Why does Sen. Lindsey Graham have a seat at the table on immigration? Are Jorge Ramos and Vicente Fox unavailable?
Graham's claim to fame is: 1) having twice negotiated a voluntary surrender for the GOP on immigration; and 2) winning 0.00 percent of the vote when he ran for president two years ago.
You could run for president on the platform that we should kill babies and eat them, and you'd get more votes than Lindsey Graham. Who designated this most remote of back-benchers, thoroughly rejected by the American people, as the principal negotiator on Trump's central campaign promise?
Graham's thought process seems to be: We had an election, I ran for president; literally no one voted for me, so my views should prevail over the guy who won an Electoral College landslide.
How about getting Dennis Kucinich in there? Has anyone asked Martin O'Malley for help in the "DACA" negotiations?
To a rapturous media, Graham has been peddling the lie that President Trump blew up a beautiful bipartisan deal on immigration. It wasn't "bipartisan," except in the sense of being "angrily rejected by the voters."
It's the same deal that has gone down in flames at least twice before. It's the same deal that has already destroyed the careers of Sens. John McCain, Marco Rubio, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Kelly Ayotte, Mark Kirk and Gov. Jeb! Bush.
It's the same deal President Bush tried to push through Congress in 2006 -- with Graham's support! -- leading directly to the Republican wipeout in the midterm elections later that year. (Innumerable polls showed that the public hated Bush's proposed amnesty even more than it hated the Iraq War.)
It's the same deal that voters repudiated for approximately the 87th time when they made Donald Trump president (and -- again -- gave Lindsey Graham zero votes).
Notwithstanding the media's phony polls showing 98.6 percent of voters wildly enthusiastic about amnesty for "Dreamers" -- or "Nightmares," as radio host Howie Carr calls them -- every time the public gets its hands on an actual ballot, it votes for: less immigration, punishing employers who hire illegals, no government services for illegals, no driver's licenses for illegals, no amnesty ever, English-only and Donald Trump.
What the media call a "bipartisan deal" didn't even meet the basic definition of a "deal."
For at least a decade now, the argument for amnestying the Nightmares has been: Screw the parents. THEY SUCK! They were the lawbreakers ... but don't blame the innocent children (single typewriter key) brought-here-through-no-fault-of-their-own.
Then we get to see the big bipartisan deal, and it's: We amnesty the kids -- but also the parents! Not only is this not meeting Trump halfway, it's also doubling the distance.
It's like negotiating in the Kasbah:
Democrats: We demand $30!
Republicans: We'll give you $10.
Democrats: OK, $200.
Lindsey Graham: DEAL!
How did an existential issue for the Republican Party get assigned to the single worst person to negotiate it?
It would be as if during Bush's presidency, anti-war Republican Chuck Hagel had anointed himself spokesman for the GOP on the Iraq War. Republicans would have gone nuts! They would have been screaming at the media, the Democrats and the president: DO NOT TALK TO CHUCK HAGEL!
The fact that Senate Republicans have not done this in the case of Graham and immigration makes me think the fix is in. If we had a party that was serious, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Senate GOP would say, "That's great that you and Jeff Flake have been having meetings, Lindsey, but you don't speak for us."
It's hard to avoid the impression that other Republicans are saying, God bless Lindsey. There, but for the grace of God, go I -- because this is what our paymasters want. The Business Roundtable doesn't care what Republicans have to do to fool the base, provided: Another year goes by, the Nightmares are still here, and we haven't sealed the border.
Either Mitch McConnell is very, very stupid or the reason he's not pulling Graham is precisely because he keeps missing shots.
Let's see, what's the stupidest way we could do this? Every single day of Trump's campaign he promised everyone a wall and mass deportations. What if we DON'T build a wall, but take the person who got zero votes, was the earliest and most vociferous in attacking Trump -- and involve him centrally in the negotiations on immigration?
Recall that McConnell spent $8 million to defeat Rep. Mo Brooks in the Alabama Senate Republican primary last August, leading to Trump's humiliating defeat in the reddest state in the Union in December. There's nothing embarrassing about Brooks. But he's with Trump on immigration, so he had to be stopped.
Voters get lip service on "securing the border" at the same time that Republicans are letting Graham negotiate amnesty. The complicit senators hide in their offices and practice looking shocked. No, Lindsey! That's not what we wanted at all! ... Oh well, what are you going to do? Let's just get those illegals their permanent residence cards and move on to more tax cuts for Wall Street.
It's said so often that it's become a cliche: Elections have consequences. Just this once, couldn't an election have a consequence? A wall and deportations -- YES! Amnesty for the Nightmares -- NO!
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