Arizona Sen. John McCain said Thursday on MSNBC's
Morning Joe that Republicans should fund the Department of Homeland Security now that a federal district court in Texas has
temporarily blocked Obama's immigration actions from moving forward. Here's the details from
Rebecca Shabad.
“It’s not a good idea to shut down the Department of Homeland Security,” he said. “We should be working together despite the obstruction of our Democratic colleagues to resolve this issue so that we don’t shut it down. Now we have the perfect reason to not shut it down because the courts have decided, at least initially, in our favor.”
Okay, we'll let that Democratic obstructionism comment slide only because it's so refreshing to hear a Republican admit that shutting down Homeland Security over the president's immigration policies is simply "not a good idea." (It's recently become popular among hard liners like GOP Sen. Ron Johnson to say shutting DHS
is no big deal.)
Even the ultimate Beltway conservative rag the National Review is searching for a way out of the mess that Speaker John Boehner and the House crazy caucus has put Republicans in on Homeland Security. Don't get me wrong, their approach isn't great, but the editorial board made an attempt Thursday to rein in the House crazies because Boehner clearly doesn't have the guts to do it. Their idea: fund the part of Homeland Security that deals with homeland security but not the part that deals with "immigration bureaucracy."
It is not as politically vital to fund the immigration bureaucracy as it is to fund the rest of the homeland-security department. Refusing to fund that bureaucracy will, at the very least, ensure that Republicans aren’t affirmatively complicit in funding Obama’s extra-constitutional policy.
We won't quibble at the moment about their framing of Obama's "extra-constitutional policy." What's important here is that even the
National Review knows Republicans have a major political mess on their hands.
In the editorial, the board makes three key admissions: 1) Republicans will "likely get the blame" for a shutdown; 2) threatening to change the filibuster rules in order to advance the bill is "a myopic shortcut." And here's the third:
Republicans will never have the leverage to succeed in opposing every action of the president’s that they dislike. Reasserting constitutional limits on the president’s authority requires a politically plausible strategy.
That's as close to lucid thinking as we have seen thus far from conservatives.