Our newspapers are full of reports that the amnesty lobbies are confident of victory in 2014. So was Napoleon before the battle of Waterloo, a short 199 years ago.
Each year we hear the same story from the mainstream media. The proponents of a new amnesty bill have "developed broad support" to push the legislation. Business interests have joined with religious leaders, public sector labor unions and "immigration rights activists" to forge a "powerful coalition" to push the amnesty legislation.
All that is true again as Congress gears up for 2014, but there is nothing new here. These news reports are the advanced artillery barrage aimed at softening up the beachhead. The goal is always the same, to create an atmosphere of inevitability, and the liberal media is happy to participate in this game. The message being sent to conservatives and all patriots is – if it is inevitable, why fight? Better to spend our energies and resources on some other issue. Right?
This is all hogwash. Nothing in Washington is inevitable except another annual budget deficit. Amnesty can be blocked, and I believe, in all likelihood, it will fail again for the same reasons it has failed every year since President Bush announced his amnesty plan in 2004.
Yes, it is discouraging that the House Republican leadership has signaled a willingness to "act on immigration" in 2014 if it can be done through a "series of small steps" instead of a single "comprehensive" bill like the Senate's Gang of Eight bill, S.744.
The amnesty lobby's 2014 plan is well-known to Washington insiders. It aims to get some "moderate" immigration bill passed in the House by the Republican majority, a bill that has some features supported by a majority of Republicans, and then use that bill as a vehicle for a conference with the Senate amnesty bill. The product of that conference would be some form of amnesty legislation, which would then pass both houses with both Democratic and Republican votes.
That plan is so transparently deceptive that it is stupid, and it shows the desperation that now permeates the ranks of the amnesty lobby. Far from being a plan for an easy victory, in reality it is a plan that points to a dead end.
The Achilles' heel of the new plan is that there is no Senate immigration bill that is remotely acceptable to a majority of House Republicans, so there is no legitimate basis for a conference committee. If a modest House immigration bill is sent to the Senate, it will either be killed by Senate Democrats or be amended to create an amnesty bill unacceptable to a majority of House Republicans.
The Senate's Gang of Eight bill has been so thoroughly discredited that it is toxic to most House Republicans. One of its most prominent early sponsors, Sen. Marco Rubio, has publicly disavowed his prior support for the bill. That's why even the Republicans who want to appear flexible and accommodating to the amnesty lobby talk in guarded terms about modest steps toward "humanitarian reforms" and do not embrace a straight-out amnesty plan that offers only hollow and unenforceable provisions on border security and interior enforcement.
It will take a magician twice as talented as Houdini to persuade a majority of House Republicans to vote for an amnesty bill that is as transparently dishonest and full of evasions, exemptions and waivers as the border security provisions of the Senate bill. And if House Speaker John Boehner tries to ram a conference report through the House without the support of a majority in the House Republican conference, he will destroy the Republican Party.
So, the real question is, does the Republican leadership in Congress and the RNC truly believe it is smart politics to destroy the Republican Party in order to placate the amnesty lobby? Is it possible that these mavens of mediocrity really think that they can "put the issue behind us" by destroying Republican credibility among the 80 percent of party regulars who oppose amnesty?
Do Republican leaders truly think the advocates for total amnesty will allow the issue to die if Congress passes some pale imitation of amnesty – a bill that gets to full amnesty by a series of small steps – if that legislation does NOT include a path to full citizenship?
Do Republican leaders not realize that such a deceptive bill – a stealth amnesty bill – puts Republican members of Congress and all Republican candidates in the worst of all worlds – a world where the party's base distrusts them and immigration activists continue to attack them? Is it really possible that Republican leaders in Washington are that stupid?
Maybe I am suffering an outbreak of cautious optimism, but I do not think Republican leaders can digest that much stupidity when there are so many other issues working in Republicans' favor. On the other hand, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is something Republicans in Washington have become astonishingly good at.
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