Hospitalizing illegal immigrants

Take it from me. Just because you're asked for your opinion doesn't mean you shouldn't be careful in expressing it. You need to be even more careful if you're a Republican official in a border state and the issue at hand is illegal immigration.

One person who didn't get that memo is Texas Attorney General John Cornyn. Asked for a legal opinion from hospital administrators in East Texas about whether providing reduced-cost medical care to illegal immigrants violated any law, Cornyn stirred a legal and political hornet's nest.

TRENDING: GOP senator joins in the narrative twisting

First, the law. Esq. Cornyn relies upon the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, also known as the welfare reform act. Cornyn interprets it to mean that hospitals in Texas are prohibited from using public tax dollars to provide free or discounted non-emergency medical care to illegal immigrants unless the state legislature enacts a special law allowing it. Texas legislators – who have an aversion to hornets – have passed no such law, Cornyn says. Thus, hospitals are breaking federal law and could conceivably lose federal funds.

But lawyers, by their nature, disagree. Among those who disagree with Cornyn is Tanya Broder, an attorney with the California-based National Immigration Law Center. She disputes that the welfare reform law prohibits hospitals from rendering care and doubts that the federal government would bother to penalize or prosecute health-care providers even if it did. She suspects that Texas officials are just looking for legal justification to squirm out of their responsibilities.

Also taking exception to Cornyn's opinion are hospital administrators – and their lawyers – who say that denying preventive care increases the need for emergency care, costing taxpayers more in the long run.

Then, there is the politics. In 1994, then-California Gov. Pete Wilson convinced a majority of voters in his state that the blame for most of their problems could be pinned on illegal immigrants. Wilson rode that sentiment to re-election as Californians were also approving Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that sought to deny illegal immigrants non-emergency health-care and other services. The measure might have done so, too, if it wasn't for the tiny matter of it being unconstitutional and labeled such by the courts.

Meanwhile, Wilson, by putting a Mexican face on the problem, also stirred the Sleeping Giant: Latino voters, nearly 80 percent of whom opposed the initiative, have since taken their pound of (elephant) flesh, making California Republicans candidates for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Republicans in Texas are considered more enlightened. But, are they?

They have a positive role model. After Californians passed Proposition 187, Gov. George W. Bush did the right thing when no one was looking. Bush courageously declared Texas a Proposition 187-free zone where similar initiatives were not welcomed.

But since Bush moved to Washington, some Republicans in his home state are back to being, well, Republicans. In a March speech in Austin to a real estate association, Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff lamented how illegal immigrants are "clogging" Texas hospitals and emergency rooms.

"We have to serve them with medical care just like you and me," Ratliff told an audience that, presumably, looked more like him than them.

And now, Attorney General Cornyn offers his two cents about how offering medical care to undocumented immigrants is unlawful. Already, one district attorney is investigating whether medical providers, in treating such folks, violate state laws that guard against misapplication of public money.

Given that Texas district attorneys, like the attorney general, have to run for office, this legal offensive could be based less on law than politics and a desire to take advantage of a cause that has been a proven winner with many voters.

That sound you hear is the vacationing President Bush falling off his horse.

Cornyn insists that he's just going by the book – the law book – and that, legal issues aside, he thinks denying illegal immigrants medical care is bad public policy. He also says that, for the record, he was "personally offended" by what he heard coming out of California seven years ago.

It's just that the law is the law, he says – at least according to one lawyer.

George Bush learned a lot from Pete Wilson's mistakes. Now, if he can just stop other Republicans back home from repeating them.