This afternoon Steven Benen flagged this comment by NBC’s Chip Reid in which Reid claimed the Democrats were the “big loser” in the demise of the immigration bill. Now there are a number of things to say about this — 1) that Reid is parroting Republican talking points on this issue and 2) that no one seems to be raising the fact that, by the definition that prevailed only a year ago, Republicans are filibustering basically everything the comes up in the senate.
Yes to both. Both very important.
But you have to be far more than ordinarily clueless to believe that the Republicans aren’t overwhelmingly the losers in this whole debacle. The whole episode is only a little short of a catastrophe for the GOP, indeed, twice over.
The fact that the episode has further revealed President Bush’s political impotence is relatively unimportant, given his extreme unpopularity. More important is that the whole run-through has further divided Republicans in the lead up to the 2008 election. But even that isn’t the really big deal.
The real fall-out is that this has dealt a massive and probably enduring blow to Republican efforts to at least compete for, if not win over, the growing hispanic electorate. The model here is then-Gov. Pete Wilson’s (R) 1994 reelection campaign in California — a set of events that played out somewhat more amorphously but to real effect across the country in the mid-1990s.
Briefly, Wilson successfully rode the anti-immigration issue to victory, in particular through his embrace of Prop. 187 — a successful ballot initiative to deny social services to illegal immigrants and get local cops into the business of policing people’s immigration status. It helped Wilson get reelected. But it also basically destroyed the California Republican party. Destroyed may be too strong a word. But it put the state’s rapidly growing hispanic population firmly into the Democratic camp and played a big part in making California into the solidly Democratic state it is today. (People forget, it didn’t used to be that way.)
The kicker here is that at least Pete Wilson won his election. Indeed, anti-immigrant politics, in California and elsewhere, helped fuel the Republican sweep in 1994. In this case, the Republicans didn’t even get it together and get a win in the short run. They managed to damage themselves in the short run and deal themselves a massive long term blow. That’s great work.
Now, some people might say that Democratic votes in addition to Republican votes helped to scuttle the bill in the senate. But this ignores the salient fact that Republican opposition to the immigration bill — not just in the senate but across the board — has been overwhelmingly nativist in character. Democratic opposition has tended to focus either on the guest worker provision or other details of the bill. It’s really as simple as that, indeed so simple it barely requires saying.
This whole episode has branded the Republicans as the anti-immigrant party. And that’s not good for a party that wants to compete for the votes of America’s largest bloc of new immigrant voters.
