The Grand Illusion
For years, Republicans have been crying and screaming about the need to fix the immigration problem.
And now that a bipartisan Senate initiative has been developed (in large part by a conservative Republican senator) that would tighten up the system significantly more than in twenty years, if not more, what’s the reaction of Congressional Republicans?
Waah, waah, waah…it’s not enough. We want it all our way or we won’t play.
The bipartisan immigration proposal is far from perfect, but it would definitely address some aspects of the immigration problem.
As I’ve said before, and as this reaction proves, Republicans, especially House Republicans, are the party of “no.” They’re not in the slightest interested in fixing problems. They’re totally invested in exploiting grievances. Whether those grievances are real or imagined, it makes no difference, because they have no interest in actually addressing the problems and no workable plans for solutions. They just want to create anger against the Democrats.
It’s so easy to propose “solutions” so extreme that half the population won’t and can’t accept them and then to say that the other side is uncooperative or that the other side created the problem. Proposing cutting social programs while pushing tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans doesn’t lead to cooperation, but polarization.
That, of course, isn’t surprising, because, at least for now, the Republicans and the far right seem to believe that polarization benefits them… and realistic political solutions don’t… as witness the reaction to the bipartisan immigration proposal.
The only way we will keep this country going strong for any time in the future is to find common ground in the middle; A solution that does the most good for the most people. I am not sure that is even possible anymore. Was it ever?
What we are seeing here has nothing to do with finding the middle. It’s that Donald Trump had the immigration legislation blown up because he would rather have it as a festering sore that he can run on against Biden.
I don’t think it is so much about them being crybabies about not getting more, it’s that they had no intention of ever letting this problem be fixed because it is a political expedient for them. It’s another car they want to bark at but not catch. Know that every major compromise on immigration over the last decade has been blown up by Republicans. Remember the Grand Bargain on immigration in around 2013? Read about what happened to Mark Rubio. It’s the same thing that’s happening to that Senator from Oklahoma. The Republicans aren’t going to make the same mistake they did by letting abortion get banned.
Well, this has been the Republican legislative strategy for decades now. Finding “wedge issues” isn’t new in electioneering, but deliberately avoiding the fixing the problem, that’s a new wrinkle.
But the problem is, that it works. The Republican party has groomed a reliable set of grievance-based voters who think they are cowboy pioneer individuals. They are continually upset but don’t care that the problems never get solved.
Between these folks and the 50% of eligible voters who don’t vote, it turns out that the voters who pay attention to policy and care about results are in the minority in the United States of the 21st century.
I’ve become more increasingly convinced that republicans don’t actually want to be in power. It’s far more profitable to be in the minority so that they can more easily scare the far right into even more campaign donations. However, the party of “no” is going to have to realize that eventually the country will need to be governed and the people will get tired of the “do nothings.”