Look for Donald Trump and immigration, in that order, to dominate the next few news cycles. Republican rival Jeb Bush heads to the U.S.-Mexico border today, according to the Washington Post:
Over the weekend, the Post's top two conservative pundits lambasted the immigration policies that The Donald is pitching, particularly his proposal to expel 11.3 million illegal aliens. Both argue that it threatens GOP chances in 2016. From George Will:
Trump proposes seizing money that illegal immigrants from Mexico try to send home. This might involve sacrificing mail privacy, but desperate times require desperate measures. He would vastly enlarge the federal government's enforcement apparatus, but he who praises single-payer health-care systems and favors vast eminent domain powers has never made a fetish of small government.
On its own terms, this is crackpot. Wouldn't you save a lot just on Mayflower moving costs if you chose the "good ones" first — before sending SWAT teams to turf families out of their homes, loading them on buses and dumping them on the other side of the Rio Grande?
Less frivolously, it is estimated by the conservative American Action Forum that mass deportation would take about 20 years and cost about $500 billion for all the police, judges, lawyers and enforcement agents — and bus drivers! — needed to expel 11 million people.
Over at The Hill, a D.C.-based newspaper and website, Emory University law professor Polly J. Price tackles birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment:
The prevailing understanding is that Congress has no such authority because the language of the 14th Amendment is clear and so are the Supreme Court opinions interpreting it. Any person — regardless of their parents — acquires citizenship at birth so long as he or she is "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.
Proponents of congressional authority, however, reason that because the parents are in the country illegally, they are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. It is a tortured reading of the plain language — something originalists accuse "activist judges" of doing — to conclude it doesn't mean what it says.
The parents are most certainly subject to the jurisdiction of the United States when they are inside this country. Public understanding would reject the alternative: If illegal migrants are not subject to our jurisdiction, we cannot punish them for criminal behavior.
But not everyone is piling on Donald Trump. Former Georgia congressman John Linder has retired to Mississippi, but he's posted a column in praise of Trump's crusade against birthright citizenship at The Blaze. In part:
One wonders how Operation Wetback under President Eisenhower was able to deport or cause to leave nearly a million men women and children without impeachment. He also appears to have escaped the charge of racist…..
I do not expect Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee, but I admire him and salute him for showing the Republican establishment – the elected, the lobbyists and the chattering class – how out of touch they are with the American people.
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GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz isn't letting Jimmy Carter's cancer diagnosis interfere with his stump speech lines about the 39th president. NBC captured the U.S. senator from Texas saying this on Friday in Iowa, one day after Carter's remarkable news conference about his health:
When asked about the timing of his remarks, Cruz said, according to Bloomberg News: "We can always have a discussion about public policy."
Cruz added, "The public policy of the late 1970s didn't work. And the point that I made here that was so important is that in response to the failures of public policy in the late 1970s there was a grassroots movement of millions of men and women that rose up and became the Reagan revolution. And the same thing is happening today."
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Republicans are already plotting to unseat Democrat Taylor Bennett, the former Georgia Tech quarterback who weeks ago won an upset victory in a conservative-leaning Republican district. And one possibility involves running a young rising star of their own.
Meagan Myers Hanson, a former aide to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and a lawyer who headed the Georgia Young Republicans, sent word she's considering a challenge for the Brookhaven-based seat next year. Hanson has already become a spokeswoman for the GOP on the Georgia talk show circuit, and she came up short earlier this year to run the Young Republican National Federation.
"I will say that I have been blown away by the number of phone calls, text messages, Facebook messages and other support I have received encouraging me to run," she said. "I am giving it serious consideration and will make my final decision in the upcoming weeks after consulting with my family and close friends."
We've messaged Catherine Bernard, a DeKalb County lawyer who finished third in this summer's election, to see whether she's in.
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DeKalb County may soon host another intriguing race. We're picking up word that DeKalb Solicitor-General Sherry Boston is planning to challenge District Attorney Robert James. She's set to make up her mind within weeks.
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The company pitching a controversial fuel pipeline has turned to a new strategy to build support among wary politicians.
The Texas-based company gave McIntosh County a $30,000 check earmarked for school athletic programs. It chipped in $20,000 for an anti-littering campaign in Savannah. And it added $3,000 contribution to a South Carolina high school's robotics team.
But the most recent giveaway, an offer of $25,000 to Augusta to install emergency call boxes downtown, didn't exactly win over local politicians. From the Augusta Chronicle:
"It's demeaning to feel that you can garner our support with a trivial, insignificant amount of money on something that could be useful, but could easily be done without," Lockett said....
Commissioner Marion Williams said the boxes were unnecessary because most people now carry cell phones. "Give me something I can use," Williams said.
For more on the debate, read the AJC's special report by clicking right here.
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