Michigan closet case Dave Camp has a new angle on thwarting immigration reformWednesday, at the House Republicans' closed door strategy session about immigration reform, Boehner and Ryan begged their GOP colleagues to not doom the party to national electoral oblivion by sabotaging the bipartisan efforts in the Senate at a time when record majorities of Americans support comprehensive reform. But bigoted Members in nicely gerrymandered districts in primitive parts of the country where people get all their information from Hate Talk Radio and Fox, are not thinking about national trends or about the fate of their marginalized party outside their own little safe House districts. The quote that came through the closed door was Boehner's whiny warning-- unheeded-- that Republicans would be "in a much weaker position" if they are seen to be killing the immigration bill. Alabama KKK-sympathizer Mo Brooks responded by reading America the Beautiful aloud.But Boehner is so weak as a Speaker that the two hour meeting resulted in nothing but negativity and a decision to do exactly what he and Ryan begged them to not do. The decision was made to kill widely popular bipartisan immigration reform. One of those hardline backward bigots, Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, seemed satisfied why he talked to reporters when he emerged for a pee break: “There is little consensus in there for doing anything other than border security." Huelskamp later told reporters he would trust Obama as much with border security as he would trust his own daughter with Bill Clinton. The man is obviously demented... but Kansans seem to like 'em like that in the last couple of decades. He and the other hatemongers kept harping on the theme that Obama can't be trusted to enforce the strict border stipulations-- even though Obama's policy is far, far stricter and more effective than anything ever seen at the southern border before.Arkansas neanderthal Tom Cotton, a right-wing freshman extremist who would like to run for Marc Pryor's Senate seat next year, rushed a demented OpEd to the Wall Street Journal, basically, "it's my way or the highway... and forget citizenship for these lawless colored people."
[T]he Senate immigration bill undermines the rule of law without solving the country's illegal-immigration problem, and it will harm American workers. The House of Representatives will reject any proposal with the Senate bill's irreparably flawed structure, which is best described as: legalization first, enforcement later . . . maybe.
Boehner tried put on a happy face after he lost. "The American people want our border secured, our laws enforced, and the problems in our immigration system fixed to strengthen our economy. But they don’t trust a Democratic-controlled Washington, and they’re alarmed by the president’s ongoing insistence on enacting a single, massive, Obamacare-like bill rather than pursuing a step-by-step, common-sense approach to actually fix the problem. The president has also demonstrated he is willing to unilaterally delay or ignore significant portions of laws he himself has signed, raising concerns among Americans that this administration cannot be trusted to deliver on its promises to secure the border and enforce laws as part of a single, massive bill like the one passed by the Senate."Writing for New York, Jonathan Chait, a conservative-consensus pundit, took note of the GOP's shocking decent into nihilism:
One of the novel developments in conservative thought during the Obama years is a burgeoning hatred not merely for government but for lawmaking. Before the Obama era, the ends of crafting laws divided the parties, but the means did not. The process of corralling votes, placating hold-outs, and hammering out compromises was not something either side especially loved-- you’ve heard the classic line about watching the sausage get made-- but also not something that one side disliked more than the other. But a hatred for lawmaking has emerged in the Obama years, first as a Republican tactic, and then as an apparently genuine belief system.The distrust for lawmaking is the main argument — wait, “argument” is too strong; maybe premise?-- of a rare joint op-ed by Rich Lowry and William Kristol, editors of the National Review and the Weekly Standard. Lowry and Kristol urge House Republicans to kill immigration reform, because passing it would involve legislating, and legislating is bad.
So the strategies they decided on are to stall, delay, obfuscate and threaten to make the government default if they can't get their way. And House Ways and Means Committee Chairman-- and closet case-- Dave Camp (R-MI) declared that the Senate immigration bill is unconstitutional anyway because it's a revenue bill and revenue bills have to start in the House. So there!This is as good a time as any to mention that despite Obama beating McCain in Camp's Michigan district, Steve Israel took him off the table and refused to recruit or back a candidate against him-- or any of Boehner's vulnerable committee chairmen. That leads to this kind of irresponsible rhetoric... and to this:
