The Least Surprising Story Of The Day

You're kidding. Unpossible!

I love it when the super-savvy Presiding Geniuses of Tiger Beat On The Potomac pretend to be as shocked as the rest of us plebes that many of their regular dinner companions, and many of the people who help them Win The Morning, really are the obstructionist vandals that people who almost never Win The Morning keep saying that they are.

In private conversations, top Republicans on Capitol Hill now predict comprehensive immigration reform will die a slow, months-long death in the House. Like with background checks for gun buyers, the conventional wisdom that the party would never kill immigration reform, and risk further alienating Hispanic voters, was always wrong - and ignored the reality that most House Republicans are white conservatives representing mostly white districts.

From this, one might conclude that the Republican party is the White People's Party, but that won't Win you a Morning. This latter was a phenomenon deliberately created in the states, and heavily financed by the sugar daddies of the right, that somehow eluded the Presiding Geniuses until just now. The Republican party, root and branch, has been hell-bent on dementia since the nasty-ass NCPAC campaigns of the late 1970's, since it embraced the Bible-bangers as an auxiliary field operation, and probably since it decided to take into itself the spavined refugees of the American apartheid state in the 1960's. These were the prion diseases that began eating the party's brains from the inside out, and from long before there were Mornings to Win. I mean, you had to go Behind The Curtain to notice this? When did you both come out of the coma?

Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) held a town meeting last week where 25 of the 100 people spoke out on immigration - and every single one of them argued for staying clear of anything remotely resembling the Senate-passed bill..."Our constituents don't trust our government," Cotton said. And he is reluctant to pass even pieces of immigration reform that he thinks are needed - like a better tracking system for people in the country on visas - because he is concerned they could become "a Trojan horse in a conference committee for a package that puts legalization first and enforcement later." Top Republican and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill see the momentum swinging decidedly against getting a deal this Congress. Rubio persuaded only 13 fellow Republican senators to back the bill; the editors of the National Review and Weekly Standard offered a rare, joint editorial in opposition to it this week; and private GOP headcounts show only a small fraction of House Republicans would ever vote for anything approximating the Senate deal.

That a wingnut rookie like Tom Cotton is quoted at length in a piece like this is a demonstration of the steadily encroaching dementia.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a leader of the House's hell-no-on-immigration-reform caucus, held a jam-packed meeting Monday night to walk through why his party should proudly defeat the bipartisan bill. King said the Senate's immigration plan would help "elites who want cheap labor, Democratic power brokers, and those who hire illegal labor." "It would hurt Republicans, and I don't think you can make an argument otherwise," King said. "Two out of every three of the new citizens would be Democrats." Some might dismiss this as the rantings of a bombastic right-winger - but his take is mainstream theology among House Republicans.

Most of whom are bombastic right-wingers, and as nutty as a Christmas fruitcake besides. If one of the two major political parties we have is letting Steve King drive the train on a crucial issue, the country is well and truly fked, and this would be a far bigger story than immigration reform is.

Most House Republicans quite frankly don't care. First, most represent districts with scant Hispanic populations. They will win or lose based on the views of whites, especially older ones, since that is who votes in their districts in off-year elections. "The belief among House Republicans is that they're going to do well in the midterms, and that instead of negotiating now from a position of weakness, they should wait until 2015," said a lobbyist close to House GOP leaders. "They'll be stronger in the House and maybe control the Senate." Second, most Republicans in the House and Senate just don't believe Hispanics will vote for them in 2014, 2016 and perhaps ever - simply because they backed immigration reform. "You don't change demographic support by passing legislation in Washington," a Senate GOP leadership aide said. "The [George W. Bush] prescription drug plan was supposed to fundamentally alter the way seniors related to us. The only way you get that is with the candidate, like Ronald Reagan with blue-collar voters."

Seniors didn't move because C-Plus Augustus kept talking about privatizing Social Security, and because Paul Ryan talked about voucherizing Medicare, and because he is a zombie-eyed granny starver, besides. Reagan's appeal to "blue-collar Democrats" almost completely hinged on blaming the loss of industrial jobs on mooching black welfare queens and their Cadillacs, in which they drove their young bucks to buy steaks with "your" tax dollars. Which rather brings us back to the original problem again.

But, the obvious Republican problems with race aside, the problem with the piece is that it begins with the premise that the Republicans in Congress, and especially in the House, ever had any intention to help govern the country in any real fashion. This is a fundamental error in which you must be complicit, if you ever plan to Win The Morning again.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below