Amnesty supporter.
Republicans
don't want to talk much about immigration policy or the substance of what President Obama announced Thursday night. But every now and then, they have to say a little something to describe the reason for their most recent claims that Obama is acting as a dictator. And the word most have settled on is "amnesty." Problem is, Slate's Betsy Woodruff finds, most of the Republicans moaning about amnesty
don't really know what they mean when they say it:
When I asked Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican, what specific immigration policies he was referring to when he used the term amnesty, he said, “I don’t understand the question.”
“Amnesty is a forgiveness by definition,” he said, “and there are many different types of that so I’m not gonna get into trying to define it, what other people might think. If you look in the dictionary, it’s forgiveness, you can take it for that.” [...]
Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, said this: “Amnesty to me is totally forgiving or granting a pardon to people who’ve broken the law.”
No word on whether giving work permits is the same as giving a pardon.
And so on. Woodruff got Republicans to offer definitions of amnesty that definitely don't fit Obama's actions, to acknowledge that "I don't know" what it means, and to give answers so broad as to be meaningless. Sure, a few zealots know what they mean by amnesty—and they mean virtually anything that allows more people to enter or work in this country legally—but mostly, "amnesty" is the word that Republicans use to sound like they're talking about policy without actually talking about policy. Even though their patron saint, Ronald Reagan,
was in favor of amnesty.
It's a good reminder: When all the Republicans are using the same buzzword to get out of detailed policy discussion, ask them what they mean by it. The answers may not shed much light on the policy, but we'll learn a little something about how Republicans think.