Last week, the election board in Hall County -- home to Gov. Nathan Deal and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle — reversed itself and decided that it would not provide ballots in Spanish this year.
The backpedaling negated a vote taken last April. The money for bilingual ballots must be appropriated by the county commission – and so the decision should be made there, the winning side maintained.
But others see the retreat as yet another sign of the continuing Republican struggle over the topic of immigration. Not unlike what happened in Washington over the weekend.
It is entirely fair to characterize the 69-hour, weekend shutdown of the federal government as a case of overreach by Senate Democrats, who gambled that the prospect of deporting 800,000 young adults — to countries many of them have no memory of — would be enough to strike a deal.
They lost.
But the important take-aways are on the GOP side. The first one: Republicans have yet to complete their rightward shift on immigration. The second: President Donald Trump’s wall will be a pricey but essentially meaningless bauble in the next phase of the debate, which will pit DACA kids against a redefinition of legal U.S. immigration.
The devaluation of the Great Trump Wall as a bargaining chip was made apparent by Democratic willingness to embrace it over the weekend. “I’ll take a bucket, take bricks, and start building it myself,” U.S. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, D-Ill., told reporters on Saturday. “We will dirty our hands in order for the ‘dreamers’ to have a clean future in America.”
Then there was U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and former Democratic presidential candidate. "I think the wall was a great idea in the 15th century," Sanders told CNN on Sunday, referring to the Great Wall of China. "But I'm willing to sit down in a room and do what the American people want."
No doubt they saw the writing on the wall. So to speak.
The most earthshaking development to come out of the shutdown is the fact that U.S. Sens. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Tom Cotton, R-Ark. — and presumably, White House aide Stephen Miller — were able to convince Trump that DACA was too valuable to trade away for a mere wall.
A wall intended to address angst over illegal immigration.
Cotton and Perdue back legislation that would cut legal immigration by half, end “chain” migration, and close down a “green card lottery” that issues 50,000 visas annually. Immigrants would be allowed entry through a point system that would value such traits as education and the ability to speak English.
That famous Jan. 11 meeting at the White House – the one where Trump allegedly compared African countries and Haiti to squat latrines?
Never mind the phrasing. The import of the meeting was that U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., walked into the White House with a bipartisan deal that traded legitimacy for “dream kids” for the partial funding of Trump’s wall.
The two senators quickly discovered that their efforts had been buzz-sawed. And that the Perdue/Cotton legislation, considered a longshot even when the two senators won Trump’s endorsement last August, was now ascendant.
The next three weeks will see a tug-of-war in the U.S. Senate. On one side will be that bipartisan knot of two dozen members trying to reach a deal before government funding hits another wall on Feb. 8. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., is one of their number. Perdue is not. Georgia’s junior senator will be on the other side, pushing his RAISE Act.
Republican insiders tell me that the sticking point is likely to be an eventual path to citizenship for “dreamers,” however arduous.
We often mention the shift in attitude toward gays and lesbians as one of the great political transformations of our age. But another is the continued rightward drift of Republicans on immigration, even in the face of clear demographic evidence that a piper exists. And that he’ll have to be paid, eventually.
Ten years ago, Gov. Mike Huckabee won the Republican presidential primary in Georgia, overcoming criticism for his support of a bill introduced in his home state of Arkansas, which would have provided taxpayer-funded scholarships for illegal immigrant children.
The legislation “would’ve allowed those children who had been in our schools their entire school life the opportunity to have the same scholarship that their peers had,” said Huckabee, a former Baptist minister. “We’re not going to punish a child because the parent committed a crime.”
The former governor’s daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is now President Trump’s press secretary. On Monday, she defended her boss’ assertion — made in ads paid for by his re-election campaign — that Democrats are “complicit” in murders committed by illegal immigrants.
I’ll close this with two points. First, a note to Bernie Sanders: Actually, the Great Wall of China wasn’t that grand an idea. It failed to stop two dynasty-changing invasions — the Mongols in the 13th century and the Manchus in the 17th century.
And to the Hall County election board: Some payments for pipers have extended grace periods, and some do not. According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the Hispanic population of Hall County stands close to 30 percent. Your bill may come due more quickly than others.
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