 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
"Roe v. Wade is the law of the land," the nominee invariably replies, "and whatever doubts I may have had about the original decision, I will faithfully execute that law as my oath as a judge compels me to do."
This unequivocal reply only half satisfies the senator. He shakes his head dubiously. "Well," he says eventually, "I and my colleagues will be watching you to see that you do as you have promised. From the president down, we have all sworn an oath to defend the laws and Constitution of the United States and we can accept nothing less." Rumbles of solemn agreement, subsequently echoed in liberal newspaper editorials, are then heard from all sides. Now, an innocent observer witnessing this scene would assume that all responsible people in the United States believe that the government should uphold and enforce the law. He would be surprised therefore at recent brouhaha in which a Republican congressman, Tom Tancredo, has been criticized and shunned, first by local leaders and later by the Bush administration, precisely because he pointed out that the authorities were ignoring a law that they were duty bound to enforce. The row was sparked off by a heartwarming/heartrending story in the Denver Post of a brilliant young scholar, 18-year-old Jesus Apodaca, who, despite high grades, might not be able to take up his place at the University of Colorado because he is an illegal alien and therefore ineligible for most of the usual scholarship funds. Such stories crop up with suspicious regularity when, as here, a bill is pending to pay tuition fees for illegal aliens. On this occasion, however, Rep. Tom Tancredo (who happens to chair the 60-strong Immigration Reform Caucus in Congress) asked why the INS had not enforced the law against illegal immigration on the young student and his family since the local paper had obligingly published their names and whereabouts on the front page. At which point absolutely nobody replied: "Deporting illegal aliens is the law of the land and, whatever my private doubts on the matter, I will faithfully execute the law etc., etc." Instead the Denver Post and all but one of its columnists denounced Tancredo in the usual terms — bully, xenophobe, mean-spirited, etc. The INS hummed and hawed eloquently to the effect that, er, it didn't have enough resources to track people down even when told where they lived. The White House and the Republican National Committee sharply distanced themselves from Tancredo, stating that he spoke only for himself and his constituents whereas it was the president who decided the GOP's policy on illegal immigration (He's for it.). And there the matter might have ended if the Denver Post had not held an online poll about the congressman. At the last count 92 percent of the Post's readers had either a "favorable" or a "very favorable" view of Tancredo. Nobody loved him but the people. As Mark Krikorian pointed out last week on NRO, the Tancredo affair had become one of those seemingly minor incidents that erupt into a major political controversy. That is usually a sign that some concern of ordinary voters has been neglected or suppressed. And that usually highlights a political issue that pits the voters against the political establishment of both parties. Failure to enforce the law on illegal immigration has become just such a fault-line in American politics — for three reasons: 1. It has serious consequences. People will not take the severe risks of crossing the border illegally if they cannot get jobs afterwards and if there is a strong chance that they will be deported when caught. Neither condition applies today. The INS does not enforce penalties on employers who hire illegal aliens; and if illegal migrants are unfortunate enough to be caught, they are only deported if they have been guilty of an unrelated criminal offense (and often, not even then.) So poor Mexicans reason that once they get in, they will be secure from deportation, and that if they try enough times, they will eventually cross the border. So they try to cross the border. Porous borders are not the cause of uncontrolled immigration-they are its result. 2. The political and media elites believe that the answer to illegal immigration is not to halt it — but to legalize it. Hence President Bush's proposed amnesty for illegal aliens (also supported by House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt); the various measures to grant illegal aliens scholarships, driving licenses, and other half steps to legal status; and the hissy-fit thrown by the media whenever anyone like Tancredo surfaces to ask why the law is being ignored. 3. But the voters — waking up to point 1 — are increasingly skeptical about the establishment's approach. National polls show a general sympathy with Tancredo's restrictionist arguments. And Invasion — an important new book by columnist Michelle Malkin on the failure of the authorities to protect national security against the risks of illegal immigration — has already reached #4 on the Amazon Best-Seller List despite not having yet been reviewed in major journalistic outlets. If the Tancredo affair has refused to die, however, that is because it has been kept alive by the establishment as much as by Tancredo. Not entirely without reason. Letting the issue die after its populist power has been revealed is a risky strategy for the establishment. If the voters are against them on illegal immigration and the Bush-Gephardt amnesty, then the leaderships of both parties have to very firmly discourage anyone from bringing these subjects up. Tancredo has to be crushed, as Voltaire said of Admiral Byng's execution, "pour encourager les autres." So, instead of moving on, the politicians and press duly opened fire on him a second time — and they did so with subtlety as well as firmness. Instead of dealing with the general and unpopular fact that the INS now openly tolerates illegal immigration, local press and politicians alleged that Tancredo was picking on a meritorious young man who deserved a good education at Colorado's expense. He was therefore subjected to a second round of ritual denunciations as The Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving. Thus Angela Kelley of the National Immigration Forum: "There are many members of Congress who believe our immigration policies need to be fixed. But you just don't find a member who's decided to single out a young man and his family in this fashion, to bully them really, because they've had the courage to speak out." As the facts emerged, however, this attack began to falter too. After all, it was not Tancredo who had put the young man on the front page as a symbol of the virtue and vitality of illegal immigration — but the Denver Post itself. Still more embarrassing, the paper had done so at the urging of the local Mexican consulate that was campaigning to extend scholarships and other benefits to illegals. What had been uncovered was not only the INS's failure to enforce the law but also a cozy cabal between the media, the local politicians and the Mexican government to put a nice friendly face onto the reality of illegal immigration. And that campaign goes on. Republican Governor Bill Owens intervened with the INS on behalf of the young man — quite needlessly since the INS had already made clear that the lacked the "resources" to find him or indeed anyone else. Republican Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell now proposes to introduce a bill giving the right of U.S. permanent residency to the Apodaca family. And other Republican office-holders in Colorado are humming the same tune. These Republican reactions are, of course, rooted in Karl Rove's belief that a policy of indulgence towards illegal immigration will prove popular with the Hispanic voters now being assiduously wooed by the GOP. But this strategy rests on the casual assumption that all Hispanic voters favor illegal immigration-and that is gravely mistaken. Polls suggest that 70 per cent of Hispanics are opposed to illegal immigration and to an amnesty for illegals. This point of view, rarely heard in the media, was expressed by four Hispanics in the Rocky Mountain News who wrote:
To be sure, such views may well be transformed into a minority Hispanic opinion when Democratic political campaigns seek to arouse their ethnic loyalties. That is what happened to Ron Unz's California campaign against bilingual education. But the GOP needs itself to target not natural Democrats but those Hispanic voters who broadly share their conservative philosophy. That means Hispanics voters like the four writers above-and they are "outraged" by the Rove approach. The GOP's concerted denunciation of Tancredo serves to drive away these Hispanic voters, non-Hispanic critics of illegal immigration, and other natural GOP constituencies. If Tancredo is to survive this onslaught-and so far he is doing so — he must do more than merely refuse to withdraw. He must change the subject from the personal qualities of Mr. Apodaca to the general problem represented by porous borders, eight million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and a political class that refuses to enforce the law. He might do so in the style of Machiavelli by offering to support Senator Campbell's bill to legalize the Apodaca family's immigration status provided that it also toughens up the INS's deportation regime in general. Or if that offer is rejected, as it probably would be, he might threaten to put a referendum initiative on the 2004 Colorado ballot paper to empower the Colorado authorities to assist the INS in halting the influx of illegals — which would at least embarrass the INS and the federal government. Or he might even run against Senator Campbell when he comes up for reelection in 2004 on the issue of illegal immigration. Meanwhile, however, this cause no longer rests entirely on the shoulders of Rep. Tancredo or of politicians in general. Several RICO lawsuits now wending their way through the courts threaten to bankrupt employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants with effectively limitless fines — the most recent was two weeks ago in Washington state in which the federal appeals court ruled that orchards that imported illegal immigrant farm workers were engaged in a criminal conspiracy to hold down the wages of American farm workers. Corporations under attack will urge their political allies in Washington and state capitals to change the law to remove the heavy penalties allowed under RICO. The political establishment will be faced with a choice between angering the voters and disappointing their donors. And so the political action will move from center-stage in Denver to behind the arras in the Beltway. Watch out for a complex and incomprehensible rider removing RICO penalties from immigration law to be attached to some unrelated but popular bill. Late at night. Without discussion. On a day when Tancredo is out of town. |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
here
is a standard scene in any judicial confirmation hearing before the U.S.
Senate Judiciary Committee. A Democratic senator, frowning skeptically,
will quote from the nominee's legal writings in which he has expressed
doubts about the quality of the legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade.
He will then frown more deeply and demand an assurance that if confirmed,
the nominee will abide by a woman's constitutional right to an abortion
in any of his future judicial decisions. 
