While it’s hard to believe that Democrats could be any further on the wrong side of the immigration issue, Majority Leader Harry Reid recently managed to insult the ethnic group at the heart of the debate. “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, OK,” Reid said at a campaign stop on Tuesday. “Do I need to say more?” The Nevada senator apparently assumes that Americans of Hispanic descent should consider border security issues in a strictly racial light, rather than in terms of color-blind, consistent law enforcement and national sovereignty. Reid couldn’t be more wrong.
Perhaps the senator had a recent CNN poll in mind. That poll showed that three-quarters of Americans of Hispanic descent do not support Arizona’s immigration law, SB-1070. Given all of the disinformation that liberals like Reid have spread about non-existent racial-profiling contained in the Arizona law, that result is not surprising. Of greater interest is the fact that about two-thirds of Hispanic Americans said they favor tighter control of the U.S.-Mexico border and also want more officers patrolling it. Thus, while Hispanics may not support Arizona’s particular response to the problem of illegal immigration, it’s clear that they recognize that the problem exists and needs serious fixing. Given that reality, Reid’s patronizing, polarizing and insulting remarks rank alongside his declaration that the war in Iraq was lost as one of the greatest gaffes in a career that has been full of embarrassing moments.
Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles who is the Republican candidate for the Senate in Florida, certainly thought so. In an interview with Fox News, Rubio called Reid’s remarks “ridiculous” and called out both Reid and the Majority Leader’s party. “This kind of outrageous speech in politics is continuing to spread,” Rubio said. “You know, Americans of Hispanic descent, you know what the strongest issue there is? That is economic empowerment, upward mobility. There’s only one economic system in the world that that’s possible in, time and again, and that’s the American free enterprise system. And the reason why Americans of Hispanic descent should be Republicans is because the Democratic leadership is trying to dismantle the American free enterprise system.”
The hypocrisy of liberals like Reid on racial issues has become almost impossible to hide. They claim to long for a color-blind society – a goal the vast majority of conservatives and libertarians share, whether Reid and his colleagues have the courage to acknowledge that fact or not – yet they inject racial divisions into political debate whenever they can. This liberal tactic is growing ever more transparent. Whenever a difficult issue comes up, they rush to play the race card. The problem with that approach is that they can only play so many of those cards before people begin to catch on to the fact that liberal Democrats are trying to stack the deck in order to avoid the debate.
State by state, America is starting to catch on to the game that Democrats have been playing for decades. Florida and Virginia are the latest states to emulate Arizona, if not exactly in form then certainly in intent. Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, the GOP candidate for Governor in the Sunshine State, co-authored a bill that targets illegal immigration and, according to McCollum, the bill has been crafted so as to have a better chance of surviving a court challenge than SB-1070. “Florida will not be a sanctuary state for illegal aliens,“ McCollum said in a written statement. Florida’s proposal follows a ruling issued by Virginia State Attorney Ken Cuccinelli last week saying that police in the Old Dominion can ask people about their immigration status during routine stops. The cause of states’ rights has lain largely dormant for 150 years, but the Obama administration’s passive-aggressive approach to expanding federalism has reignited the issue. In the 1860s the question was decided by bullets and brawn. A century and a half later, the battlefield involves ballots and briefs. No matter; the conflict is as heated as ever.
What makes America different – what has always made America different – is the primacy of the rule of law. We are not, in theory anyway, a nation governed by the whims of a ruling elite, but by the recorded intentions of our duly elected representatives. Liberals have been increasingly schizophrenic when it comes to applying that basic principle. If a supposedly evil corporate citizen is involved, then the most perfunctory of transgressions involving the most obscure details of legally executed statutes deserves, in their minds, the harshest of penalties. Yet, if a favored, potential voting-bloc runs afoul of some part of the same body of law, then actually enforcing the laws that the majority of Americans have agreed to enforce somehow becomes a form of discrimination.
Liberals divide the world between “victims” and the “elite.” Reid’s skeptical, insulting comments about illegal immigration clearly demonstrate that he desperately hopes to lure Americans of Hispanic heritage into the “victims” sphere and that they will thus adopt Democrats as their duly-appointed rescuers. His statement demands subservience, although Reid clearly isn’t capable of understanding that. November 2010 may knock some sense into Democratic heads, but one doubts Harry Reid will absorb the lesson, whether he is still employed in public service or not.
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