Takeover (23 page)

However, with something like one out of eleven Mexicans emigrating to the United States (about half of whom crossed the border illegally), Bush and Rove couldn’t deny that local governments were paying billions in increased hospital emergency room costs because illegal immigrants had no health insurance or incentive to pay their medical bills.
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Nor could they deny that school budgets and local taxpayers
were being overwhelmed by the cost of educating millions of children whose first language was not English, and whose illegal alien parents chose to live outside the law and could contribute little or nothing to their education.

Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly later wrote in
Human Events
:

The Republican National Committee’s mail-order fundraisers often contain a comprehensive multiple-choice survey so that prospective donors can give their opinions on topics of national importance. One issue, however, is conspicuously missing from the list: border security/immigration.

The omission isn’t an oversight; it’s a deliberate policy. The National Republican Congressional Committee has been advising its candidates not to mention this issue in their speeches or campaign literature.

House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D Mo.) gave Republicans the opportunity to seize this issue when he addressed the radical left-wing Hispanic group, the National Council of La Raza, in Miami on July 22. He announced a Democratic Party plan to introduce legislation to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.

Nothing is more unpopular with the voters than amnesty (which Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) called “sheer lunacy”). If the powers that be in the Republican Party don’t realize this, they are out of touch with the grass roots.
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President Bush deflected the issue by promoting various “guest worker” schemes, saying in a 2005 speech in Arizona that “people in this debate must recognize that we will not be able to effectively enforce our immigration laws until we create a temporary worker program.” Said Bush:

The program that I propose would not create an automatic path to citizenship. It wouldn’t provide for amnesty. I oppose amnesty. Rewarding those who have broken the law would encourage others to break the law and keep pressure on our border.

The temporary worker program, by contrast, would decrease pressure on the border. I support increasing the number of annual green cards that can lead to citizenship.

But for the sake of justice and for the sake of border security, I’m not going to sign an immigration bill that includes amnesty.
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In the wake of the revelation that many of the 9/11 terrorist attackers were in the country illegally, it seemed like finally Republican promises to stem the tide of illegal immigrants would be kept.

But instead of the immigration enforcement plan that President Bush and Republicans in Congress had been promising Americans who wanted the rule of law upheld, what Bush and his establishment Republican allies on Capitol Hill, such as then senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, eventually came forth with was “comprehensive immigration reform.”

No matter how you sugarcoated it, once the details of the legislation were understood, “comprehensive immigration reform” was nothing more than amnesty for illegal aliens—just like Democratic leader Dick Gephardt had promised his radical Left allies at La Raza.

The outraged reaction at the conservative grass roots was immediate; the Capitol Switchboard, talk radio, letters to the editor, and public forums of every sort were overwhelmed by the opposition. Bush was not persuaded or dissuaded by conservative opposition to his plan to grant amnesty to illegal aliens and began an all-out effort to build support for the amnesty bill, including the unprecedented step of putting Vice President Dick Cheney on Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated radio program to try to mollify conservatives.
¹³

In what may have been one of the few understatements of his long political career, Rep. Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, one of the leaders of the effort to stop the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America said, “The emphasis that he [Bush] placed on the amnesty provision will not fly.”

Tancredo said Republicans, already facing difficult midterm elections, would suffer if the president was successful in advancing
his proposal, which he believed diverged with public opinion and carried the risk of alienating much of the Republican base.
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Bush’s offer of amnesty sparked mass demonstrations and rallies of illegal aliens which further angered grassroots conservatives and many nonpolitical Americans who simply believed in the rule of law.

Their feelings toward Bush and his establishment Republican allies on Capitol Hill was best summed up by Rush Limbaugh when he said to the millions of listeners who tuned in his syndicated radio program, “My first thought is anger, folks. … How can they [the illegal alien demonstrators] just show up and brazenly demand to be … allowed to be against the law, and nobody does anything about it? Some of you might say, ‘Surround them with INS agents.”
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Bush was increasingly desperate to salvage his proposal and reverse the grassroots landslide moving against it. He lashed out at conservative opponents saying: “If you want to kill the bill, if you don’t want do what’s right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it. You can use it to frighten people.”
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Laura Ingraham, a potent voice in conservative talk radio, said the president’s decision to lash out at the critics of the immigration bill had left them feeling jilted, betrayed, and incensed.
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Limbaugh said later that the immigration reform debate had broken the back of the president’s loyalist base. There are people who are saying, “I’ve had it. I am through defending him. This is the last straw, because he [Bush] is attacking me here.”
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If the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court had cost Bush his remaining support among conservative leaders, “comprehensive immigration reform” cost him whatever support he had left with the conservative grass roots.

I
n 2001, when Karl Rove and Bush came to town, they seemed to adopt a one-word strategy for governing, and that one-word strategy was
bribery
—it was all completely legal, but it was still bribery. As I, and many other conservatives, saw it, the spending and legal theft that the Republicans engaged in under Bush was immoral, but Bush’s betrayal of conservative principles didn’t stop there.

Republicans as the party of fiscal conservatism?
Gone in the hundreds of billions of deficits for a new prescription drug benefit, earmarks, and pork-barrel spending by Republicans in Congress and a Republican president.

Republicans as the party of competent governance?
Gone in the vast loss of lives and treasure sunk in the Bush Cheney Rumsfeld–inspired and managed quagmire in Iraq, and the incompetent pursuit of Usama bin Laden.

Republicans as the party of clean government?
Gone in the “K Street Project” and the Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff, and Bob Ney bribery cases, and the Mark Foley sex scandal.

Republicans as the party of the rule of law?
Gone in the blundering attempt to appease the Left and gain Hispanic votes with a
bill to grant amnesty to illegal aliens.

Republicans as the political home of conservatives and traditional values?
Gone in the cronyism that would have put Harriet Miers—likely another closet liberal like David Souter—on the Supreme Court.

By Election Day 2006 President George W. Bush and his establishment Republican allies on Capitol Hill had effectively destroyed the Republican brand.

As my good friend L. Brent Bozell III put it so well in March 2008, when he looked back and summed up the George W. Bush administration:

Any hopes that Bush would deliver on a conservative agenda in his second term evaporated almost immediately. We [conservatives] watched with growing fury as he and the GOP leadership promoted one liberal initiative after another. Finally, we openly rebelled, turning on the GOP over the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, amnesty for illegal immigrants and the Republicans’ shameless abandonment of fiscal discipline. What was once a powerful alliance between the Republican Party and grass-roots conservatives had become a political bridge to nowhere. With the GOP facing the loss of Congress in 2006, we shrugged in indifference. The movement that had “nowhere else to go” had gone.
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But in 2006 not everyone in the conservative movement was ready to walk away from Bush and the Capitol Hill Republican establishment just yet.

In late September of 2006, my old friend James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, and now with Dr. James Dobson’s
Family Talk
, told the estimated three thousand people attending the “Stand for the Family” rally at the Mellon Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that despite his misgivings, they should stick with the Republicans.

“I have flat-out been ticked at Republicans for the past two
years,” he said. “This country is at a crisis point. Whether or not the Republicans deserve the power they were given, the alternatives are downright frightening.”
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Jim Dobson was right; it was true that the country was (and is) at a crisis point, but many conservative leaders had already mentally checked out of exerting any effort on behalf of the Republican establishment, even if they hadn’t publicly said so.

There was a growing (albeit largely unspoken) conservative consensus that the Big Government Republicans in Washington did not merit the support of conservatives.

President George W. Bush and his establishment Republican allies on Capitol Hill expanded government regulation into every aspect of our lives and refused to deal seriously with mounting domestic problems, such as illegal immigration.

They had busted the federal budget for generations to fund the prescription drug benefit and the creation and expansion of other programs. They had brought forth a limitless flow of pork for the sole, immoral purpose of holding on to office.

As we saw it, they spent more time seeking the favors of Washington’s K Street lobbyists than listening to the conservatives who brought them to power. Establishment Republicans wanted, of course, to hold on to power even if it meant the wholesale abandonment of conservative principles. Some conservative leaders, like Jim Dobson, were concerned that the damage Democrats would do would be too great to be undone. However, as I and many other conservative leaders saw things, if we ever wanted to get conservative governance, Big Government Republicans and Big Government Republicanism were going to have to go. We weren’t necessarily campaigning against Republicans, but we’d been around long enough and understood history well enough not to fear defeat. We recognized that the defeat of Republican senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, the resignation, in light of the Watergate scandal, of President Richard Nixon in 1974, and the defeat of President Gerald Ford in 1976, and in 1992 the defeat
of George H. W. Bush, each swept away many of the older Republican leaders of the time.

As I saw things from the perspective of my then forty-plus years (now fifty-plus years) in conservative politics at the national level, when Republicans were defeated, it has invariably led to the growth of the conservative movement. The resounding defeat suffered by Goldwater at the hands of President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 cleared a lot of dead wood out of the Republican Party, which made it easier for us to increase our influence on the GOP, utilizing new technology, more effective techniques, and fresh ideas. Likewise, the Watergate scandal in 1974 eliminated more Republican officeholders who stood in the way of creating a more broad-based party. It dramatically weakened the Party establishment, making it much easier for Ronald Reagan to mount a nearly successful challenge, just two years later, to an incumbent Republican president. And the 1992 election of Bill Clinton led directly to the conservative “Contract with America” and the Republican takeover of Congress two years later.

Those defeats allowed younger leaders, like former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Bob Walker, and other young conservatives, to rise to positions of leadership that normally would have taken them another twenty years.

Conservatives turned out for McCain and Romney, but independent voters didn’t. Conservative unhappiness reflects what others see; specifically, that there was no clear choice between Big Government Republicans and Big Government Democrats.

Of course the Republican establishment wasn’t about to admit that the GOP was very poorly led and weren’t going to make any progress until the existing leadership passed from the scene.

Sound familiar?

What I told my friends in 2006 was that we conservatives should not respond to the Big Government Republicans’ message of “
Yes, we’re bad, but the other guys are worse, so if you don’t vote Republican, the boogeyman’s going to get you
.”

Conservatives had been threatened with that as long as any of
us can remember, and it was my experience that conservatives don’t usually have growth until establishment Republicans have losses.

If, in 2006, the Republican leaders of Congress and at the White House didn’t recognize that they had a serious problem with the base of the Republican Party, then I expected that Republicans would lose the House and possibly even the Senate.
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As I put it in an op-ed I penned for
Washington Monthly
:

With their record over the past few years, the Big Government Republicans in Washington do not merit the support of conservatives. They have busted the federal budget for generations to come with the prescription-drug benefit and the creation and expansion of other programs. They have brought forth a limitless flow of pork for the sole, immoral purpose of holding onto office. They have expanded government regulation into every aspect of our lives and refused to deal seriously with mounting domestic problems such as illegal immigration. They have spent more time seeking the favors of K Street lobbyists than listening to the conservatives who brought them to power. And they have sunk us into the very sort of nation-building war that candidate George W. Bush promised to avoid, while ignoring rising threats such as communist China and the oil-rich “new Castro,” Hugo Chavez.
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