Memo: To congressional Republicans
Subject: Immigration
I hear you're angry?
Yawn. Everything angers you. And when anger is a permanent condition, it loses whatever emotional impact it might once have had on others. Nobody fears it any more.
Yet clearly, that anger has become very very important to you. You keep it at blast-furnace levels, turning daily to Rush and Hannity and Breitbart and Fox News to stoke it with more fuel, whether legitimate or imagined it doesn't seem to matter. Just make it burn. And the truth is that you've been angry about a lot of things for a lot of years, most of which have nothing to do with Barack Obama, although he sure does make a convenient target for it.
Anger doesn't impress. And it surely doesn't make your arguments any more rational or convincing for those outside your circle of anger. You've allowed yourselves to become a caucus of Rumpelstiltskins, stomping and fuming in perpetual frustration that leads repeatedly to your own self-destruction. On immigration in particular, you have allowed your course to be set by the worst among you, by idiots ranting about canteloupe-sized calves and other foolishness, and the reasonable among you don't dare to reclaim control because as your speaker explained so well, that would be "too hard."
"Pass a bill."
That's what the president said last night: "Pass a bill."
You don't like what Obama is doing? Fine. The choice is yours. You can whip each other into yet another fine frenzy, shutting down government or even talking of impeachment in retaliation. I hear that wacky sheriff out in Arizona is going to file a lawsuit against Obama. So is the new governor of Texas. It's a thing.
Or ... you could pass an immigration bill that contains your own solution for the 11 million here illegally.
"Pass a bill." Obama said it in a very calm, reasoned tone, but he knew and you knew that it was really a taunt of sorts. Because you don't have a solution. You know it, and Obama knows it. You have anger.
As with health care, you've had the House for four years now and in all that time you haven't passed or even drafted a bill reflecting a GOP solution to the problem of the 11 million. The policy that your more rabid members really want -- a massive police action ripping 11 million people out of their homes, jobs, communities, schools and churches, shipping them south on buses and in rail cars with no legal process -- is completely impractical, utterly inhumane and politically suicidal. Yet they won't support anything that falls short of that, and you have allowed that stubbornness to dictate to you.
As of Nov. 4, you now have the Senate as well, giving you control of all of Congress. You've been like a dog chasing that car for years and now you've finally caught it; the rear bumper is firmly within your teeth, and the sweet taste of chrome fills your mouth.
But now what? Can you actually drive that car?
"Pass a bill." Come up with a solution.
Prove that "smug, arrogant man" in the White House wrong is about you: Legislate. Compromise. Govern.
Or fume and revel in your apparently inexhaustible and exhilarating anger.
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