The New Republic (Opinion)
By Brian Beutler
August 18, 2015
The
moment he officially entered the Republican presidential race, and
through the first debate, Donald Trump began to influence (or cheapen,
if you prefer) the antics
and rhetoric of other candidates.
This
wasn’t new or unexpected in presidential politics, let alone Republican
presidential politics. But the specter of someone like Trump driving
the dynamic—as opposed
to a more polished or pragmatic candidate—terrified Republican elites
for obvious reasons. Many of them were hoping that 2016 would be the
year that Republicans managed to avoid the worst-foot-forward problems
that hobbled their nominees in 2008 and 2012,
yet here was the GOP frontrunner calling Mexican immigrants rapists,
another contender comparing nuclear diplomacy with Nazism, and still
another one cooking bacon on the tip of a semi-automatic rifle.
The
problem persists to this day, thanks to Trump’s persistent polling
advantage and command of the media. But it just got meaningfully worse
and now threatens to deteriorate
into an outright catastrophe. For the first time since he joined the
race several weeks ago, Trump has laid out a comprehensive policy
approach—perhaps the most nativist, antagonistic, right wing immigration
plan any leading Republican has ever proposed—and
it’s earning rave reviews and approving nods from conservatives and
other candidates.
Trump isn’t just shaping Republican rhetoric and antics anymore. He’s starting to shape Republican policy as well.
By
design, the primary campaign is putting rightward pressure on everyone,
forcing viable candidates to stake out positions they’ll ultimately
regret, even in realms where
Trump isn’t much of a player. At the first debate, both Governor Scott
Walker and Senator Marco Rubio claimed to favor abortion bans without
rape, incest, and life-of-mother exceptions. But Trump’s foray into
policy will make him a standard-bearer in realms
like economic and foreign policy, where he has thus far skated by on
trash talk and empty sloganeering.
On
Monday, Walker said his own immigration ideas are “very similar” to
Trump’s—both want a wall built along the U.S.-Mexico border—and his
campaign promised, like Trump,
to “end the birthright citizenship problem.”
Birthright citizenship is a longstanding right wing bugaboo. It emerged briefly at
the zenith of the Tea Party movement, when several leading Republican
members of Congress
proposed examining remedies to the Constitution’s broad citizenship guarantee. In 2011, Senator Rand Paul proposed amending the constitution
“so that a person born in the United States to illegal aliens does not
automatically gain citizenship unless at least
one parent is a legal citizen, legal immigrant, active member of the
Armed Forces or a naturalized legal citizen.”
Neither
Walker, nor Trump, has specified how they’d achieve their goals.
Trump’s white paper is more consistent with support for a constitutional
amendment, while Walker’s
comment is more consistent with support for ramping up enforcement so
dramatically that unauthorized immigrants are deported before they can
give birth. But the details are almost beside the larger point, that as
cruel and damaging as the immigration debate
was during the last Republican primary, it has become more so this time
around. After they lost in 2012, Republicans set about to neutralize
immigration as a campaign issue, by moving quickly to the left and
helping Democrats update immigration policy for
a generation. Instead they have moved significantly to the right.
That
reflects a broader, more troubling trend. Three years ago, the GOP
recognized the need to move in a subtly but meaningfully different
direction. What they’re finding
instead is that their coalition lacks the cultural and ideological
space to nurture that kind of moderating impulse. Now, as on
immigration, Republicans have moved right on a host of other issues,
from abortion rights to voting rights. This massive strategic
failure by the party apparatus has been investigated at length, and the
party’s inability to prevent the 2016 primary from degenerating into
another 2012-like fiasco will become the focal point of a thousand
postmortems if Republicans lose the presidency again.
Their mistake would be to blame it all on Trump, a GOP tourist. The
problem runs so much deeper.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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