Do you trust your congressman?

Last updated on: December 4, 2013 at 8:22 am by Jane the Actuary

Do you trust your congressman? 2013-12-04T08:22:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Drudge this morning links to an article in the “Quorum Report” (a site I’d never seen before) claiming that House Speaker John Boehner told “various Texas business interests” that he would schedule immigration votes after the filing deadline for the 2014 elections. In other words, the implication is that he would hold votes only after it was too late for upset citizens to protest by fielding a candidate to primary an amnesty-supporting GOP congressman.

If this is true, this means that there are a lot of Republican congressmen out there who want to vote for amnesty but fear their constituents’ reactions. And, of course, on top of this, the further news is that Boehner’s new Immigration Policy Director is an amnesty supporter coming out of McCain’s staff.

Does Boehner, do these secret amnesty supporters truly believe that we can achieve that promised one-time amnesty, that the aspirational enforcement measures will truly lead to genuine enforcement and end the current situation of, ahem, “undocumented immigrants” working under the table or with a false/stolen ID? If so, they’re so naïve that this alone should disqualify them from office.

Or do they support an unrestricted guest worker program which, in some versions, was claimed to be a permanent solution to the illegal immigrant issue because any prospective immigrant could seek guest worker status? (And anyone who thinks that the guest worker program proposed in the Senate bill had sufficient protections for American workers is also fooling themselves, given that the economic conditions in which guest workers would make sense, low-skilled jobs so plentiful and workers so scarce, that wages skyrocket, are so far removed from our current situation.)

Do these amnesty supporters just want amnesty, plain and simple, and fundamentally don’t care about whether a bargain to reduce future illegal immigration succeeds? And, if so, is it out of personal convictions, believing the arguments about the injustice of the current situation? Is it out of an extreme libertarianism, in which borders should be open and there’s nothing wrong with low/un-skilled American workers being forced to compete with any number of unskilled Mexicans willing to live 10 to a room to send money back home? Is it due to principled support of business interests who want to keep wages low? Or is it to keep the campaign cash flowing from those business supporters?

And — regardless of the reason for their support of amnesty — are there really that many congressmen planning on telling their constituents one thing and, ultimately, voting the other way in hopes of short voter memories?

Hence, the title of this post. Who are these congressmen? Not mine — she’s a Democrat who’s very open about amnesty. Are there a cadre of GOP congressmen who, like the pro-life Democrats from conservative districts who lost their elections after they voted for ObamaCare with its fig-leaf abortion-related protections, want to vote for amnesty but need to play dirty politics to hide their intentions from their own constituents? And if so, should they be pre-emptively primaried?

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