I was happy to learn through Pilgrim that our mutual friend, Rep Eric Cantor, of Virginia’s 7th District, already has a primary challenger this year. His name is Dave Brat.
You’ll want to send Dave an encouraging word and any other expressions of support you can muster in these hard times. I plan to light a few fires around here.
Wisely Dave is doing what I hope dozens of other conservative Republicans will do very soon, and that is throw their hat into the ring before the Immigration vote is scheduled, as John Boehner has already indicated he doesn’t want to schedule that vote until the filing deadlines have passed. In this way conservative candidates will not have time to jump into the race in order to salve voter anger against the GOP incumbents, who clearly, Boehner expects, will be voting against the will of their constituents.
(At least we’re getting a clearer focus on just what that elusive “higher purpose” is the GOP Establishment claims to be clinging to.)
Just so you’ll know, the Establishment math behind this is that the candidate who is hated by only 50% of the voters will likely win over the candidate…the Democrat…who is hated by as many as 70%. This is Boehner’s idea of courage under fire. It’s my idea of cynicism.
For the challengers: I believe the arguments on immigration used by the Establishment GOP, as we’ve heard so many times before, are canned and pharisaical, (vain repetitions), and when put to the test, insincere. They are crafted language that try to convey one meaning before a vote, but can be used to sustain a “That’s not what I meant” reply after the vote.
While people like Cantor are able to deliver those canned lines in front of a microphone uninterrupted, they can’t, I think, do as well under a parry of facts and figures, which are readily available to any who will do their homework. Specious arguments all, they are vulnerable to direct, face-to-face contradiction.
Ser Americano (To Be American)
You already know my position on immigration. It’s simpler than most.
If an immigrant can kneel down and kiss the ground and bless the name of America and the Constitution, instead of the feet of the Democrat or Republican Party, I want him here, no matter how he got here. That has to be the first objective of any immigration policy…
…Ser Americano (To Be American)
If they only want to become hired hands, or we only want hired hands, try another way. A cheap 10-page guest-worker law will work better instead.
There is actually some science, math and history to back this position up, for one of the demonstrable facts that destroys the old Malthus myth about population growth is that when poorer (and more fecund) populations immigrate to more advanced and affluent economies, if the productive capacity of that economy is increased, the breeding population diminishes it fecundity in the process. Over-population does not occur, because the immigrant population does measurably better than had they stayed home, in this case, south of the border. America does immeasurably better with 23 million employed then with 23 million under-or-unemployed.
Citations on this fact abound. Let’s just say “It’s a law.”
But also part of that law is that…
…the immigrants must accept the dominant economic culture, its traditions and its moralities. Ser Americano (To be American)
In other words, if they come as foreigners or outsiders and remain as foreigners or outsiders, all bets are off. Instead of enhanced, the national economy is diminished and drained of it resources. That’s why the “melting pot” idea always worked, and always will, and why the Democrat Party despise this notion so much.
Based on this simple 80-word policy definition above, and on what we know anecdotally of Latino intentions in coming here in the first place, most do not want to remain as citizens or obtains any other permanent status. Instead, most would like to build up enough capital to build a better house for their families back home in Guadalajara or Durango, only with the ability to travel back and forth with papers, until the job is done, usually a few years. In this way they can avoid the annual “coyote fee” to come and go.
The rest can process their papers and stand in line just as current law provides.
This can be done, as I said, with ten pages of legislation. And for the business donors of both parties, this should satisfy them completely. They want the labor, and are generally uninterested in political positioning beyond that.
American business wants cheap labor, we all know this. Some of these are deep pocket Republicans while others are deep pocket Democrats. No one to date has bothered to inquire which of those are also of the Big Business-crony capitalist variety, which we often associate with Wall Street, and which are of the smaller, mid-sized private businesses, represented by the various chamber of commerce-type groups.
I think this also satisfies the Republican’s basic desires as well. Create a work-pass system, no path to citizenship, for say 10-15-20 years, with right of renewal, and all is good.
This is not complicated, for this fulfills all the things both Democrat and Republican deep pocket business donors want. And everything the GOP says it wants. And quite frankly everything most illegal immigrants want.
WHAT IT DOES NOT FULFILL …
…is anything the Democrat Party wants, nor anything the various constituent Latino interest groups want. They want voters, or at least people who can present themselves to the right voting officers as legal voters. And they want people who will not be willing or allowed to meet that single criterion of “accepting the dominant economic culture, its traditions and its moralities.”
What they want is an immigration bill that is a continuation of the “plantation laws” that have cooped up America’s first immigrants, the blacks, on federal reservations, for fifty years now, and have served as a net drain to the national economy of approximately 21 trillion a dollars, and who have still been denied full integration into the American melting pot. Democrats want the growth of an immobile underclass that allows them to drain off 16% (now) of the national economy directly into their pockets as overseers and middle men. (You don’t think the poor see that money, do you?)
In the 1960s the blacks were no more aware of this feudal scheme than the emerging Latinos are today. And the Republicans have done a pitiful job of letting either group know.
The GOP’s Default Sell-Out Position
If the Democrat Party cannot gain this as part of an Immigration deal, they will not reach across the aisle and compromise with Republicans or even their own donor base. They won’t have to because they will be able to blame the Republicans for the bill’s failure. There will be no new legislation. This failure is totally within their power to bring about.
But they also know the Republican Party must have a deal, any deal, because, quite frankly, after years of cudgeling by the Democrats with lies, they’ve sort of halfheartedly started believing these claims of lack of compassion themselves.
Bot parties already know this. The Democrats know the Republicans must retreat to this default sell-out position and provide them with the very least they will accept. That is always a moving goal-post. But McConnell, Boehner and Cantor already know these position by heart, so will spend the greater part of their time trying to find ways to slip it by first, skeptical Members, and then second, the voters. negotiating with the Democrats will almost be an after-thought, although the media will portray this Kabuki dance at tense, filled with minefields. This is supposed to give the Republcans more face in defeat.)
For the challengers then:
There is much to do here. Important things. And all by keeping your focus on the simpler things.
If you follow closely to the in-front-of-the-mic explanations of the Republican establishment positions, you can pick out these false premises that they will have concede to the Democrats as easily as picking your teeth with a toothpick.
Look for them first to broadcast this in the language they will use to assert
their positions before a vote, then watch how they will nuance those words after the vote to explain how their retreat, their sell-out, was really a victory instead of a defeat.
On camera, in front of a microphone this will be easy for them, for the 50%-70% rule (above) will apply (unless the Dems run a candidate from the right). But on stage, in front of a well-armed challenger, they shouldn’t be able to do as well.
This is why you need to get out there early and declare yourselves as Dave Brat has done.
(Oh, about these Republicans I don’t like very much, they’re all pretty decent people, in their own minds honest and upstanding. (Except in Delaware.) They just have their priorities a little juxtaposed. They are not like Democrats, except for McCain and a couple of others, who have their priorities lined up exactly as they want them. So be polite. Just get them out of office. )
