Moe Lane

Chuck Schumer is claiming that he’s going to pass legislation that will effectively neuter Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law if/when (and a lot of people are starting to say ‘when’) the Supreme Court upholds said legislation.  Ann Althouse notes that the law is actually popular, and that even Latinos themselves are divided on whether or not it’s a good idea.  I have a much more elemental take on this: Chuck Schumer has considerably less ability to dictate what or what does not get passed in this Congress – but if he really wants to get his legislation considered, there’s an easy way to do it.

Attach it to a Democratic Senate budget proposal.

I am going to break an internal rule, and feel somewhat sorry for an Obama appointee. Yes, I know that it’s the man’s own fault for working for this administration; I also know that anybody who would be a top-level Obama administration official would waste no sympathy on me.  But judging from this report, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli is apparently on a smooth glide path to losing in whole or in part the Supreme Court case over Arizona’s new immigration law.  Apparently he’s not even convincing Justice Sotomayor; and that takes skill, in this administration*.

So why am I feeling sorry for the guy?  Well, it’s not because Verrilli’s problem is that, as Ed Morrissey notes, he’s stuck using stupid arguments concocted for political purposes by an administration whose core competency is incompetence.  That, again, is part for the course.  No, why I feel sorry for Verrilli is because I am morally certain that if he loses both the Obamacare and immigration cases he will be blamed by everybody on the Left, because that’s much easier than dealing with, say, objective reality.  And that will be sole blame: nobody else will have to take the fall.  Progressives and liberals will tell themselves for the next two generations that they could have gotten what they wanted, only Verrilli failed them in the clutch.  His name will be mud.

(more…)

Legal Insurrection tacitly wonders about the same thing that I’ve been wondering about: what happens to the Democrats when/if the long-trumpeted Latino demographic shift – one fueled by thirty years of constant immigration from Mexico – well, stops?

Spoiler warning: probably nothing all that good.  (more…)

Ed Morrissey’s thoughts on Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s endorsement of Mitt Romney make sense, but there’s another thought: could this simply be about immigration?  Romney’s portraying himself as a hardline immigration hawk at this point*, and Brewer got herself elected in 2010 largely on her willingness to take and keep a hard line on the topic herself.  Not too surprising that this might translate into an endorsement, honestly.

But will it work?  Don’t know, don’t care.

Moe Lane

*Note my choice of verb.

Yeah, I know, I know: merely asking this question feeds into the entire weird (and sometimes sewage-tinged) false narrative that the Koch brothers run the Tea Party.  Blame Mitt Romney for that: after all, if this Examiner article is correct (via Ben Domenech’s Transom) then Mitt Romney seems to believe that the Koch brothers run the Tea Party, and he’s acting accordingly.  You tell me how to ignore a conspiracy theory when a Presidential candidate refuses to.

Seriously.  I spent a good part of the morning trying to come up with a way to do that, and failing.

But let’s backtrack a little and go over the background.  As you’ve probably heard, Team Romney is going gangbusters over Governor Rick Perry’s supposed weaknesses on immigration, particularly his opposition to a national E-Verify system.  See Ramparts 360 and RightWing News for Perry’s actual views on the subject (and immigration in general): to summarize, Perry is as about as impressed at the federal government’s current ability to run a country-wide identification database as he’s impressed at its ability to run pretty much anything else; which is to say, Perry is not particularly impressed.  Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is actually pretty hardline on E-Verify.

For the moment, at least.  Whether this survives the weekend may be an open question.  Because, again, comes this news that Mitt Romney – everybody put down their coffee cups, by the way – is planning to court the Tea Party – and the Koch brothers. (more…)

This post by Mickey Kaus, on how the Texan mindset colors Texan attitudes towards certain aspect of illegal immigration?  From what I’ve seen from working with and talking to Texans, there is indeed a certain point there.  While I consider actual secession fears to be insanely overblown monster-under-the-bed walking nightmares at best and cynical attempts to go after conservatives at worst, the truth is that Texans have an extremely strong regional self-identity.

It’s also kind of infectious, which possibly Mickey should have gotten into more.  Although I don’t know how easy it is to get other Texans to agree that you’ve become one…

Moe Lane

Which is fine by me – but before the Left starts screaming, maybe they should talk to their own side. The final cloture vote was 55 to 41, with the following Democratic Senators voting against the DREAM Act:

Mark Pryor
Jon Tester
Max Baucus
Kay Hagan
Ben Nelson

Where I come from, 55 + 5 = 60, or enough to pass a cloture vote.  Three Republicans voted for cloture, so there was enough of a margin for Democrats.  Guess Harry Reid didn’t want this bill badly enough…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Hot Air says add Joe Manchin to the list.

Pew surveyed Latino voters on illegal immigration issues: the report isn’t available yet at the site, but this article reports that Latino attitudes towards illegal immigration has taken a seriously negative turn.  The most important finding? 31% consider illegal immigration a net negative for the Latino community, with 29% considering it positive, and 20% considering it neither.  In 2007, 50% considered illegal immigration to be a net positive.

Oddly, I sort of agree with both sets of spin from the article on why this would be so: the right’s argument that this reflects heightened public awareness on the issue makes a good deal of sense.  After all, people are more than a set of survey questions: having a last name like Herrera or Sandoval or Martinez does not automatically require you to take a hardcore liberal line on immigration policy.  But this means that I also sort of take the left’s argument that much of this new attitude comes from our miserable economy.  Indeed, it does: the economy’s bad, thanks largely to the inability of the Democratic party to focus on job creation.  Instead, they do things like waste valuable legislative time pandering to the ultra-far left splinter of the Latino community…

Via Mickey Kaus (who is watching in horror as his Democratic party acts like, well, the Democratic party on the DREAM Act*), via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

*:shrug: Elections have consequences.

There was a Mickey Kaus / Dave Weigel twitter exchange on the likelihood of an amnesty gambit lame-duck session: Mickey thinks it’s likely, Weigel not so much.  Personally, I think that it’s not, for one specific reason: there are a lot of Democratic Senators who will be sweating 2012 as it is, because they aren’t precisely in a position where any remaining, lingering popularity of the President’s will necessarily rub off on them (hi, Senator Webb!).  You think that conservative activists can hold a grudge for two years?

Yeah: fortunately or unfortunately, so do those Senators.

But I could be wrong.

I understand that it was, well, accurate?

Recent news reports that Democratic leaders promised Hispanic Caucus members that provisions inserted in the healthcare to win the votes of others would be removed later suggest that South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R) charge that President Obama’s denial that the healthcare bill would cover illegal aliens was a lie was dead on.

The healthcare bill as passed and signed into law prohibits illegals from buying into the so-called healthcare exchanges that will be established under the law and denies even temporary legal immigrants access to Medicaid unless they’ve been here for five years. Hispanic Caucus leaders are now charging that the administration specifically promised to eliminate these and other restrictions and are vowing to hold the president and congressional Democratic leaders to that promise.

More on that promise here.  It certainly sounds as if Hispanic Caucus legislators were led to believe that they would have the access to exchanges resolved in illegal immigrants’ favor… which leads to the question, “When will people start apologizing to Joe Wilson?”

Ha! Yes, I know: I’m quite the comedian.

Let me put it a different way: Gov. Jan Brewer (R, AZ-GOV) removes AG Terry Goddard (D-CAND, AZ-GOV) from the defense of the illegal immigration law that the former supports and the latter opposes.

Late Friday night as the Memorial Day weekend began, Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, in effect, suspended the state’s Democratic attorney general from defending the new law in upcoming legal challenges. The measure, known as S.B. 1070, is due to take effect this summer and, among other things, allows local police under federal guidelines to check the immigration status of people they stop.

[snip]

The governor’s abrupt action against Terry Goddard, her likely Democratic opponent in this fall’s gubernatorial election, came after months of disputes between the two and at the end of a long day of legal maneuvering in both Arizona and the nation’s capital.

(more…)

Ain’t a ‘misunderstanding,’ by the way.  Arizonans got the message loud and clear. Louder and clearer than desired, in fact.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

“…doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t visit:”

San Diego tourism leaders and hoteliers fear they could lose a sizable chunk of business this summer from valued “Zonies” who are so angered by elected leaders’ recent censure of Arizona for its illegal-immigration law that they’re mounting an informal boycott of their own.

The San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau and several hotels report receiving e-mails and letters from Arizona visitors saying they intend to change their plans to travel here in light of local outcry over their home state’s anti-illegal-immigration stance.

Tourism officials are striking back. In an open letter, they urge Arizona residents to overlook local politics and come to San Diego just as they always have for its mild climate, beaches and attractions.

Read the whole thing, especially the parts where the Democratic legislators involved are stammering over the alarming revelation that their act of political … ah, ‘auto-eroticism’… actually had adverse consequences in Big-Person Land.  I encourage the San Diego hospitality industry to contemplate the implications of this; and to further contemplate that the solution to their problems with an insulted customer base lies with dealing with the insulters, not the insultees…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.