Newt Gingrich was on Fox News Sunday last weekend,
pointing out some obvious things. “The people are sending a
message,” he said, and Congress — Republicans and Democrats —
ignored it at their peril. He pointed to the Senate compromise
immigration bill as being completely out of touch with the American
people. “Border security, a test for citizenship, an English
language requirement — these are 80 percent polling issues.”
As usual when he plays the role of educator, gadfly, and
political entrepreneur, Newt’s right. (When it comes to running a
political business, like Congress, that’s another matter.) On the
emotional issue of illegal immigration, a mute gap stands between
the people and their elected — and unelected — leaders. Chris
Wallace of Fox News Sunday himself, his establishmentarian
lineage unparalleled, told Boston talk show host Howie Carr a week
ago that “the whole immigration thing” meant almost nothing to him.
Carr pressed him. (Wallace appears on the show for 15 minutes every
Friday.) No, Wallace assured him blandly, he didn’t care about 12
million illegal immigrants.
“What does it have to do with me?” Wallace asked.
Conventional wisdom in a situation like that predicts a
backlash, as indeed Gingrich did, as voters rise up in fury and
chop off a whole political class at the knees. One such backlash
happened in 1994, when Gingrich engineered the Republican takeover
of the House of Representatives. But the most portentous backlash
in recent political history took place in 1978 in California, when
the voters, led by the marvelously irritating Howard Jarvis and his
co-sponsor Paul Gann, passed Proposition 13 to limit property taxes
and tax increases. A wave of such initiatives followed, setting the
stage for the Reagan revolution on taxes.
ONLY PROBLEM IS, POLITICIANS HATE BACKLASHES. And they have done
everything in their power to eliminate the possibility. State
redistricting conferences, which ostensibly promote more wins for
candidates of the majority party, actually see pols of both sides
horse trading as they draw district lines to assure that no
incumbent need ever lose. That’s what made Gingrich’s revolution so
remarkable. Hardly any House seats ever change hands. And it’s
world-shaking news when an incumbent Senator loses.
Recent legislation has made political insurgency even harder.
The McCain-Feingold law actually put the First Amendment into play
— just another loophole, as George Will trenchantly put it. And
now Republicans have begun to play the same game by limiting
contributions to 527s.
Most of all, politicians hate initiatives. They will look for
any way around them. If they can’t get an irksome initiative struck
down by the courts, as often happens in California and Arizona,
they’ll simply ignore the law, the way they do in Massachusetts.
Those examples I cited involve, interestingly, immigration-related
laws: Benefits for immigrants in California, an English requirement
in Arizona, and the abolition of bilingual ed in Massachusetts.
SO GRANT ALL THIS: That elite opinion and mass opinion are
completely split on immigration, that a restrictionist-enforcement
approach to immigration, both legal and illegal, enjoys the 80
percent support in the polls that Newt Gingrich cites, that people
are angry, and that the country is arguably in danger, at least
culturally, from a flood of immigrants that overwhelms our ability
to absorb citizens. How is the widely predicted and seemingly
inevitable backlash going to happen?
There is no national ballot initiative provision. Can enough
candidates for Congress arise and run on hawkish immigration
platforms to shift the balance of power? The most likely way for
the issue to come to the fore, with an immigration hawk running in
a Presidential election (not just the primaries), portends
disaster, if that candidate is a Republican (Tom Tancredo). It
would split the Republican vote, Perot-like, and put a plurality
Democrat in office. I can’t imagine any Democrat doing it.
Military planners look first to logistics, it is said. You can
only do what you can do, or, as Donald Rumsfeld put it, you go to
war with the army you have. With the political forces we have, the
immigration battle may not only not be able to be won, it may not
be possible even to fight it.
