Democrats understandably have no interest in even allowing a congressional debate on Obama’s crimes against the Constitution, and Republican leaders have no stomach for it. But Republican sheepishness is in truth a reflection of the deeper problem that now permeates our civic culture at all levels, national, state and local.

In days of old, which is to say, for the first 200 years of our nation’s history, citizens, lawmakers and judges alike looked to the language of the Constitution for guidance on the grounds for impeachment of public officials. No one was thought to be above the law, not even presidents, and this was universally considered one of the hallmarks of a republican form of government. Only monarchies and dictatorships have a class of people above the law, not democracies.

But that was before we entered the Obama era, the era of “a post-racial America.”

After five years of progressivism under our “transformational leader” Obama, we now know that a “post-racial America” is not a place where politics has risen above race. Rather, it is a place where a Constitution is not allowed to constrain leaders who are pursuing social justice. To accomplish “transformational change,” Obama must necessarily be above the law.

But it is not really Obama’s race that gives him this immunity and insulates him from impeachment, it is his progressivism. If anyone doubts this, they have only to consider whether a black Republican president, someone cut from the same cloth as Allen West or Clarence Thomas, would be given this same immunity.

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On careful analysis, it turns out that race per se is not the critical factor in allocating this new immunity from the laws of impeachment. It is the progressive motives and goals that give certain anointed politicians immunity from criticism when things just don’t work out too well – which, as we know, happens all too often in government, particularly when your goals are grandiose.

We should not be surprised that this new, progressive “post-racial America” is not a place where Martin Luther King’s dream is realized, a place where a person is judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. Instead, we live in a place where you are judged by the content of your agenda. The more “progressive” your agenda, as defined by the lords of political correctness, the more latitude you have in pursuing it.

“Occupy Wall Street”? That’s a sideshow when progressives occupy the White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the courts.

It’s hardly a secret that Obama has long considered himself above the law, that he would prefer to govern by executive decree and not acts of Congress, but that arrogance is not based on his race. Yes, his race is used as a weapon against critics, but it is not the source of his special status as a transformational leader above the law.

Progressives of all races are quick to play the race card against critics and especially against white liberals, who are on a perpetual guilt trip because of the sins of their ancestors. But to Obama’s progressive legions, he needs to be above the law because his mission demands it.

To progressives, the law itself and, indeed, the Constitution are presumed to be illegitimate. To Obama, Holder and Hillary Clinton, the principles of social justice can be the only compass, not laws inherited from “dead white men.” But it was not Obama’s race that taught him this, it was his ideology. As Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation theology teaches us, our laws are the product of history, and our history is one of exploitation, slavery, sexism and imperialism.

It is not news that Obama and his allies on the left believe such things; they always have believed them, as do several million college professors and social activists. What is new and dangerous is that the Republican Party leadership and large segments of our political establishment have come around to agreeing with them. It no longer matters what the Founding Fathers and authors of the Constitution believed. What matters is not offending political correctness, and progressives are the guardians – and enforcers – of those texts.

Thus, Washington’s elites of both parties are of one mind on impeachment. While the facts may suggest to ordinary folks that at a minimum, the House of Representatives should launch an impeachment investigation, political correctness dictates otherwise. Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton cannot be impeached because only the forces of reaction and racism would want to do such a thing, not law-abiding citizens.

Still, ordinary folk are puzzled by reluctance in Congress to employ the constitutional remedy for lawlessness, which is impeachment. They see the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, the flagrant disregard for the Constitution in presidential appointments without Senate confirmation, the Benghazi lies to protect the president’s re-election campaign and the newly exposed IRS war on Obama’s political enemies – the list grows each week.

To solve the puzzle, first open your eyes. When government officials are above the law and are universally acknowledged to be above the law, we cannot say that the nation is in danger of slipping into dictatorship. We are already there.

The debate over the Gang of Eight amnesty bill, S.744, has centered on the weak border security provisions, but in truth, that is almost a distraction. Enforcement problems permeate every aspect of the amnesty bill.

The first Senate committee hearing on the amnesty bill should serve as a wake-up call for Sen. Rubio. All amendments aimed at setting honest enforcement “triggers” were voted down. Rubio has been promising the conservative critics of the bill that “its weaknesses will be fixed.” Well, evidently not.

It turns out that the other members of his “gang” have no interest in fixing the bill. Sens. Jeff Flake and Lindsey Graham voted with Sen. Schumer and other Democrats to scuttle any strengthening of the bill’s border security features. So much for the Gang of Eight’s willingness to help Rubio keep his promises for genuine, enforceable border security guarantees.

But why is any of this a surprise to anyone? The reality is that no amnesty bill acceptable to Democrats and President Obama will have meaningful enforcement provisions – not on border security, not on employer sanctions, not on our five million visa overstays, not on any significant problem the bill is supposed to “fix” in our “broken immigration system.”

The scenario being played out in the Senate was entirely predictable. Thus far, the bill is following the 2006 pattern to a tee. The Senate will pass a very bad amnesty bill with near-unanimous Democrat votes and a dozen Republican votes and will then be hailed as “a great bipartisan achievement.” The bill will then go to the House.

What will happen when the Senate amnesty bill goes to the Republican-controlled House? If the House Republican leadership has its way, the Senate bill will be taken up and amended and then passed. But this will not happen if the House follows “regular order” and first gives consideration to House-sponsored immigration reform bills originating in House committees.

The only open question is what those House bills will look like, and the first question House conservatives will ask is this: If the bills do not take enforcement seriously, why should we take the bills seriously?

That question has no answer. No amnesty bill ever takes enforcement seriously. Why? Because the amnesty sought by Democrats and the Republican open-borders lobby lies not simply in the granting of legal status to a fixed number of currently illegal aliens. The amnesty they want lies in creating a legal path for additional millions of illegal aliens to join them in gaining that legal status over the next 20 years.

So, no amnesty bill acceptable to Democrats and President Obama will ever contain meaningful enforcement provisions that limit the rewards of legal status or actually secure the border against successive waves of illegal aliens.

If the debate over “triggers” for border security were only a debate about how many low-skilled Mexican and Guatemalan laborers we can tolerate crossing our borders, then that alone would be a serious issue to be debated and resolved. But border security involves far more than the future wages for the landscape crew at Lindsey Graham’s private golf course. Border security involves our national security and our national sovereignty.

Members of Congress need to be reminded that while 95 percent of illegal aliens entering the country across our southwest border are from Mexico and Central America, 5 percent are from other places –like Pakistan, Yemen, Vietnam, Iran, China, Russia, Cuba and Egypt. Maybe Sen. Flake does not care that over the decade 2000 to 2010, more than 150,000 individuals from countries other than Mexico entered our country, individuals whose true identities remain unknown. And if he doesn’t care, probably other Americans do.

The attitude of the Gang of Eight sponsors of the Senate amnesty bill as revealed in the first round of committee hearings is, well, “Enforcement? We don’t need no stinking border enforcement!” We can understand why the Mexican government thinks in those terms. What is alarming is how many elected U.S. senators and representatives think the same way.

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Yes, it is possible. As our character and culture change, we become a different nation, like an alien being taking over a human body. It looks the same, but the soul is different.

As what it means to be an American changes, we are justified in wondering whether the nation’s Founding Fathers – or Alexis de Tocqueville or Teddy Roosevelt – would recognize the new Americans who celebrate not a special American identity and American destiny but our “common humanity” and “oneness” with the world’s collective misery.

Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to speak of Americans as a new people who required a new nation. For Franklin, what propelled Americans toward independence was not the Stamp Act or the Tea Tax or the quartering of British troops in the homes of colonists. America was destined to be a separate nation because we were a new people on the face of the earth.

In 1776, a fellow Pennsylvanian, John Dickinson, asked Franklin, who had been an early advocate for independence, exactly why the colonies should separate from the mother country. Franklin replied:

“We have spawned a new race here in America. It’s rougher, simpler, more violent, more entrepreneurial, and less refined. … We require a new nation.”

Benjamin Franklin understood that Americans were a fundamentally different people, a new people in the history of the world. Thus, to Franklin, independence from England was both natural and inevitable.

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Thomas Jefferson then articulated the political principles that justified separation from England, starting with the “unalienable rights” to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson explained in letters to friends that he had not invented anything new; he had simply articulated beliefs commonly and widely held all across the 13 colonies. What Franklin and Jefferson both saw was that holding such views made us unique in the history of the world.

What all of the founding generation understood is that a nation is more than a physical place. What gives a nation its own identity is not borders, flags and laws. The character of the people make them a particular nation, and as a people’s character changes, the nation changes.

Can a nation remain exceptional if it evolves into a mirror image of the old world, the corrupt and tyrannical world from which its early immigrants sought refuge? How much accommodation and compromise can a nation endure without losing its special character and becoming, in modern jargon, “part of the problem, not part of the solution”?

This is a new question Americans never before had to ask. For 200 years, Americans took our special mission for granted, and fortunately, so did the rest of the world. We were Ronald Reagan’s “City on a hill,” and we were proud of it.

The new question for Americans in the 21st century is whether we even want to be a distinct race and a distinct nation, a beacon of light in the darkness. The question has become, not whether we have lost that quality that made us different but whether we should care one way or the other.

This doubt and this questioning of our place in the world is the cumulative product of three generations of progressive education of our elites. Beginning in the mid-20th century, our schools began teaching the devaluation of our history and doubt about our character as a different kind of nation.

Our new progressive culture asks us to worship at the shrine of multiculturalism, where “American Exceptionalism” is cast into what Marx called the “dustbin of history.”

America maintained its exceptionalism for 200 years because it attracted a special kind of immigrant as well, people similar in spirit to the first colonists – individuals drawn to the promise of Franklin’s entrepreneurial individualism. They didn’t come just for employment and with the intention of sending a third of their earnings back home and then returning there some day. They came wanting to be not laborers, but Americans.

Ronald Reagan was an optimist on the question of America’s destiny, and many conservatives still echo that optimism. Yet, the case for a weary pessimism grows stronger each day.

It’s not just the foolhardy “Gang of Eight” Senate amnesty bill that illustrates the Republican Party’s yearning for electoral oblivion. The House Republican leadership has squandered broad public opposition to Obamacare by never defunding the program. On a dozen major bills they have refused to force confrontations with the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Indeed, it’s hard to find a major issue in Congress where the Republican leadership has not abandoned principle as well as smart politics in favor of placating the Washington establishment.

The upshot of all this stupidity is that the conservative base of the Republican Party – which is to say, 80 percent of the party’s membership – is beginning to look for a new home. Inertia can carry the party’s leadership only so far, and it is not likely it will carry them through 2016.

Conservative opposition to the Boehner team has been growing since the debt ceiling cave-in of 2011. If Boehner caves on amnesty by allowing the Senate amnesty bill or some version of it to come to the House floor for a vote, the Republican Party will implode. It will not require a “coup”; it will simply collapse, a victim of its own homegrown Hemlock.

What is striking about the GOP self-immolation is that is has all been done in the name smart politics, as if you can expand your numbers by insulting and then angering your base. That’s about as smart as kicking a hornet’s nest.

We’ve all heard that third-party movements seldom succeed and usually only split a protest vote and allow the incumbent party to win. That is true in ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times.

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A third-party movement in 2016 would not be a replay of the Ross Perot effort in 1992, when the Republican Party was still enjoying the fruits of the Reagan years. Instead of entering the ring against a heavyweight champion, a new third-party movement would be challenging an aging middleweight seeking a comeback, but who has lost the will to fight.

What conservatives want is a vigorous SECOND PARTY challenge to Democratic orthodoxy, and the Republican Party has proven itself incapable of providing that challenge. So, what we will see in 2016 is not a third-party movement but a Replacement Party movement.

Will it be the American Conservative Party or some version of it? The name is not so important as the platform, and the platform might well be similar to the Republican Party Platform of 2012. There were sound principles in that platform, such as explicit opposition to amnesty, but Republican leaders never bothered to read it.

The amnesty bill by itself could never provoke a showdown with conservative voters and a collapse of support for the Republican Party as a viable instrument of constitutional government. But it is the last straw in a long train of betrayals.

The amnesty bill is the last straw not because of the subject, a new amnesty, but because of what it says about Republican perfidy. The amnesty bill is both an arrogant betrayal of principle AND unprecedentedly outrageous in its political stupidity. It asks citizens to buy a pig in a poke merely on the promise of immigration enforcement by the Obama administration, a promise no one with an IQ about 30 can accept.

If after three years of Obama, Napolitano and Holder dishonesty, Republican leaders in Congress want us to put the nation’s sovereignty in their hands, not in real safeguards tied to tangible proof of enforcement, that is one straw too many. Those leaders have forfeited any claim to loyalty or support.

Democrats are laughing all the way to bank, but conservatives are not amused. A replacement party is now inevitable.

Two young Muslim immigrants have been identified as the culprits behind the Boston Marathon slaughter. Using homemade “backpack” bombs constructed on the models in al-Qaida training manuals, they killed three people, maimed a dozen others and injured over 170. Yet, our nation’s lawmakers are not supposed to worry about how the immigration system allows legal entry to thousands of individuals from territories infested with jihadist training camps?

Sen. Schumer has reasons to be worried. His 844-page amnesty bill is in enough trouble already without these uninvited guests crashing the Schumer-Rubio Happy Hour.

Americans not infected by the common disease Potomac Myopia can connect the dots. Ordinary folk assume that a successful immigration system should afford protection against jihadists, not a welcome mat. When citizens say they want our broken immigration system fixed, they think that means securing our borders, real enforcement of immigration laws and better screening against jihadists gaining legal status by way of a green card.

The political reaction to the horrific news out of Boston should serve to alert Americans to this unpleasant fact: Sens. Schumer, Rubio and other members of the “Gang of Eight” have different priorities. Most citizens will be shocked to find out that the bill this “Gang” introduced this past week, S.744, actually makes it easier, not more difficult, to enter the United States illegally and then obtain legal status and citizenship.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old former Chechen killed Friday morning in a wild shootout with Boston police, was a legal U.S. resident who nevertheless could have been removed from the country after a 2009 domestic violence conviction. Yet, under Obama’s generous guidelines that limit deportations to only people who have committed “serious crimes,” he was not deported. His younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, gained citizenship in 2012 after being granted asylum in 2002.

These two Muslim brothers were able to enter our country legally from Chechnya, a region in southern Russia well-known by U.S. intelligence agencies as a hotbed of Islamist radicalism and home to al-Qaida-affiliated training camps.

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We granted asylum and eventual citizenship to young Muslim men who harbored a secret hatred for the United States. Does the FBI or anyone at Homeland Security know how many more terrorists-in-waiting there are among the thousands admitted through our humanitarian asylum policies?

The FBI is belatedly examining foreign travel records for the two brothers to determine if they may have visited a terrorist training camp. It’s good to know the FBI can spare manpower from its task force devoted to monitoring U.S. citizens with “extremist views.”

It’s true, of course, that no immigration system, no matter how well designed, can prevent all terrorist attacks. Terrorists can use counterfeit documents and other forms of deceit to advance their ambitions. But when we make it easy by lowering our standards and weakening our safeguards in the name of compassion and humanitarian charity, we are asking for trouble.

The Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill has weaker border security provisions than the 2007 amnesty bill and the 2006 Secure Fence Act passed by Congress. It grants nearly immediate amnesty to 11 to 20 million illegal aliens without any improvement in border security – only a promise of a “strategy” for border security to be announced by DHS Secretary Napolitano. It will allow foreign nationals not even residing in the U.S. to gain legal status by piggybacking on the amnesty bestowed on illegal aliens who are here already. And it adopts a weaker entry-exit monitoring system for our airports, seaports and land ports-of-entry than already mandated in current law.

During the period 2002-2009, 95 percent of the persons apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally were Mexican nationals, but 5 percent were not. Now, maybe 5 percent seems small, but when you consider that 5 percent of 2,000,000 is 100,000, well, that’s not a small number. Those other 5 percent came from over 100 different countries, including countries that have known terrorist camps or which tolerate terrorist networks – countries like Pakistan, Russia, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ecuador and, of course, Cuba.

Considering the shockingly low priority attached to border security in the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill, it ought to be titled the “Jihadists Empowerment Act of 2013.” The Mexican drug cartels that already have financial arrangements with Hamas and Hezbollah likely will be emboldened to expand those partnerships. It’s a small step from smuggling marijuana and heroin to smuggling Hezbollah operatives. To a criminal gang, all money is green, no matter the source.

The next amnesty bill ought to be titled, “The American Worker Impoverishment Act of 2013.”

A new report by the nation’s leading immigration economist documents in concrete terms what economic theory has always predicted: that there are winners and losers in the impact of immigration, legal and illegal, on American workers. The irony of these findings may be lost of mainstream journalists, but it is nonetheless true that the net losers in terms of wages are a core Democratic Party constituency, low-wage workers with less than a high school education.

While the economy as a whole does benefit from immigration in GDP growth, Americans do not share equally in the benefits. A steady flow of immigrant labor into the economy each year makes poor Americans poorer and increases the number of children raised in low-income households.

Here are some numbers from the report by professor George Borjas of Harvard University.

• Immigration in total results in a gain to the American economy of $1.6 trillion. Of this gain, 97.8 percent goes to the immigrants themselves, and the remainder is the “immigration surplus” benefit to the native-born population.

• But this “surplus” or net benefit to native-born Americans is not distributed evenly across the population: “The immigration surplus of $35 billion comes from reducing the wages of natives in competition with immigrants by an estimated $402 billion a year, while increasing profits to the users of immigrant labor by an estimated $437 billion.

To economists, illegal immigration is a subset of all immigration, and Borjas has identified the “surplus” created by illegal labor as only $9 billion, or less than 25 percent of the net benefit of $35 billion from legal immigration. Or put differently, over 80 percent of the economic benefits from immigrant labor come from legal immigration, not illegal immigration.

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And who are the losers in this game? “Illegal immigration” says Borjas, “reduces the wages of native-born workers by an estimated $99 to $118 billion a year.” American business and other employers of illegal labor profit to the tune of from $107 to $128 billion.

Which native born-workers? The largest impact is on workers who lack a high school diploma. And we know from other studies that 24.8 percent of all children of native-born working poor live in households headed by a high school dropout.

So, let’s consider the shocking truth behind those numbers by asking a couple of questions.

• To what extent are these facts being taken into account in the “deal-making” under way in Washington, D.C., by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO as they maneuver to support the next amnesty for 12 to 20 illegal immigrants?

• Does any member of the Senate “Gang of Eight” care about the next $99 billion that will be robbed from the poorest native-born workers?

Native-born workers are the forgotten, disenfranchised victims of illegal immigration. No one is speaking for them in the “negotiations” over new guest worker programs.

Who will speak for the native-born American workers the AFL-CIO has abandoned?

• Not the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which fanatically supports illegal immigration and every amnesty program that comes down the pike.

• Not Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, who has given his blessing to a parallel effort by a Gang of Eight in the House to craft its own amnesty plan.
• Not the Republican National Committee, which is prepared to give a wink-wink nod of approval to any amnesty plan in the vain hope of “putting the immigration issue behind us.”
• And apparently not libertarian utopians in the tea party, who think we can easily absorb 100 million additional immigrants over the next decade, all the while bemoaning the growth of the dependency culture.

Under the new amnesty bill emerging from the secret chambers of Capitol Hill, will additional guest workers be allowed only in occupations that have a demonstrated labor shortage? That would make some sense, and in fact, I proposed it in a 2004 bill I sponsored when in Congress. But such a modest plan would never be acceptable to the other group that now dominates the Democratic Party and the Obama White House, the National Council of La Raza.

Perhaps someday, America’s native-born blue-collar workforce will wake up to the betrayal they have suffered at the hands of labor unions and politicians of both political parties. When they figure it out and begin keeping score, American politics will look a lot different.

I can offer you three good reasons for walking away from the deal, and then I want to make you an offer of a better deal – a deal that is good for the Republican Party, good for the country and, therefore, good for Marco Rubio.

The Schumer-Menendez “Gang of Eight” amnesty plan is none of those things. It is bad public policy, a bad bargain for the Republican Party and a very bad gamble for Marco Rubio.

The Schumer-Menendez plan is bad for the country because it is a foolish repeat of the mistakes of the dishonest 1986 amnesty deal. Its most glaring weakness is the one a certain senator from Florida warned against repeatedly over the past year: It does not require genuine border security as a precondition for the legalization of 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants.

Make no mistake: It is legalization that is the main prize, not a green card. Everyone knows that after legal status is granted it will never be revoked – so the only political incentive for achieving true border security has been removed.

The Republican Party must not be a partner in another “immigration reform” fraud, and fraud is the right word. As a congressman, Charles Schumer played a direct, personal role in writing the 1986 amnesty-without-enforcement fraud. The 2013 Schumer-Menendez amnesty fraud is a tar pit from which Republican sponsors will never escape.

Honesty, integrity and truth-in-advertising still count for something, and no leader who perpetrates another bait-and-switch amnesty fraud will ever be elected president on the Republican ticket.

I need go no further than quoting you on the pivotal importance of border security as a prerequisite for any new amnesty. In January, you told Sean Hannity that any bill that does not put border security first will be unacceptable to you. In February, you called a White House proposal that lacked concrete border security provisions “dead on arrival.” Since November, you have repeatedly stated that any plan you endorse must give clear priority not to a mere promise of border security but to its demonstrated reality.

Surely, you can see the suicidal folly in abandoning not only your prior statements and promises but your good judgment as well.

The Schumer-Menendez plan is a bad bargain for the Republican Party because it cannot fulfill the extravagant expectations of its godfathers in the Republican establishment. It will not produce some miraculous surge in support among Hispanic voters. Such hopes are based on wishful thinking, not a realistic analysis of political history.

There is a better path for immigration reform and a better choice for Marco Rubio. That is the path of political courage, not the path of political capitulation. If Sen. Marco Rubio offers a different plan, a plan based on realism, integrity and the rule of law, he can be a hero.

That different plan would have three main pillars, with other elements such as a new guest worker proposal left open to negotiation. I myself proposed a new guest worker plan in 2004 based on a labor market test for new work visas. But there are three policies that must form the basis for any honest and sensible immigration reform.

Those three principles are, first, a convincing demonstration of true border security, not a promise of security down the road. That must be non-negotiable – not only because Americans expect nothing less, but because our national security and our sovereignty demand it.

Second, the offer of legal status and work permits to non-criminal illegal immigrants must not include an easy or guaranteed path to citizenship. Persons with legal status and work permits are free to travel to and from their home countries, so if interested in obtaining citizenship, they can apply for a green card from their home countries and wait in line like other applicants.

Third, the federal E-Verify program must be mandated for all employers, perhaps phased in over three years.

There is no denying that the Republican Party faces a challenge in attracting a larger share of Hispanic votes. To do so, Republicans need a multi-faceted, long-term strategy based on conservative Republican principles, not a quick-fix imitation of the transparent pandering that serves Democrats so well.

The cornerstone of the Republican appeal to former immigrants who are now voters should be this challenge: Join us in preserving America as the land of personal freedom and economic opportunity, not a place that more and more resembles the socialist and communist failures from which you fled.

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In 2006, Senate Bill 90 was passed to prohibit municipalities like Denver and Boulder from adopting sanctuary city policies to obstruct local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration agencies. Sanctuary cities exist in almost every state – Houston, Atlanta, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles to name only a few.  Denver was one of the first.

Under S.B.90, when a police officer has probable cause to believe that a person arrested for any crime is in the country unlawfully, he is required to notify the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE. If ICE asks for a “hold” on the person, local police then detains him. Cities are also prohibited from adopting any ordinance or policy that hinders cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. .

The Democrats advocating repeal of S.B.90 say it is obsolete and redundant because we now have the federal Secure Communities Program, or SCP. SCP requires that the fingerprints of all persons booked into any local jail be sent to federal immigration authorities to check against their database. Supposedly, SCP is now catching and deporting criminal aliens, so we no longer need to burden local law enforcement with the mandates of S.B.90.

The problem with this redundancy argument is that the two programs are not actually redundant. The two programs do different things and operate independently of one another.

The other problem with the repeal is more serious: The federal Secure Communities Program is not what it advertises to be.

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Like most of our federal immigration laws, the professed and advertised intent of the Secure Communities Program is being deliberately and systematically sabotaged by the Obama administration. Because SCP is a purely an administrative creation, not a program established by act of Congress, it can be modified or discontinued by President Obama or Janet Napolitano at any time. Thus, repealing Colorado’s anti-sanctuary city law would be abandoning a state law for a federal administrative program that may vanish tomorrow.

Enforcement of the Secure Communities Program depends on two factors: 1) what crimes Obama’s cronies in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency consider worthy of detention and deportation – and at present that means only violent crimes, not serial DUIs or other misdemeanors and 2) what actions local sheriffs choose to take in response to the information provided by federal authorities. Here’s the important point: All such decisions are purely discretionary. A local sheriff can totally ignore the information ICE provides about his jail inmates who are illegal aliens and still be in full compliance with SCP.

For example, if the Denver County Sheriff chooses to disregard a notification that one of his jail inmates is an illegal alien who has been twice deported and is wanted for felony reentry, and releases that person on bond, no federal law has been violated. The criminal alien is gone, ICE has done its job and the local sheriff will not be held accountable for future crimes committed by that criminal alien.

So, what’s happening with SCP in Colorado? What percentage of illegal aliens identified by federal fingerprint records are actually detained and deported in each of Colorado’s 64 counties through the SCP program? Are more criminals aliens being deported since SCP was adopted across Colorado, or not?

We don’t know the answer to such questions, and neither do Colorado lawmakers. That’s because ICE does not release that information. We only know deportation totals for each state, not the other numbers that could tell us how well SCP is working to identify and remove criminal aliens in each community.

The federal Secure Communities Program has been continually weakened by the Obama administration. Democrats in Colorado now want to repeal Colorado’s own program and leave the state totally at the mercy of a completely discretionary and highly politicized Obama-run bureaucracy.

In 2006, Colorado Democrats, led by former Governor Dick Lamm, joined Colorado Republicans in enacting tough laws to restrict illegal immigration and help deport criminal aliens. There was in those days a consensus that everyone wanted criminal aliens removed, but that consensus has vanished now that Democrats control both houses of the state assembly and the governorship.

That tells us the real agenda of the Obama administration and Colorado Democrats. The only remaining question is how many Republicans will dance to that tune.

There are no surprises here. No one expects much from the RNC, and this embarrassingly stupid report follows a long line of RNC missteps.

How many political consultants does it take to change a light bulb? The answer: No one knows, because it’s never been done. Political consultants don’t actually do anything, they only advise on how to do it and how to avoid blame if their ideas lead to failure.

This RNC “autopsy report” is a suicide note. Its endorsement of a policy of amnesty for 15 million illegal aliens – and the tens of millions sure to follow – effectively “seals the deal” and gives a pass to any conservative Republican congressman who wants an excuse to vote for amnesty legislation. So, historians can duly note the date and time of the demise of the Republican Party and can give it its proper name. It was not an assassination, nor a death by natural causes. Republicans did it to themselves: a suicide.

The RNC is choosing to endorse and repeat the disastrous 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli amnesty plan despite the plain evidence of its failure. Amnesty for 3 million illegal aliens was granted immediately, while border security and interior enforcement were promises made and never kept. But this time, it’s not 3 million, it’s 15 million or more.

It may be relevant to point out that in 1986, when Congress was debating the amnesty proposal, the official government task force estimate was that 1.4 million would take advantage of the amnesty. The true number turned out to be more than double that number. So, let’s not kid ourselves that we are talking about only the 11.5 million in the official U.S. Census estimate. The true number will be 15 or 20 million or more. Thus, in doubling down on a failed plan, the RNC is re-rebranded itself (again) as the Stupid Party.

Yes, you can find a few good ideas in the 100-page RNC report. The recommendations on fewer primaries and fewer presidential debates – and more control over the venues and formats for the debates – are probably sound. But a few healthy vitamins added to a cup of poison will not alter its entirely predictable effects.

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In fact, it is probably not an exaggeration to say that those recommendations about changes in Republican Party rules and presidential primaries are in the report to help disguise the taste of the poison. The political consultant class in Washington, D.C., has plotted since Nov. 7 to convince the Republican Party of the inevitability of a new amnesty bill, and this report is merely one more nail in that coffin.

That promoting the “amnesty option” was the primary purpose of the RNC report is obvious from the fact that no other policy issue was discussed – not the national debt, not national security, and not repealing Obamacare – which, unlike amnesty, is wildly popular among grass-roots Republicans. No: Only “comprehensive immigration reform” was identified as dictating a change of course for the party. Why? Because according to these experts, only Republican opposition to amnesty stands in the way of Republican success among the most important electoral demographic, Hispanic voters.

Only an incestuous political consultant class could get away with offering such delusions and nonsensical arguments as self-evident truths. In any other industry outside politics, such hubristic stupidity would be laughed out of the room. The report avoids any acknowledgment – mush less a fact-based refutation – of the inconvenient truth that Hispanic voters have been registering Democrats and voting Democratic by a 2-to-1 ratio for over 40 years, long before immigration became an issue!

Until now, until the RNC consultant class was engaged to give history a new spin and a hypnotic gloss, Republicans have been unaware that Bob Dole’s 21 percent of the Hispanic vote in 1996 was due to his campaign’s intemperate treatment of the immigration issue. That had mysteriously escaped our attention until explained by the RNC consultants who wrote this report.

And until now, Republicans did not realize that the DECLINE in Hispanic votes for Republican candidates in the 1988 national elections was due to the fact that the 1986 amnesty legislation signed by a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, was not generous enough!

And until now, Republican leadership at RNC and the American public were unaware that the Hispanic voters who answered the Pew Hispanic Center’s survey questions in the 2008 and 2012 elections and told us that immigration ranked fourth or fifth in importance behind jobs, the economy, health care and education – that such Hispanic voters were lying! All along, all they really cared about was amnesty.

We did not know any of this until now – until the RNC amnesty manifesto enlightened us.

A suicide is always a sad, heartbreaking event. That it will be celebrated in some quarters as a rebirth does not diminish the tragedy, but it does render it a tragi-comedy.

There is no “assimilation debate” because assimilation as a policy goal of our civic culture has already been abandoned.

The new watchword is “integration.” The integration of immigrants has replaced assimilation in the lexicon of not only the United States government but the private-sector institutions dealing with immigration.

Of course, this multiculturalist subversion of our civic vocabulary can be seen in other areas of public life as well. For example, the left has been advancing a new, much narrower meaning for the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion. Under the imperatives of Obamacare, freedom of religion now means only freedom of worship, and many religious leaders have accepted this constriction. They may wake up when their churches begin receiving their first property tax bills.

Yet, this makeover is not something that was started by the Obama administration. It has been under way for more than a decade, promoted by first multiculturalists in the universities, followed by foundations and immigration attorneys. The process went unnoticed because good citizens and patriots were asleep at the wheel.

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Since hardly anyone has been paying attention, the renaming and repackaging of assimilation was accomplished without controversy. The few measurements and indicators for the progress of assimilation were converted into easier measurements for successful “integration.”

No one protested this amazingly seamless transition, and no one has protested that the standards for the successful “integration” of immigrants into American society are very different from the old standards for measuring the success of assimilation. The result is that today, it is nearly impossible to question the status or success of assimilation.

The difference is real, and the difference affects more than the success of immigrants: It affects the health and success of our nation. We no longer judge ourselves by the fulfillment of “E Pluribus Unum” – from many, one. If we listen to our elites, we are now happy being many cultures instead of one culture.

Why was assimilation abandoned in favor of integration? And why does it matter?

Assimilation has been ruled out of fashion and slowly banished from officialdom because it implies and expects an accommodation by immigrants to a dominant host culture, an accommodation that takes the form of adoption of the language and civic values and norms of the host nation. But to the partisans of multiculturalism, our new cultural orthodoxy, such accommodations are no longer necessary; in fact, they are undesirable relics of our racist, xenophobic past.

A concrete example of the difference between assimilation and integration is the change in the federal government’s enforcement of the non-dependency laws for immigrants. It used to be that every legal immigrant required a U.S. citizen “sponsor” who was obligated to guarantee that the immigrant would not become a “public charge” during the first five years of his immigration status. Today, although the “public charge” law is still on the books, it is no longer enforced.

Or, let’s take the most elementary traditional measurement of successful assimilation, the expectation of attaining proficiency in English. The evidence of our declining ability to converse in a common language is all around us. Even the English language skills required for passing the Naturalization exam have been watered down. Very likely, the English language requirement for citizenship soon will be abandoned altogether: After all, it makes little sense if you can even cast your vote for mayor or president in a foreign language.

Even if a naturalized immigrant can’t follow presidential debates unless they are translated into the native language, he is still considered “fully integrated” by the mere act of voting, which is facilitated by federal mandates for multi-lingual ballots. He is also fully integrated if he is participating “equally” in our social welfare system – a fully “integrated” participant in our new culture of dependency.

So, how well is this new emphasis on “social integration” working out? In a recent survey by the Pew Research Hispanic Center, over half of young Hispanics (under age 40) declined to identify themselves as Americans, not even hyphenated Americans. This included not only recent immigrants but second and third generation native-born Hispanics as well.

Two statistics illustrate that this problem goes far deeper than the political issue of citizenship for illegal aliens.

• Among people who are already eligible for citizenship under current law, over the past decade fewer than half actually applied for the naturalization process within five years of their eligibility.

• And what is the nationality with the lowest application rate for citizenship? Among the 10 largest national groups, persons born in Mexico have the least interest in becoming American citizens.

That’s progress in the new culture of diversity. You don’t need to be a citizen to be “fully integrated” into American society. In fact, you don’t really need to be an American. Indeed, it’s more than that: In our public schools, American youth are now discouraged from adopting American cultural values. In the new orthodoxy, assimilation is not only bad for immigrants, it’s bad for children as well.