The 'Amnesty' Card: GOP Launches 2014 Border War

Politico

By Alexander Burns

August 13, 2014

The ‘amnesty’ card: GOP launches 2014 border war 

So much for that fresh start with Latino voters.

In a dramatic departure from their determination only months ago to win a second look from that rapidly-growing community, national Republicans have embarked on a sustained campaign to make the immigration crisis a central issue in 2014 and exhort voters to punish the White House for failing to lock down the U.S.-Mexico border.

The intensity of their rhetoric has increased as a surge of child migrants has renewed attention to the border and amid anticipation that President Barack Obama will issue a set of executive actions on immigration, including potentially suspending deportations for countless migrants.

Gone are the days of tiptoeing around the real and perceived sensitivities of the Latino community, which holds powerful sway over the Electoral College in presidential elections.

Public and private polling shows border control creeping up the list of concerns among conservative voters and independents, and the GOP is responding accordingly. Republican candidates are lacing into the Obama administration and its congressional allies for supporting “amnesty” and casting them as unable to secure the southern border.

Three major Republican Senate hopefuls – Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Scott Brown of New Hampshire and Terri Lynn Land of Michigan – are airing commercials blasting their Democratic opponents for supporting “amnesty” and attacking “lawlessness” and “chaos” on the border. Other candidates are expected to join them.

At the start of August, the House of Representatives voted to reverse the White House action – dating to 2012 – that deferred action on deportations for illegal immigrants brought into the country as minors. The measure was hugely popular among Latinos during the presidential campaign that year, but it caused an outcry on the right as an example of brazen executive overreach.

And the most prominent national Republican voice on immigration and the border is no longer Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American legislator who supported the Senate’s immigration compromise bill, but rather Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the swaggering border-state conservative who has deployed national guardsmen to the Rio Grande.

It’s hard to overstate how sharply the GOP’s new strategy breaks with the party’s determination to enact sweeping new immigration policy in the aftermath of the 2012 election, when Obama won more than 7 in 10 Latino votes and prompted the release of a grim Republican National Committee report to endorse immigration reform as its primary policy recommendation.

Many prominent Republicans, from House Speaker John Boehner to billionaire super-donor Sheldon Adelson, still support immigration reform in word. But with the 2014 election squarely in sight, the party has spun away from a national quest to reintroduce itself to Latinos and planted itself squarely on the turf of the midterm campaign — where individual races are playing out in largely conservative territory in the Deep South and Mountain West states with fewer Latino voters.

Even Republicans who fear the party’s dire position with Latinos will hurt them in the presidential race just two years out say that prosecuting the case against Obama may need to come first for now.

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, one of the GOP’s premier strategists and an endorser of immigration reform, called it appropriate for Republicans to campaign against any Obama action to “give amnesty to thousands and thousands – hundreds of thousands or however many it is – of children who have crossed the border illegally.”

“He doesn’t have the authority to do that by law. That’s something that Congress should decide,” Barbour said. “We do need to have immigration reform, but it does need to secure the border and do so demonstrably.”

But Al Cardenas, the former Florida Republican Party chairman who helmed the American Conservative Union, cautioned that what voters hear from the GOP in 2014 may resonate to the party’s detriment later on.

“The bigger the political prize is, the more counterproductive these hard-hitting amnesty positions are,” Cardenas said. “You can find certain congressional districts where, politically, maybe this kind of harsh rhetoric is self-serving.”

Republican leaders in Washington say that even a few months ago, the short- and long-term political math might have argued against a border-hawk message in 2014. Yet as the economy shows fresh signs of life and the white-hot national firestorm over the Affordable Care Act’s botched rollout subsides at least modestly, Republicans have turned with greater frequency to the broad-strokes argument that Obama and his party are simply incompetent to run the country.

Border control would seem to be a case in point: At the end of July, an AP/GfK poll showed that 68 percent of Americans disapproved of Obama’s handling of immigration. About the same fraction called illegal immigration an “extremely” or “very serious” problem.

National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Brad Dayspring predicted that go-it-alone immigration actions from the White House “would be the political equivalent of nuclear explosion for Democratic candidates.”

“President Obama’s Executive Amnesty would inject adrenaline into an electorate already eager to send him a message of disapproval,” Dayspring wrote in an email.

To senior Democrats, the GOP’s renewed enthusiasm for a border debate looks like a profound miscalculation over all but perhaps the shortest of time horizons. Republicans have won less than a third of the Latino vote in the last two national elections, which Democrats chalk up to the perception among Latinos that the party simply does not like them.

If waving around the amnesty issue excites the conservative base in a handful of midterm election states, Democratic leaders say Republicans will pay an incredible price in the near future.

“The Republican Party continues to do severe damage to their brand with the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country,” said Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager. “The only constructive thing they’re doing is helping the Democrats in 2016.”

He contrasted the GOP’s risky midterm strategy with the Democratic approach to the congressional elections during President George W. Bush’s sixth year in office. The party campaigned against Bush’s record on Iraq and the ethics and economic policies of the GOP Congress – the same issues Obama trumpeted in his campaign two years later.

“You think about us in ’06, we weren’t out there on issues that hurt us in ’08,” Messina said. “But I don’t think [Republican candidates] care about the presidential. They care about their own politics.”

In a sign of the hesitation in some GOP quarters about a harder-line immigration strategy, most of the 11 “no” votes on the House border bill were lawmakers in districts with significant Latino populations, including Nevada Rep. Joe Heck, California Reps. Jeff Denham and David Valadao, and Colorado Reps. Mike Coffman and Cory Gardner. Gardner is running for Senate.

What’s more, the same AP/GfK poll that showed Obama’s approval rating perilously low on immigration also showed he’s not suffering alone. Americans blame Republicans more than the president and his party, by modest margin, for congressional failure to pass an immigration law.

Eighty-five percent of respondents said that Republicans in Congress deserve “all” or “some” of the blame, versus 72 percent who said the same of Obama and 80 percent who blamed Hill Democrats.

Still, Lanhee Chen, the policy director for Republican Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign and now a Hoover Institution fellow, said there is no longer a consensus view in the GOP that immigration reform is an essential political imperative.

“My sense is that some of that energy that was there, post-2012… some of that urgency has gone away or has directed itself in other places,” said Chen, who supports a legislative immigration overhaul. “I think the majority view is, certainly on 2014, is let’s just wait out the clock; and 2015, why proceed on something that divides the conference as opposed to one that unites it?”

To some Republicans, the Democrats’ utter confidence in the political superiority of their position is a provocation all on its own – a deep affront to a party that bitterly resents the implication that their low tolerance for unlawful migration is tantamount to bigotry.

Pete Wilson, the former California governor who caused a national stir during his 1994 reelection with sensational ads on illegal immigration, said Senate Democrats have been “playing the race card” on a law-and-order issue.

“It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the rule of law,” said Wilson, who won his own reelection race but created a lasting rift between Latinos and the California GOP. “Congress is on record as supporting the securing of the border … They have not achieved it and that, I think, is not a forgivable sin.”

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