The Trump Menace rolls on and, as predicted, there is no
serious attempt being made to take his issue away. The Republican establishment remains fully
committed to amnesty and dreamers and paths to citizenship and helping the poor
bastards who are living in the shadows.
And open borders.
The only major change has been that no one takes Jeb!
seriously anymore, maybe not even his parents.
This is just not the year for a guy who needs a fresh makeover, based on
whatever his consultants tell him, every time he appears in public. There was a time he was pulling double digits
in the polls. Now he is somewhere around
4%, which means he is within (and under) the margin of error. In other words, it is statistically possible
that if the Iowa caucuses were held today, NOBODY would vote for him.
So the amnesty crowd needs another candidate. Chris Christie wants that job but he won’t
get it. Instead it will almost certainly
go to Marco Rubio, the brilliant and articulate Cuban-American who was once
described as a “tea party” politician but has subtly dialed back his
conservatism in order to make himself acceptable to establishment Republicans. As part of this repositioning, he has embraced
the amnesty/open-borders agenda. Because
of Trump’s rise, and the obvious unpopularity of open borders among Republican
primary voters, Rubio doesn’t talk much about his support for the “comprehensive
immigration reform” he supported in the Senate, but he hasn’t backed away from
it either. When Jeb! gets dumped by the
regular Republicans, Rubio is perfectly situated to slide into that
(well-funded) slot, the one that led to a nomination for both McCain and
Romney.
A large majority of Republican primary voters want a fence,
they want border enforcement, they want deportations of criminals, and they
want the legal immigration policies that favor Somalis over Belgians to be
reexamined. The switcheroo from Jeb! to
Rubio is an attempt to fool the Republican base. Rubio is young and cute and
smart, and certainly could defeat the dreadful Hillary, and he usually sounds
like a conservative. Can he be sold to
primary voters even though he (quietly) wants the borders open and citizenship
for those who have already snuck in?
Maybe, but I doubt it.
Trump will not be silent about Rubio’s position on
immigration. And neither will Ted Cruz,
whose strategy is to inherit Trump’s enforce-the-borders voters when and if
Trump stumbles and fades away.
There is still just one issue in the campaign for the
Republican nomination. Will the Party,
and its largest donors, accede to the views of a large majority of Republican
voters and demand a return to enforcement of immigration law? So far the answer is no. So far, Mitch McConnell and the Bushes and Karl
Rove and Paul Ryan and the people who fund them believe Donald Trump and his
supporters will all go away.
But the clock is ticking, and the Trump Menace not only
survives but seems to be as strong as ever. The open-border Republicans are
faced with a critical decision and they only have until early February to make
it, because once Trump starts collecting delegates, it may be impossible to
shut him down. Will they abandon open
borders, or will they let Trump win the nomination (and almost certainly lose
the general election to a Democrat)? At
the moment it looks like the leaders of the Republican Party would rather have
Hillary become our next President than allow enforcement of our immigration
laws.
Copyright2015MichaelKubacki
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