“You’re going to see — hopefully not — but you could see instances of anarchy … You could see violence.” Senator Tom Coburn
Today the Courtier Press and the Counts and Countesses of Congress to which they bow and scrape will spend the day debating issues surrounding last night's speech by Barack Obama making a strong case to the American people for the executive actions he plans to issue regarding undocumented residents. It was an outstanding speech laying out a plan which utilizes the normal executive discretion to favor ridding the nation of those who are a criminal danger, further reducing the number of those who illegally cross the border, and reduce the state-sponsored, forced separation of families.
The debate, unfortunately, will be entirely Kabuki theater. The debate will be entirely over things which are known to be facts, but which some pretend are opinions. The debate will center over whether the President has legal ability to prioritize law enforcement and court resources (which ALL Presidents have done) and how Republicans in Congress can stop him from doing what all prior Presidents have done (debate and pass some form of comprehensive immigration reform...which the Senate already did in strong, bipartisan fashion).
This carefully choreographed, fact-free debate ignores the most important thing, however. It ignores the scream from within the Conservative Id expressed in the Tom Coburn quote above. Republicans have refused to act because they prefer a world in which families are kept separated or constantly in fear by a system which is frozen in a state everyone acknowledges to be broken. Republicans have refused to act because they find it politically useful to have an underclass of millions living in the shadows, providing cheap labor to thousands of businesses and serving as political punching bags, the ever-present monster under the bed. An underclass whose footprints are assumed to be damp with the water of the Rio Grande River even though huge, huge numbers of them entered this country legally to begin with and many, many of whom arrived by other means, from other places.
If we were to strip the euphemism and minutiae from the conversation, here’s what it would look like: Instead of engaging in academic discussions of “norms” or wasting time with tit-for-tat examples of partisan hypocrisy, we’d listen to Coburn. Not because his premonitions of disaster are serious and in themselves worthy of attention, but because they’re so clearly in-tune with the rhetoric about immigration that actually exists within the GOP base. If you talk to Tea Party people about immigration, as Harvard’s Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson did in a definitive study of the movement, you won’t hear about the imperial presidency or prosecutorial discretion. You’ll hear about liberals bringing good-for-nothing immigrants into the country so they can make them citizens, have them vote for Democrats and establish a new America where the government exists to redistribute from those who “make” to those who “take.”
Put differently, an honest estimation of the anti-reform bloc’s views here would spend a lot more time looking to Pat Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” and many other anti-immigration tracts, than James Madison. And it would devote more energy to teasing out the links between Mitt Romney, who blamed his 2012 loss on Obama’s willingness to dole out “gifts,” and Michele Bachmann, who described the president’s executive orders as an attempt to make “illiterate” immigrants the “new voters” for the Democrats in 2016. That’s where you have to look to understand immigration politics; forget about checks and balances and start listening to conservatives when they say they’re fighting to “take our country back.”
http://www.salon.com/...
Yes, listen to what Conservatives say...even though it isn't as pretty as Kabuki debates over Separation of Powers and is considerably more unsettling. The truth often is.