How much political damage will the GOP incur?

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A Majority of the Majority
By Robert Tracinski, June 21, 2013

Speaker of the House John Boehner recently offered an interesting perspective on how Republicans should approach the immigration bill: "I don't see any way of bringing an immigration bill to the floor that doesn't have a majority support of Republicans." Instead, he wants to pass a bill in the House with a "majority of the majority."

That makes a lot of sense, and it makes you wonder why none of the Republican leaders in the Senate seem to have thought of it. Instead, they spent all of their time negotiating with Chuck Schumer in the Gang of Eight, instead of first figuring out what they needed to do to get their own people on board. But perhaps that would have required guys like John McCain and Lindsey Graham to sit down and take seriously the hotheads and "wacko birds" like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

As I have argued, this was an issue on which the Republicans really needed a leader or leaders who would show they could bridge the divisions in their party and get everyone to back a common approach. The fact that no one rose to that leadership challenge is a bad sign for 2016, because it means that none of the rising stars in Congress was able to demonstrate the leadership skills that would really qualify him for a future presidential run.

Senator Paul is an interesting case, because with his libertarian leanings, he would presumably love to back a less restrictive immigration policy. But he states the obvious political flaw in the bill.

"I'm one of the Republicans who favors immigration reform, but I think that any legalization of those who are here illegally should be dependent upon border security, and unfortunately we're hearing from the Gang of Eight they want the opposite. They want legalization not dependent on border security, but I think most conservatives in the country want to see the border secured, and then they're willing to go ahead and give documentation to workers that are here illegally. But we can't do it if we're not going to secure the border first."

I'm about as much of a liberal squish on immigration as you can get, and I take the view that if you reform immigration to actually make it possible to come here legally, you won't have to worry all that much about enforcement. But even I can accede that if you want to peel off a number of Senate and House conservatives to back this bill and avoid a fratricidal battle within the party, you need to give the conservatives some substantial assurance that they will get something they want that they can boast about to their constituents. Without some kind of "enforcement trigger," the bill amounts to asking them to place their trust in the Obama administration to crack down on border security. Which is not something anyone can credibly ask them to do.

The Republicans' failure to form a united front on immigration is a disaster because of the importance of the issue for the party. Jonathan Chait has his own partisan interest in how he frames the issue, but he gets the politics of the issue pretty much right.

"It may be the case that Democrats just win the politics, regardless—they win if Republicans kill reform, and they win if they accede. Even if that were true, passing reform would at least take the issue off the table. If Republicans kill a bill, Democrats can run on it again in 2016, and basically every future election, and the underlying dynamics will get continuously better as the nonwhite share of the electorate rises every cycle. CNN's poll shows that the Gang of Eight bill is narrowly popular, but it also creates a huge generational divide, with senior citizens strongly opposed and young voters strongly in favor. Eventually something will pass, and there's no reason to think conservatives can get a better deal four, eight, or twenty years from now. The main question is how much political damage they will incur in the meantime."

Now leadership on this issue is devolving to Speaker of the House John Boehner, who is backing an incremental approach, with a bunch of tough enforcement measures slated to be passed first. The idea seems to be that these incremental reforms will aggregate into something that can be compared to and reconciled with the comprehensive Senate bill—but that means that the process will drag on for a lot longer.

It might have been simpler if Republican leaders had really taken seriously this idea of getting a majority of their own party on board first.
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