BY APPOINTING Florida senator Mel Martinez to chair the Republican National Committee, President Bush sent a blunt message to conservatives: “Drop dead.” That’s the opinion of Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, who has lobbied hard against Bush’s “comprehensive” immigration reform package. Hyperbole, perhaps, but it highlights the GOP fissure on immigration–one deepened by the recent election.
Martinez, a Cuban refugee who fled the island in 1962, supports the Bush vision of a guest-worker program for future immigrants and a “path to citizenship” for illegal aliens. He is also a prominent GOP envoy to the Latino community. His elevation to RNC chief, says Krikorian, shows how “emotionally” invested Bush is in passing an “amnesty” bill. “This is something the president can’t let go.”
Bush, of course, rejects the word “amnesty.” But his decision to tap Martinez for the RNC post may reflect unease over the GOP’s loss of Hispanic votes in 2006. Like Bush, Martinez breaks with most conservatives on immigration: He accepts the need for stiffened border control, but also wants to expand channels for legal immigration and create a process for illegals to earn citizenship. The Hagel-Martinez bill, which Bush strongly favored, did just that. It passed the GOP-led Senate by a vote of 62-36 last May, before dying at the hands of House Republicans, who refused even to appoint conferees.
In the meantime, Congress passed, and Bush signed, a bill calling for 700 miles of reinforced fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border. But the guest-worker and earned-citizenship ideas languished–until the election was over. At his press conference the next day, Bush agreed that a Democratic Congress would give him (in a reporter’s words) “a better shot at comprehensive immigration reform.” It is an issue, Bush said, “where I believe we can find some common ground.”
Maybe. But almost as soon as this became the new conventional wisdom, it was supplanted by the even newer conventional wisdom, according to which House Democrats may resist pushing any umbrella bill that House Republicans can deride as “amnesty.” There are several reasons for this. Democrats may wish to deny Bush the pomp of a signing ceremony, not to mention any credit with Latinos. Democrats may also be leery of forcing such a tough vote on their freshmen, several of whom ran to Bush’s right on immigration. No doubt House Republicans will be trying to peel off Blue Dog Democrats with whom they can create an “anti-amnesty” bloc.
Krikorian guesses that “the overwhelming majority” of House Republicans oppose the Bush plan, which means they would oppose a revived Hagel-Martinez bill. “There’s a small hard core that would pretty much vote for any amnesty that was presented to them.” If Krikorian is right, it suggests an irony liberals should appreciate: The same president that many caricature as a right-wing partisan is closer on immigration to Ted Kennedy than he is to the House GOP caucus.
But not all conservatives agree about the House Republicans. Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist thinks there has always been a functioning House majority for comprehensive immigration reform. So what happened last summer? “The radio talk-show hosts got out there and poisoned the atmosphere,” says Norquist, who worries that being overly harsh on immigration contributed to the GOP’s loss of Congress.
That seems a common point of view among Republicans who favor the Bush-Martinez approach. “Immigration hurt us,” says one GOP House aide. “That’s why Mel Martinez got the RNC chair.” While many question whether speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi will make it a priority, this aide says he “would not be surprised” if the Democratic Congress passed comprehensive immigration reform “within the first hundred days.”
What if Pelosi does make common cause with Bush on immigration? How will House Republicans respond? “I think they’ll lay down on the railroad tracks in front of it, to keep it from going through,” says an aide to GOP congressman Mike Pence of Indiana, head of the conservative Republican Study Committee. “We lost the base a long time ago, and that’s why the House crumbled.”
Last Friday Pence lost his bid for minority leader to John Boehner, the current majority leader. Arizona’s John Shadegg also lost his challenge to incumbent Roy Blunt of Missouri for GOP whip. Both vote counts were lopsided. “I have never been so disgusted with my own party,” says another Republican House aide. “I find it astonishing that our leadership just seems to be skating through.”
Whatever their thoughts on the leadership fight, Republicans remain bitterly split on immigration. What if Bush puts on a full-court press for his guest-worker and earned-citizenship proposals? “I think it will be chaos,” says the “disgusted” GOP aide. “It’s gonna tear our party up.” It would certainly place a further burden on Bush’s already strained relations with congressional Republicans.
Much may depend on the lessons Republicans take from the 2006 election. Fans of the Bush-Martinez strategy point to losing Republicans J.D. Hayworth, Randy Graf, and John Hostettler. Here were three of the toughest border hawks of the campaign. Hayworth and Graf were running in Arizona, one of the states most affected by illegal border crossings. Yet they both lost, as did Hostettler in Indiana. Meanwhile, a national exit poll found that voters–when given two options for dealing with illegal immigrants–preferred giving them “a chance to apply for legal status” over mass deportation by a margin of 57 percent to 38 percent. All these data, say the Bush-Martinez Republicans, suggest public support for the sort of “comprehensive” reform that passed the Senate.
Other Republicans, not surprisingly, draw a different lesson. They claim the exit poll question (“Should most illegal immigrants working in the United States be: Offered a chance to apply for legal status; Deported to the country they came from?“) was hopelessly skewed in favor of the “amnesty” side. They note that Hostettler’s opponent, Democrat Brad Ellsworth, was also a security-first, anti-amnesty border hawk. And while Arizona voters rejected Hayworth and Graf, they overwhelmingly approved a series of ballot initiatives that will, among other things, restrict illegal immigrants’ access to social services, ban them from winning punitive damages in civil lawsuits, and make English the official state language.
Come January, much will depend on the agenda set by Pelosi. Rather than toss up the Hail Mary of comprehensive reform with a guest-worker program and earned citizenship for illegals, Pelosi may pursue a piecemeal strategy. That is, she may bring up smaller, labor-related bills that touch on various aspects of immigration policy but would not prove as controversial as broad-based reform.
It’s also worth noting what Democrat Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader-elect, said shortly after the election. He had just met with Bush at the White House and discussed immigration. “The president’s observation was–and our observation was–that we are probably going to have an easier time with the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives than he had with the Republican majority,” Hoyer told Bloomberg Television. “Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill got together–I mentioned that at the White House–and they solved the Social Security funding crisis of 1983. Each gave a little bit, and they said to the American public, ‘This is what we need to do.’ We can do that again.” It may be a long two years for House Republicans.
Duncan Currie is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
