National Journal
By Ronald Brownstein
August 26, 2015
Exactly
19 years ago this week Bob Dole, as the recently chosen 1996 Republican
presidential nominee, faced the same question that Donald Trump has
presented his rivals
today: whether to support ending the Constitution's guarantee of
automatic citizenship for all children born in the U.S.
At
the national convention that nominated Dole and Jack Kemp that summer,
the party's platform called for revoking the provision in the 14th
Amendment that ensured citizenship for all U.S.-born children, regardless of their parents' immigration
status. Dole had remained vague on that plank during the convention, but
in an appearance with Kemp before the National Association of Black
Journalists on Aug. 23, 1996, the new nominee
briskly rejected the idea.
''For
generations, white children of white immigrants, regardless of their
status, enjoyed citizenship,'' one reporter said to him, according to
The New York Times. ''Now
that the new immigrants are black and brown, would you support a
constitutional amendment denying them citizenship?'' Dole's reply was
unequivocal: "No."
For
Dole, the choice of defending the 14th Amendment's promise of
birthright citizenship "was a no-brainer," recalled Scott Reed, his
campaign manager. "There were a handful
of issues Dole just didn't agree with [in the platform] and he wasn't
going to roll along without saying something."
Trump is proposing more sweeping change than the 1996 platform Dole repudiated.
The
businessman argues that the 14th Amendment does not, in fact, guarantee citizenship to the estimated 4.5 million U.S. children born of
undocumented immigrants; if
the courts agreed, that presumably would make those children subject to
the deportation he pledges to pursue against all those here illegally.
But
in responding to Trump, the 2016 Republicans have wavered far more than
Dole did. About half of the GOP field (including Ted Cruz, Rick
Santorum, and Ben Carson) has
also endorsed ending birthright citizenship, at least prospectively.
Scott Walker quickly embraced the idea before backpedaling to reject it.
Even the two candidates who most forthrightly rejected Trump's call
could not completely escape his gravitational
pull.
Marco
Rubio said he would not seek to change the Constitution, but would take
unspecified steps to combat those "taking advantage of the 14th
Amendment." Jeb Bush, while
also rejecting constitutional change and praising America's
"diversity," courted Trump's constituency by adopting his incendiary
"anchor babies" language.
This
rightward lurch—behind an almost certainly hopeless cause of
constitutional change—captures the core GOP dilemma now unfolding in the
party's nomination contest.
The
Republican electoral coalition now relies on preponderant majorities
from the groups most unsettled by demographic and cultural change:
older, noncollege, and rural
whites. There are no longer enough of those voters to guarantee
Republicans a national majority; that's why Democrats have won the
popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. Yet, as
Trump's rise shows, many of those voters militantly oppose
the policies (like immigration reform) that might help the party expand
its coalition.
By
demonstrating that dynamic so viscerally, Trump's ascent has further
weakened the Republicans who contend the party must bend to, rather than
resist, demographic change.
After
Mitt Romney lost decisively in 2012 despite winning a greater share of
white voters than Ronald Reagan did in 1980, the Republican National
Committee's official
postelection review concluded that the party "will lose future
elections" without attracting a larger share of the growing minority
vote. That impulse peaked in June 2013, when 14 Senate Republicans (led
by Rubio and 2008 nominee John McCain) helped pass sweeping
immigration reform that included a pathway to citizenship for
undocumented immigrants.
But
with conservatives in revolt, the GOP current has since reversed. The
House refused to consider the Senate bill, and instead repeatedly passed
legislation to block
President Obama's executive orders providing legal status for some of
the undocumented. Most Republican-led states sued to stop Obama's
executive action as well. Rubio repudiated his own bill. Now the 2016
Republican contenders are collectively offering an
even harsher approach on immigration than Romney did when he embraced
the "self-deportation" policy that discredited him with many Latinos and
Asian Americans.
In
summer 2013, conservative electoral analyst Sean Trende provided the
rickety political theory that underpinned this reversal when he wrote
that Romney lost not because
he ran poorly with people of color but because he failed to motivate
enough right-leaning whites to vote. Though Trende didn't endorse a
specific policy agenda, conservatives embraced his theory as the
justification for reviving a hard-line immigration approach
meant to excite the GOP's nearly all-white base. Trump himself recently
declared that Romney lost because "he didn't do well with the
Republicans—they didn't go out and vote."
Trump's
rise behind his belligerent immigration agenda has horrified many
conservative thinkers. Perceptive conservative essayist Ben Domenech
recently warned that Trump
is leading the GOP "toward a coalition that is reduced to the narrow
interests of identity politics for white people."
Yet
on immigration and other issues, the GOP has already conceded much to
the angry and often economically squeezed voters demanding exactly such a
politics. Pacifying
them won't be easy now that Trump is promising even greater exertions
(mass deportation, ending birthright citizenship) against the ethnic
diversity recasting America.
In
practice, no policy agenda can stop that demographic transformation.
But Republican leaders may prove equally ineffectual at containing the
white racial anxieties swelling
Trump's support.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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