforcing laws are things that should be a red flag to voters out there who for years have heard lip service from politicians and are understandably angry because they haven’t been committed to following through on promises.”

This is actually the third position Walker has taken on the issue of birthright citizenship, with him telling NBC’s Kasie Hunt on Monday we should “absolutely” rethink the 14th Amendment.
Then Friday he told CNBC’s John Harwood that he wasn’t going to take “a position on it one way or the other” and that he was tired after a three-and-a-half hour press gaggle.

On Sunday, Walker said that position was finally a “no,” but not before trying to evade the question.

This is the guy all the smart money says will be the GOP nominee. Gosh I hope so.

Click over to read the whole exchange. It’s pretty much gibberish.

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Scotty waffles again

by digby

Chance the gardner likes to watch TV:

Days after seeming to echo Donald Trump’s call for ending birthright citizenship, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Friday said he isn’t for or against the idea.

“I’m not taking a position on it one way or the other,” the 2016 Republican presidential hopeful said. Only after securing America’s borders, he explained, is it appropriate to address the issue of birthright citizenship.

Walker spoke in an interview with CNBC at the end of a turbulent week in the Republican campaign. Trump, who leads in polls of Republican voters nationally and here in New Hampshire, released an immigration plan that called for ending automatic citizenship for anyone born in the U.S. regardless of the legal status of the parents.

Asked after Trump released his plan if he agreed with the idea, Walker told MSNBC: “Yeah, to me it’s about enforcing the laws in this country.”

Today, Walker said his stance had been misunderstood during a long campaign day involving numerous interviews marked by interruptions.

Walker once stood on the left side of the Republican debate, favoring a path to citizenship for immigrants who entered the country illegally. He has since explained that he changed his mind in response to additional information.

This guy is the waffle king.

Birthright citizenship has been under attack for decades. It’s only now that these guys are trying to juggle Trumpism with the need to attract some Latino voters that they are all over the place on this. I posted this before but it’s worth running it again.

As far back as 1993, then-Congressman John Kasich co-sponsored a bill to end birthright citizenship. By 2010, FOX News Contributor-turned-candidate for Governor Kasich had continued his crusade against citizen children. That yearLindsey Graham joined Kasich when he responded to Democrats’ push for comprehensive immigration reform by accusing that immigrant mothers “drop and leave” their children in the U.S.

The following year, in 2011, Senator Rand Paul introduced a resolution to amend the constitution and end birthright citizenship. By 2013, one of the vilest terms in Latino politics was born when Republican Congressman Steve King introduced a bill to end “anchor babies” – the disgusting term some Republicans use to describe U.S. citizen children born to immigrant parents.

This summer the GOP has again shifted their attack from immigrants, to immigrant families, to the U.S. citizen children of immigrant parents. Just last weekChris Christie, not once but twice, called for the reexamination of the 14th Amendment, or “birthright citizenship”. Scott Walker told a reporter he would flat out end birthright citizenship as president. On the campaign trail, Ted Cruz has refused to say whether he supported Steve King’s proposal to eliminate birthright citizenship. Here’s a rundown of what some of the rest of the GOP field has said about birthright citizenship.

REPUBLICANS IN THEIR OWN WORDS…

· Lindsey Graham: “We should change our Constitution and say if you come here illegally and you have a child, that child’s automatically not a citizen.” (Fox News)

· Bobby Jindal: “We need to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants.” (Twitter)

· Rand Paul: “I’ve always agreed with Milton Freidman who says you can’t have open borders in a welfare state. You can’t become a magnet for the world and let everybody come in here, have children, and then they become citizens. So I still do agree with that.” (WNDTV)

· Rick Santorum: “Only children born on American soil where at least one parent is a citizen or resident aliens is automatically a U.S. citizen.”(Breitbart)

· Ben Carson: “The 14th Amendment has been brought up recently, about ‘anchor babies’, and it doesn’t make any sense to me that people can come over here and have a baby and the baby becomes an American citizen … That doesn’t make any sense at all.” (YouTube)

Jeb! famously said that we need to do something about those damned “anchor babies”. What he wants to do I’m not sure, but he claims he’s not for overturning the 14th amendment and centuries of common law just to appease a bunch of bigots, which is nice. Rubio went so far as to claim that these foreign invader babies and even their parents are human beings. (My God, man, what party do you think you’re running in?)

Walker, being the rank amateur he is, jumped on the Jeff Sessions/Donald Trump train automatically without thinking through whether or not that’s what a serious frontrunning grown-up would do. He made a mistake.

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Banana Republic politics

by digby

Trump has pushed the authoritarian streak in the GOP so far that it’s compelling many of the others to go full-on fascist with him. Here’e Bobby Jindal, the previously doctrinaire believer in states’ rights and local control:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said Monday he would hold mayors of so-called sanctuary cities “criminally culpable” for crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in their cities.

Sanctuary cities like San Francisco often do not honor federal authorities’ requests to hold undocumented immigrants in custody so they can be deported — policies that have come under the microscope after an undocumented immigrant who had recently evaded deportation allegedly shot and killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle in San Francisco.

“Absolutely,” Jindal, who is a Republican contender for the presidency, said Monday morning on Boston Herald Radio when asked whether he believed mayors of those cities should be arrested. “I would hold them as an accomplice. Make them criminally culpable.”

Jindal added that he thinks those mayors should also be liable for civil damages.

“Especially if the prosecutor isn’t taking action or if the mayor’s not changing their ways, I’d allow the families to go to court and sue them civilly as well to recover damages,” Jindal said.

The comments come after Jindal announced last Thursday a “partners in crime” plan to hold city officials accountable for the crimes of undocumented immigrants in their cities. The plan calls for Congress to pass legislation that would make city officials “an accessory” to those crimes and give victims’ families standing to sue.

And here’s a powerful Iowa right wing talk show host to whom all he GOP candidates supplicate themselves:

As if the GOP’s decision to start seriously debating how to undermine the 14th Amendment weren’t bad enough, earlier this week an influential conservative Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson debuted a brilliant idea for how to deal with undocumented immigrants — reinstitute slavery.

On his August 17th program, Mickelson proposed putting up signs all over Iowa saying that “as of this date, 30 to 60 days from now, anyone who is in the state of Iowa who is not here legally and who cannot demonstrate their legal status to the satisfaction of the local and state authorities here in the State of Iowa, become[s] property of the State of Iowa.”

“We have a job for you,” he speculated telling the newly enslaved people of Iowa, before shifting to the practical benefits of slavery. “We start using compelled labor, the people who are here illegally would therefore be owned by the state and become an asset of the state rather than a liability and we start inventing jobs for them to do.”

If the Mexican government won’t pay to build Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful, powerful wall,” we will “‘invite’ the illegal Mexicans and illegals aliens to build it. You show up without an invitation? You get to be a construction worker!”

“If you have come across the border illegally, again give them another 60-day guideline, you need to go home and leave this jurisdiction, and if you don’t you become property of the United States, and guess what?” Mickelson asked. “You will be building a wall. We will compel your labor. You would belong to these United States. You show up without an invitation, you get to be an asset.”

When a caller later pointed out the obvious — that this “sounds an awful lot like slavery” — Mickelson replied by asking “What’s wrong with slavery?” He proceeded to claim that the real slaves were the taxpayers on whose largesse undocumented immigrants allegedly depend.

“We allow millions of people to come into the country, who aren’t here legally, and people who are here are indentured to those people to pay their bills, their education of their kids, pay for their food, their food stamps, their medical bills, in some cases even subsidize their housing, and somehow the people who own the country, who pay the bills, pay the taxes, they get indentured to the new people who are not even supposed to be here,” he said. “Isn’t that a lot like slavery?”

Cruz will be visiting him today.

They have always had this streak, of course. They just aren’t hiding it anymore.

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Give me that old time Constitution
by Tom Sullivan

It was good for Samuel Adams. It’s good enough for me.

Donald Trump’s championing the elimination of birthright citizenshhip is a xenophobe’s dream. Trump is getting enough mileage out of hyping the “anchor baby” threat that many among the Republican presidential field are drafting off him, hoping to hang on long enough to pass him in the final laps. Talking Points Memo’s David Leopold debunks some of the nonsense, summing up Trump’s immigration reform plan in four words: They have to go.

When it comes down to it, the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment has very little to do with immigration; it is fundamentally focused on the preservation of civil rights. Trump’s extremist proposal to end birthright citizenship — whether by elimination or reinterpretation of the Citizenship Clause — comes at the grave cost of abridging civil rights, even hearkening back to the days of Dred Scott, when people were viewed as commodities to be bought and sold.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you listen to conservative talk radio in Iowa. Media Matters reports:

Iowa radio host and influential conservative kingmaker Jan Mickelson unveiled an immigration plan that would make undocumented immigrants who don’t leave the country after an allotted time “property of the state,” asking, “What’s wrong with slavery?” when a caller criticized his plan.

Calling the Iowa state fair “the carnival of the damned,” Charlie Pierce wonders why any American politician would ever engage, not with Mickelson, but with the audience that tunes in for this sort of vulgarity.

Michael Keegan from People for the American Way condemns Republicans for entertaining the notion that we abandon the 14th Amendment:

The Republican presidential contenders’ rush to badmouth a basic constitutional right — in an apparent attempt to appeal to their supposedly Constitution-loving far-right base — speaks volumes about what they really mean when they talk about constitutionalism. They use their pocket Constitutions for the parts that come in handy. The rest of it? Not so much.

Besides, the Founders didn’t pass the 14th Amendment, so technically it’s not really the Constitution, is it? Give us that old time Constitution, back when we didn’t need the specter of voter fraud to justify keeping lesser-thans from the polls.

“Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once told a new staffer, Rick Perlstein wrote. Whether it’s the Constitution or the Bible, that flexibility is baked into the right’s anti-gay wedding cake.

They not only tolerate the relativism of which they accuse the left, they embrace it. Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast explains that far from being shunned by the GOP’s evangelical base, the religious right is embracing Trump in spite of his whatever faith, his string of marriages, and advocating “getting even” in his speech at Liberty University. After all, an eye for an eye is in the Bible, right?

Watch how often believers in nominally Christian America reference the Bible. Except when the Savior’s New Testament teachings about loving your neighbor, caring for the poor, rendering unto Caesar and turning the other cheek make them feel that Christ is too soft on personal responsibility or too left on social issues. Then they turn to the 39 pre-Christian books of the Bible filled with good, Old Testament-fashioned smiting and stoning and vengeance and wrath of God stuff – hoping to get a second opinion.

Old Testament Patriots approach America’s founding the same way. The Constitution is holy writ, yes, but when keeping to its laws and principles makes them feel soft on terror and people less American than they are, right-wingers turn to pre-ratification letters and speeches by the founders – particularly the ones whose ideas lost early arguments as the Constitution took shape – hoping to get a second opinion.

Ignore California’s example at your peril, GOPers

by digby

John Harwood interviewed Marco Rubio for CNBC today and asked him whether or not all this Latino bashing, including the use of derogatory terms like “anchor baby” were dragging down the Republican Party:

Rubio: It’s not the Republican Party. It’s individual candidates who are responsible for their own rhetoric and …

Harwood: It’s the face of the Republican Party to the whole country right now

Rubio: Well, the face of the Republican Party is going to be our nominee

Ok. Tell it Mitt Romney. Or the California Republican Party.

I wrote about it for Salon today:

There were obviously many factors that contributed to California’s evolution into the deep-blue state it is today, from demographics to the culture war. But none of those things come close to the damage that then-Governor Pete Wilson did to the longterm interest of the California Republican Party in 1994, when he scapegoated Latino immigrants as the cause of all the state’s woes.

Wilson was running for re-election, and as part of his campaign to distract from the economic failure of his first term and increase turnout among his base, he ran on a platform promising to crack down on undocumented workers, and enthusiastically supported the infamous Prop 187, which set up a statewide system designed to deny any kind of benefits to undocumented workers, including K-12 education and all forms of health care.

(He also supported a constitutional amendment to repeal birthright citizenship, currently guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.)

Here’s the famous “they keep coming” ad the Wilson campaign ran that year:

Unfortunately, they apparently didn’t know how to count. They failed to recognize that Latinos were the fastest growing ethnic minority in the state, and knew very well that all this “concern” about undocumented immigration stemmed from a nativist impulse that had little to do with economics and everything to do with bigotry.

The reaction was swift:

The Rev. Jon Pedigo remembers he was so angry that he instantly started planning a march from his parish in Morgan Hill to St. Joseph’s Cathedral in San Jose.

“I said, ‘I’m going to take that frickin’ cross from the church and I’m gonna walk to the downtown cathedral and demand that something be done,’” said Pedigo, now pastor of East San Jose’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. The next morning he led 250 people on the 21-mile walk.

“We filled the cathedral. We filled the park. It was amazing,” he said. “We said, ‘We will not put up with this, and we want God on our side.’”

I don’t know if God was on their side, but Latinos certainly did not put up with it. The Republicans lost the Hispanic vote in California and have almost zero chance of getting it back. The Hispanic population saw the ethnic hatred on display during that period, hatred which was enthusiastically stoked by the Republican Party of California.

The demographic trends in the state guarantee that the GOP will be in the minority in California for a very long time to come. And needless to say, if anyone thought that after 20 years a younger generation might forget why their parents rejected the Republicans and give them another look, the primal scream we are currently witnessing in the 2016 presidential primary is giving them quite a refresher course.

This story is almost a political cliche, repeated so constantly in the media that it has the taint of a moldy morality play rather than a true political lesson. Certainly it’s been an article of faith that the Republican Party simply cannot win nationally if they don’t find a way to attract some Latinos. This is what they themselves wrote in their post 2012 “autopsy” report:

If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In the last election, Governor Romney received just 27 percentof the Hispanic vote. Other minority communities, including Asian and Pacific Islander Americans,also view the Party as unwelcoming. President Bush got 44 percent of the Asian vote in 2004; our presidential nominee received only 26 percent in 2012.

As one conservative, Tea-Party leader, Dick Armey, told us, “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you. We’ve chased the Hispanic voter out of his natural home.”

We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic communityand beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not,our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only. We also believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.

Unfortunately, their base doesn’t care about their models and their projections; they are convinced that immigrants are the source of all their troubles. And that’s a huge problem. A recent analysis by Latino Decisions shows that Republicans need to get at least 47 percent of the Latino vote in order to win in 2016. (For reference, Mitt Romney won 23 percent.)

I’m going to take a wild guess that Donald Trump and the cowardly clown car that’s chasing him have just made achieving that 47 percent figure impossible.

There’s lots more at the link.

The GOP political establishment that wrote that “autopsy” can’t control their base or their candidates even though they know very well that they are signing the party’s death warrant as a national party. It will catch up with them congressionally as well — it did in California. These candidates are political suicide bombers, even Jeb! who is obviously getting so nervous that he’s out there saying “anchor babies.”

It’s mind boggling.

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