President Obama has forced the GOP to come out against folks like these.
President Obama, in a
powerful and compelling speech Thursday night, announced an executive action on immigration enforcement policies. The expressed and apparent purpose was to permit millions of families to remain together. In the most moving part of the speech, the president said:
Astrid was brought to America when she was 4 years old. Her only possessions were a cross, her doll, and the frilly dress she had on. When she started school, she didn’t speak any English. [. . .] she mostly lived in the shadows until her grandmother, who visited every year from Mexico, passed away, and she couldn’t travel to the funeral without risk of being found out and deported. It was around that time she decided to begin advocating for herself and others like her. And today Astrid Silva a college student working on her third degree.
Are we a nation that kicks out a striving, hopeful immigrant like Astrid? Or are we a nation that finds a way to welcome her in? Scripture tells us, we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger. We were strangers once, too. My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forbears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal, that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will. That’s the country our parents and grandparents and generations before them built for us. That’s the tradition we must uphold. That’s the legacy we must leave for those who are yet to come.
As the son of immigrants, I have to confess to choking up when the president delivered those words. But there also was a strong message sent about the power of the president, even after defeat in the 2014 elections. The Republicans now control Congress. They believed that Obama could be bullied. But what they discovered is the president is not locked in with them, they are locked in with the president.
And they are also locked in with the crazy tea party. Which leads to the present crisis for the GOP—the coming crackup on defunding. I'll explore that issue on the other side.
Prior to President Obama's expected announcement Thursday night, discord was already brewing in Republican circles on how to respond. Defunding was the idea. One of the major proponents of this approach, Conn Carroll, outlined the idea:
Regardless of when President Obama announces his plan to give work permits and Social Security numbers to millions of illegal immigrants, House Republicans are now expected to pass a short-term government funding bill early this December that will allow them to defund Obama's work permit giveaway early next year.
For reasons only Carl Levin could possibly understand, Levin said this was an appropriate tactic. Of course, when it came to Iraq War funding in 2007, Levin said it wasn't. But he is retiring, so enough about Carl Levin.
What of this GOP genius plan? Well, maybe not so genius said GOP leadership:
It would be “impossible" to defund President Obama’s executive actions on immigration through a government spending bill, the House Appropriations Committee said Thursday. In a statement released by Committee Chairman Hal Rogers's (R-Ky.) office hours before Obama's scheduled national address, the committee said the primary agency responsible for implementing Obama's actions is funded entirely by user fees. As a result, the committee said the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) agency would be able to continue to collect fees and carry out its operations even if the government shut down.
This pronouncement did not sit well with tea party types, who pushed back
saying:
That is absolute nonsense. The notion that Congress can turn on a money spigot but is banned from turning it off is nonsense. And the worst part is that it’s willful nonsense. There is simply no law whatsoever that says that the House is only allowed to X and Y but not Z on an appropriations bill.
But it turns out that while there is no law, there are legislative rules that prohibit this. Both the House and the Senate have rules that do not permit non-germane legislation to be attached to budget bills. (See
November 21 edition of KiTM where David Waldman explains these points in detail.) And to change these rules requires—you guessed it—overcoming a filibuster in the Senate (obviously the rule change would have no trouble in the House).
The argument the tea party types are making is that all that is needed is the following language:
And from that power of the purse come the most powerful words in federal law: “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no funds shall be appropriated or otherwise made available for __.”
That’s it. That’s literally all it takes. It doesn’t matter if the spending is mandatory or discretionary, good or bad, wasteful or essential; when that sentence becomes law, it nukes whatever spending it touches up until the point at which that sentence is repealed or superseded by a future law.
We believe it is more complicated than that procedurally for the reasons stated. But that really doesn't matter to the tea party types whose basic argument is "Because I said so." And that means their reaction is this:
Republicans can add defunding language to any bill whenever they so choose. The issue is not that they can’t use the power of the purse to block Obama’s lawless power grab. The issue is that they don’t want to. The real shame is that they can’t even be honest about that.
Whether it's true or not, is not the question—they believe it is true and will act accordingly. And this is not a fringe. For example, GOP House tea partiers have already
introduced legislation to enact the tea party dream on this:
Reps. Ted Poe (R-Texas) and Diane Black (R-Tenn.) have introduced legislation to prohibit funding to implement President Obama's executive action on immigration. Their bill, titled The Separation of Powers Act, would block the use of funds for deferring deportations of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally or providing work permits.
Yeah, but ... all the stuff I said above. But no matter. Republican leadership will be viewed as cowards by their base, and Republican presidential candidates—people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz—will be sure to agree with them. (Hello Jeb Bush! How do you like Obama now?)
A lot of this was expected. But I think what surprised me, and maybe it shouldn't have, was the effectiveness of the president's speech and the political effectiveness of the issue. Latinos and the GOP's attitude towards us is a big political problem for the GOP. Certainly some like Sean Trende and now Nate Cohn, argue that the GOP has a different path to viability without improving its standing with Latinos, but it is an improbable one in my view. Let's consider Cohn's optimistic take:
[A] close look at demographic data and recent election results suggest that the Republicans do not necessarily need significant gains among Hispanic voters to win the presidency. Yes, the next Republican presidential candidate will be making a big gamble if he or she doesn’t make meaningful gains among Hispanic voters, especially in Florida. But the Hispanic vote cannot single-handedly determine the presidency.
Okay, how exactly can the GOP do that? Cohn argues:
Why, then, do so many assume that the Republican path to the presidency is through Hispanic voters? [. . .] The implication was that Republicans had done all they could among white voters. [. . .] But the national exit poll finding for white voters was misleading. Nearly all of Mr. Obama’s weakness was attributable to the South and Appalachia, where Mr. Obama suffered catastrophic losses compared with prior Democrats. Mr. Obama in fact performed quite well among white voters outside of the South, easily winning overwhelmingly white states like Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin and New Hampshire[.]
So Cohn's argument, as I understand it, is that the Democratic nominee in 2016 can do worse than President Obama did amongst white voters in the 2012 election. Really, that's the argument. The worst since Mondale will not be the bottom. But even then, all problems are not solved:
[I]f the Republicans don’t make any gains among Hispanic voters, they will be taking a big risk. Hispanic voters are still important — and it’s easy to imagine a situation in which Republican gains among Hispanics are in fact necessary to win. That situation turns on Florida. The Republicans don’t have an especially credible path to the presidency without Florida’s 29 electoral votes. [. . .] The G.O.P. path to the presidency all but closes if the Democrats combine Florida and Pennsylvania.
Why can't the GOP improve among whites in Florida? Cohn explains:
Unlike in most of the battlegrounds, Mr. Obama really did fare unusually poorly among the state’s white voters. According to the exit polls, Mr. Obama lost white voters in Florida by 24 points. If he had merely lost them by the same 15-point margin as John Kerry, he would have won decisively — a fact that highlights the tremendous importance of Democratic improvements among Hispanic voters and the pace of demographic change in a state that Mr. Kerry lost by five points in 2004.
All of this is to say that the declaration of President Obama as done as a political force (I said something to that effect myself) was wrong. The president retains the power to tee up issues and take actions that have profound political impact.
Teeing up the immigration issue and highlighting both GOP bigotry towards Latinos and exacerbating the battle between the tea party and the GOP establishment is the first of what could prove to be many examples that. In fact, it's not that the president is locked up with the GOP—it's that the GOP that is locked up ... with the president.