Republican Anti-Immigration Filibuster Is Defeated 82-15. What's Next?

Will the immigration reform battle sink any of these ships?

Yesterday just over a dozen motley racists-- all Republicans-- voted against shutting down Jefferson Beauregard Session III's filibuster of the comprehensive immigration bill. These were the 15 bigots:

• John Barrasso (R-WY)
• John Boozman (R-AR)
• Mike Crapo (R-ID)
• Ted Cruz (R-TX)
• Mike Enzi (R-WY)
• Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
• Jim Inhofe (R-OK)
• Mark Kirk (R-IL)
• Mike Lee (R-UT)
• Jim Risch (R-ID)
• Pat Roberts (R-KS)
• Tim Scott (R-SC)
• Jefferson B. Sessions III (KKK-AL)
• Richard Shelby (R-AL)
• David Vitter (R-LA)

That's the good news. But it's not the end of the story... not even in the Senate. The Republicans have all kinds of tricks up their collective sleeves to water down and derail the bill. Miss McConnell was one of the Republican senators who voted to shut down the filibuster, but he warned not to interpret that as meaning he favors meaningful immigration reform. He doesn't. "As an elected leader in my party," McConnell lisped just before the vote, "it’s my view that we at least need to try to improve a situation that as far as I can tell very few people believe is working well either for our own citizens, or for those around the world who aspire to become Americans. I’ll vote to debate it and for the opportunity to amend it, but in the days ahead there will need to be major changes to this bill if it’s going to become law." John Cornyn voted "yes" as well-- and he has a poison pill in the works he hopes will derail the whole bill by requiring significantly higher thresholds of border control before the bill’s “trigger” kicks in allowing undocumented immigrants to move toward citizenship.

Marco Rubio, a GOP presidential aspirant who has been taking a bad beating from the party's Know Nothing base, helped write the bill but is now trying to be seen by the Know Nothings as being against it (while he courts Latino voters and hopes they see him in their corner; the guy's a mess). He is being given the credit for getting Mark Kirk, usually viewed as a mainstream conservative, to vote with the extremists and racists against the bill yesterday. He tried the same thing with Kelly Ayotte, who rebuffed his clownish efforts. His latest trick is to offer an amendment that requires immigrants speak English before they even get permanent residency, quite the departure from American history and traditions.

I lived overseas for almost seven years after college, and for nearly four of those years I worked at the Kosmos, an international youth and meditation center in Amsterdam. The Kosmos was a virtual Tower of Babel. People weren't just speaking Dutch, they were speaking English, German, French, Italian, 4 different Scandinavian languages, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic and Chinese. Luckily for Americans, English was the official lingua franca of the establishment, the one common language everyone used to communicating with everyone else outside of their own group. Whew!

But over the course of my stay in Amsterdam and my travels through Europe, Africa and Asia, I noticed something else about language. Americans-- and only Americans (so not Canadians or Brits)-- would get uptight when other people spoke their native language, sometimes really uptight. It was no big deal for German's to hear people speaking French or Spanish or even for Dutch people-- and it was, after all, their country-- to hear everyone speaking English. But Americans... it was scary. There was a tendency for Americans to get paranoid and be freaked out when they heard other languages. And these were the hippest Americans there were, traveling overland to India or hanging around a meditation center in Holland. There was this predilection for Americans to imagine that if they heard another language, it meant people were talking about them-- or even plotting against them!

Friends of mine in Congress have told me that many Republicans there often brag about having never traveled overseas or even owning a passport... or of even eating "foreign" food. Webster's has a simple definition of xenophobia: "fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign." It's a concept that has found a home in the right-wing psyche and the Republican party worldview. I wonder if Marco Rubio's family spoke English when they fled the right-wing dictatorship of fascist General Fulgencio Batista in 1956 and shoved to the front of the immigration line, settling in Florida. Anti-immigration wing-nut Ted Cruz is also the son of an immigrant. His father, Rafael, fought in Fidel Castro's peasant army that overthrew Batista and later escaped to the U.S. in 1957 with a hundred dollar bill sewn into is underwear. (He became a citizen in 2005.)

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Mainstream Republican Conservatives Battle Tea Party Nihilists In The U.S. Senate

Miss McConnell lays down with the GOP's 3 nihilist psychopaths

A few days ago, television personality Bill Maher was musing about the idea of Texas teabagger Ted Cruz running for president. Maher is certain that it's inevitable, pointing out that Cruz has "Newt Gingrich's ambition and ego mixed with the steely-eyed focus of a serial killer." Good description! And he added that Cruz has been "totally unwilling to compromise with liberals on anything, including eating with a knife and fork." NY Times political reporter Jonathan Weisman, might agree, but he takes Cruz more seriously and honed in on how he and a few other Tea Party Senate freshmen are gumming up the works in that body and forcing people concerned with the smooth function of government to confront deranged right-wing ideological nihilism that veers frighteningly close to outright fascism. And this is all inside the Senate GOP caucus!

In full view of C-Span cameras trained on the floor this week, Senators John McCain of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine jousted with a new generation of conservatives-- Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky-- over the party’s refusal to allow the Senate to open budget talks with the House despite Senate Republicans’ long call for Democrats to produce a budget.

It was the Old Guard versus the Tea Party, but with real ramifications, as Congress careens toward another debt limit and spending crisis this fall with seemingly no one at the steering wheel. The newer members say negotiations should go forward only with a binding precondition that a budget deal cannot raise the government’s statutory borrowing limit.

“I have tremendous respect for this institution,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview on Friday. “But I’m not all that interested in the way things have always been done around here.”

Republicans made the failure of Senate Democrats to pass a budget a central talking point in the 2012 campaign, going so far this year as to pass legislation withholding Congressional pay if budgets were not approved this spring. Now, some Republicans say the fact that members of their own party are standing in the way of a House-Senate conference committee undermines their fiscal message.

“This to me is an issue of integrity,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee. “We’ve pressed for a budget. We ought to go to conference.”

But the budget hawks have not budged, and they have even taken aim at their party in strikingly critical language.

“Here is the dirty little secret about some of those on the right side of the aisle,” Mr. Cruz said of his fellow Republicans. “There are some who would very much like to cast a symbolic vote against raising the debt ceiling and nonetheless allow our friends on the left side of the aisle to raise the debt ceiling. That, to some Republicans, is the ideal outcome.”

Mr. McCain called the demands of his Republican colleagues “absolutely out of line and unprecedented.” The Senate passed the budget before dawn on March 23 after a grueling all-night session, he noted, saying it was time to try to reach a final deal with the House in a negotiating conference.

“Will this deliberative body, whether it is the greatest in the world or the worst in the world, go ahead and decide on this issue, so we can at least tell the American people we are going to do what we haven’t done for four years and what every family in America sooner or later has to do-- and that is to have a budget?” he asked. Although few of Mr. McCain’s colleagues took to the floor to join him, many have expressed similar views.

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Republican leadership, said that at this point, resistance had to give.

“I suspect senators have held back long enough on the decision to go to conference,” he said.

...House Republicans had envisioned a plan to reach a comprehensive deficit reduction deal predicated on a showdown in July over the debt ceiling. That showdown was supposed to drive both sides back to the bargaining table, but a rapidly falling deficit, rising tax payments and huge infusions of cash from the newly profitable, federally controlled home financing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have scrambled those plans. Now, the debt ceiling may not have to be raised until October or November, in the next fiscal year.

Before then, unless a budget deal can be struck, Congress must pass bills to finance the government based on very different guidelines in the House- and Senate-passed plans. The House Appropriations Committee will have to draft a bill financing labor, health and education programs at $121.8 billion, a 19 percent cut from current levels even after the across-the-board cuts took effect. The bill to finance the Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency cannot exceed $24.2 billion, down 15 percent from the current levels after the cuts.

“There is not a member of our committee, Republican or Democrat, who is happy with these numbers,” said Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for the committee.

The Senate has no intention of swallowing those cuts, so unless budget negotiators can meet and reach a deal, Congress will be headed back toward a crisis come Sept. 30, said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the Senate Budget Committee chairwoman.

“They could create crisis by having a government shutdown or holding everything back until November and threatening a debt default. That would be to their political detriment,” Ms. Murray said. “I think the American people have had it with that kind of hostage-taking.”

Cruz may be the ringleader of mindless nihilism but his rivals for the worthless 2016 presidential nomination, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio can't cede the far right fringe of the party-- which completely controls the nominating stage in most states-- to get out ahead of them on the crackpot ideas the Hate Talk Radio-brainedwashed base loves so much. Rubio, in fact, claims he could be the last man standing on preventing a majority in the Senate to move forward. “I’m not sure this is an issue I can ever change my opinion on,” he said. Already grievously damaged in the eyes of the extremist for his collaboration with Democrats on comprehensive immigration reform-- which is vehemently opposed by the Canadian-borm Cuban from Texas, Cruz and which the Hate Talkers only refer to as "amnesty"-- Rubio is looking for an opportunity to be seen taking a kamakazi-like stand on behalf of... Alex Jones and Glenn Beck fans. He'll find Ted Cruz and Rand Paul already have those folks sewn up. Their grandstanding is pushing Harry Reid towards a Senate rule change that would allow for a majority vote-- something so detested by the demented Cruz-- which would deflate the Senate Republicans' ability to obstruct government to further their ideological and narrow partisan agenda.

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New York GOP: Cruzin' For A Bruisin'

I know that the New York State Republican Party had a golden age... but it wasn't during the 20 years I lived in New York-- nor in the decades since. Currently there isn't one statewide Republican elected official-- nor has there been one since George Pataki. Last month, NY blogger Morgan Pehme summed up the party's dilemma pretty well.

Election Day in 2012 was one of the bleakest in the history of the New York State Republican Party.

Propelled by an Obama landslide in New York—the president’s best showing in any state except Vermont and Hawaii-- the Democrats trounced their opposition all the way down the ballot.

Kirsten Gillibrand, once considered one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the U.S. Senate, amassed a startling 72 percent of the vote, the highest percent total of any statewide candidate in New York history. At the same time, Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, a Tea Party darling, was drummed out of office, Rep. Nan Hayworth was defeated in a stunner, and Rep. Tom Reed, who was expected to cruise to re-election, only narrowly staved off a strong challenge from his previously unknown opponent.

In the state Legislature, the story was just as dreary. Despite the Vito Lopez scandal that had wounded Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the Democrats rolled to victory in the lower chamber, regaining the “veto-proof” supermajority they had lost in 2010. And in the Senate, long the lone bright spot statewide for the GOP, the Republicans lost their pure majority, watching much ballyhooed candidates like Sean Hanna and Bob Cohen go down in flames, and even, after a razor-thin recount, George Amedore, for whom the party had gerrymandered the newly created 63rd Senate seat specifically for him to win.

In the devastating aftermath, a host of political observers declared the state Republican Party dead-- or at least on life support.

As Baruch College professor Doug Muzzio put it to the Daily News, “It is not extinct, but it is comatose.”

Beyond the results of Election Day, there was-- and continues to be-- ample reason to draw this conclusion. With the party suffering from a registration deficit statewide that has grown to a gaping 2.5-to-1 in favor of the Democrats, the last time the Republican nominee for president prevailed in New York was 1984, when Ronald Reagan swept every state in the union save for Walter Mondale’s home turf of Minnesota.

...In many ways, things have never looked worse for the state Republican Party-- once a breeding ground for giants like Teddy Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia, Thomas Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits.

“We have hit rock bottom,” laments New York City Councilman Eric Ulrich, one of the Republican Party’s promising state Senate candidates who went down to defeat in 2012. “The only place we can go is up.”

Actually not. The state party, according to the conservative NY Daily News could sink New York's Republican Party. Short version: their guest of honor to the annual party dinner is Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Two choices are offered to New York Republican Chairman Ed Cox: Cancel plans to have Texas Sen. Ted Cruz headline the party’s annual dinner or speed the GOP’s long demise in the state. In featuring Cruz as the prime speaker at the May 29 affair, Cox has entered a death embrace with New York’s political Public Enemy No. 1 of the moment.

Cruz represents the unthinking, doctrinaire strain of conservatism that doomed Mitt Romney’s electoral chances, such as they were, and threatened to alienate Republicans from key voting blocs, including Cruz’s fellow Hispanics.

He will be toxic to any hope that New York’s GOP might regain even slight relevance.

In the wake of the Newtown massacre, Cruz threatened to filibuster any and all reasonable gun control measures, up to and including background checks for purchases at gun shows.

With breathtaking callousness, he called the families of Newtown victims-- those mothers and fathers wrenched with pain-- “political props” for the Obama administration because many of them had stepped up to petition Congress for legislation aimed at stemming gun violence.

After superstorm Sandy devastated New York and New Jersey, Cruz voted against federal recovery funding, calling the urgently needed aid package “wasteful.”

This was typical of the GOP response, which prompted Long Island Republican Rep. Pete King to scream that his fellow legislators were “more and more taking on this anti-Northeast attitude.”

King followed up Tuesday, saying of Cruz: “He went out of his way to attack New York on the bill. It’s a little early to forgive and forget.”

King continued: “There were really false and phony charges made against the Sandy aid, and if Ted Cruz had prevailed, my constituents would be homeless.”

Extra bonus for hypocrisy-- after that fertilizer plant explosion leveled much of West, Tex., Cruz had the gall to demand that the federal government devote “all available resources” to help the stricken area.

Now, he is fighting to sink the bipartisan immigration reform plan that’s searching for support in Congress; he wants a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants to be “taken off the table.”

Let’s review the vital stats of the state party as led by Cox.

Having hemorrhaged clout for years, the GOP holds not a single statewide office.

Its last foothold in Albany-- control of the state Senate-- hangs by the slender thread of alliances with renegade Democrats.

More embarrassing still, two ranking Republican officials in the city have been indicted on charges of trying to rig the mayoral primary-- diminishing the party’s shot at winning City Hall.

Whether this Tea Partyer-in-chief will sell many tickets to Cox’s $1,000-a-plate dinner ($5,000 for a photo opportunity) at the Grand Hyatt remains to be seen. But scrounging to fill the organization’s depleted coffers will come at the price of branding the party and its candidates as pariahs.

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Does Your Heart Break For The Congressional Republican Leadership?

Yesterday there was a flurry of speculation that Texas' radical right extremist Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada and is ineligible to serve, would run for president in 2016. Intensely disliked and mistrusted in his own caucus, there are probably plenty of Republicans-- cognizant that no one is going to beat Hillary Clinton anyway-- who would be happy to see Cruz run, lose and be gone from the Senate. But 2016 isn't going to be a good year for Senate Republicans anyway. They have a lot of vulnerable seats to defend. A Ted Cruz candidacy would positively kill them.

Oh, Dick Shelby (R-AL), Mike Lee (R-UT), Jerry Moran (R-KS), John Thune (R-SD), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), John Boozman (R-AR) and whichever crackpots they run in Oklahoma and South Carolina are probably safe. But there is likely to be an open Republican seat in Arizona (McCain) and Cruz on the top of the ticket is likely to shave between 5 and 10 points off these incumbents:

• Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)
• Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
• Marco Rubio (R-FL)
• Ron Johnson (R-WI)
• Rob Portman (R-OH)
• Pat Toomey (R-PA)
• Richard Burr (R-NC)
• Mark Kirk (R-IL)

Cruz on top of the ticket could also jeopardize reelection prospects for Rand Paul (R-KY), David Vitter (R-LA), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Dan Coats (R-IN). So... yeah, go, Ted, go! It could be historic.

Meanwhile, the House Republicans-- who would also suffer, though less so because of gerrymandered districts-- are undergoing a painful civil war between conservatives and neo-fascists. Jake Sherman at Politico would rather just describe it as chaos. The zombies are restless.

The GOP leadership is dealing with an unprecedented level of frustration in running the House, according to conversations with more than a dozen aides and lawmakers in and around leadership. Leadership is talking past each other. The conference is split by warring factions. And influential outside groups are fighting them.

The chaos has led to a sense of stalemate for House Republicans, who have been in the majority since 2011.

“There’s so much stuff happening up here that sometimes, you don’t pay attention to some of the more intricate details of something until it comes right to you,” said Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a GOP whip from Georgia.

Speaker John Boehner, Cantor and McCarthy are plagued by a conference split into two groups. In one camp are stiff ideologues who didn’t extract any lesson from Mitt Romney’s loss and are only looking to slash spending and defund President Barack Obama’s health care law at every turn. In the other are lawmakers who are aligned with Cantor, who is almost singularly driving an agenda which is zeroed in on family issues.

Boehner seems more focused on passing big pieces of legislation like hiking the debt ceiling and extending government funding, sometimes drawing flak for having to rely on Democrats to move these bills over the finish line.

The House simply isn’t interested in the agendas being pushed by the president and Democratic Senate. Most Republicans aren’t looking for a big legislative push on gun control. GOP leaders are skeptical that they can arrive at a framework to negotiate a budget agreement with Senate Democrats. And tax reform and an immigration overhaul, while broadly supported, are still seen as long shots.

Members of leadership have trouble staying on the same page. Cantor is anxious to move on his agenda, but McCarthy needs to gather support in a House Republican Conference that’s filled with lawmakers constantly divided on leadership’s priorities.

...House Republicans have had worse days-- they had to abandon a tax plan pushed by Boehner in December, which was followed by a gaggle of rank-and-file members trying to prevent Boehner from serving a second term as speaker.

But the continued internal struggles illustrate a miniature picture of chaos. Despite all of House Republicans’ efforts to plot, plan and strategize to shift a divided Washington in their favor, hurdles have been difficult to avoid.

...With all the moving pieces, flubs on the floor and leadership intrigue, Chocola says he wonders why there are no challenges to the current leadership structure.

“I just think that the more kind of interesting thing to me is that even though there’s been some hiccups, there’s been violations of the Hastert rule, pulling things like [Boehner’s tax plan], to this, there’s like no opposition,” he said. “There’s no one that you hear about that will challenge current leadership. It’s assumed everyone will go up a step with Cantor and McCarthy. I’m not instigating it-- you never hear of any rumblings to the leadership.”

Steve Benen makes the case that it's even worse than that-- broken and beyond repair. "It's ugly," he wrote, "and it's getting worse... Clearly House Republicans are divided against themselves. There's no meaningful leadership; no interest in cooperation or compromise; and post-policy nihilism rules the day. The demise of Cantor's health care bill was a reminder that House Republicans will reject their own party's policy ideas with nearly the same speed as they'll reject Democratic ideas. For Beltway pundits, the inability of House Republicans to act like a governing caucus is partially President Obama's fault -- if only he'd schmooze with them, form personal relationships, and act like a character in an Aaron Sorkin movie, maybe these radicalized nihilists would be more likely to get something done. But all available evidence suggests the collapse of the House GOP is out of Obama's hands. The House Republican conference is simply broken."

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Ted Cruz vs Chris Van Hollen-- How To Win Friends And Influence People

Ted Cruz wants to make a name for himself as the Senate's biggest douche bag. Fellow Texans Louie Gohmert and Steve Stockman could give him a run for his money in the House, but in the Senate... Cruz is as bad as it gets. I suspect other Republican congressmen don't like being publicly referred to as squishes by this loudmouthed Texas pissant. And outside of Texas, it's not a good idea calling the grieving and sincere parents of the murdered Newtown victims political props.

In his short time at the Capitol, Senator Ted Cruz, a freshman Republican from Texas, has shown little regard for long-standing rules of decorum. But on Friday, he publicly discussed the closed-door dealings of the Senate Republican Conference-- and trashed his colleagues in the process.

Stopping by a Texas meeting of the Tea Party-aligned group FreedomWorks, Mr. Cruz called many of his colleagues “squishes,” forced to stand on conservative principles by the uncompromising stands of a triumphant trio of Republican “constitutionalists”: himself and Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

...“We’ve had probably five or six lunches with a bunch of Republican senators standing up and looking at Rand and Mike and me and yelling at the top of their lungs-- I mean really upset. And they said: ‘Why did you do this? As a result of what you did, when I go home, my constituents are yelling at me that I’ve got to stand on principle.’ I’m not making that up. I don’t even bother to argue with them. I just sort of let them yell.”

Yesterday Maryland Congressman, a member of the Democratic House leadership, also publicly disagreed with his colleagues... although he didn't call anyone names or try to pump up his own stature at their expense the way Cruz did. Van Hollen was one of just a handful of Democrats who voted NO on the FAA sequester fix. Unfairly, I assumed he voted against it-- along with 3 other Marylanders-- because he can commute to work by car and doesn't have to worry about flight delays. But that wasn't the impression he gave the Washington Post's Greg Sargent during an interview yesterday. His thinking was a lot more strategic than selfish.

By agreeing to give the FAA flexibility in implementing the sequester, in response to the outcry over flight delays, Democrats effectively squandered their leverage in the sequester battle, by signaling that they will selectively undo its effects when the political going gets tough. Does that mean they’ve lost the sequester fight completely?

In an interview this morning, Dem Rep. Chris Van Hollen-- a top party strategist-- was surprisingly frank in conceding that Dems had given away crucial leverage by agreeing to the FAA fix. But he said Dems could still make up some of that lost ground-- and called on them not to agree to any more targeted sequester fixes.

“We have certainly made it more difficult to stand firm going forward,” Van Hollen told me. “But we’re going to have to reclaim some lost ground here. We cannot have a situation where people just cherry-pick the sequester.”

Van Hollen bluntly suggested that Dems-- in agreeing to just a targeted FAA fix-- had sent a message about Congress that it’s only responsive to powerful interests.

“If you do that, you’re attacking the symptoms rather than the underlying cause,” Van Hollen said. “When you do that, what happens is the most politically strong groups with the most lobbyists get relief, at the expense of everybody else. Meals on Wheels, or kids on Head Start, or grants on biomedical research-- all of those get left behind.”

...Van Hollen called on Dems to have a united front in this battle going forward, and said they should not agree to any more targeted fixes. “I don’t think we should be voting for exceptions to this,” he said. “We’re going to have to draw a line and say we’ve got to deal with this in a comprehensive way, rather than play Whack-a-Mole.”

“It’s going to be tough,” Van Hollen acknowledged, speaking of the pressure that will be brought to bear on Dems to agree to more targeted fixes. “That’s why it’s going to require a united position and leadership.”

Andy Hounshell is the progressive Democrat in Ohio running against John Boehner-- and he knows how these conservative tricks work. He has a similar view on this that Van Hollen holds. This morning he told us:

"It is nice to see that Congress can agree on something, unfortunately it is something that affects a small percentage of Americans. While I am sure that the inconvenience of flight delays can be troubling to some, it pails in comparison to the cuts to programs that many Americans depend on such as Meals on Wheels. It would be great to see our Representatives sit down and actually deal with the entire budget and sequester rather than hen pick where the pinch of the sequester is going to be felt. It looks like that pinch is going to be felt by the people in this country who can't afford lobbyists. Kids in Head Start and seniors relying on the Meals on Wheels program are the ones who need their Congress right now. It would be nice if their Congress was as worried about them as they are about travel delays for those who are fortunate enough to travel by plane. By plucking out the problems that only affect the affluent, it leaves only the poor and middle class to deal with the pinch of the sequester, and we know how that works out."

If you'd like to help us elect the kinds of progressive strategic thinkers that Van Hollen clearly needs in Congress, well, you can find Andy Hounshell and others with similar views here on the Blue America ActBlue page.

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U.S.A.-- A Country Of Economic Refugees

Not my housekeeper, Juana

My housekeeper, Juana, is from El Salvador. The only way I know she's an American citizen is that we talk about who she's voting for every time elections roll around. Unlike Mitt Romney, I'm not running for office so I have no idea who's on the gardening crew. I know Roberto, the main guy, is American because he was born in L.A. But I'm not sure what the status of his employees are. I suspect the Gang of 8 proposals aren't really meant to make their lives any easier. As Joshua Holland explained in The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy, "the idea that immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, take jobs from the native-born and keep wages low and taxes high is so deeply embedded in our discourse that even many progressive-minded people have come to believe it [and] that people believe immigration plays a much greater role in the plight of many U.S. workers than it actually does." But just because that's a widely-held belief, it doesn't make it true.

Here is the reality: new immigrants (legal or not) have a negative short-term impact on local governments’ fiscal situation, but over the long haul, they contribute more in taxes than they take in services. Immigrant labor may have a negative effect on wages for a small group of Americans, but that’s anything but established, and the positive contributions-- including their contributions to native workers’ wages-- are enjoyed by a much, much larger group of Americans. All of these factors are very small in relation to the economy as a whole, and almost none of the rhetoric about how immigration hurts working people is justified by the data.

...The Corporate Right, which has made strange bedfellows with immigrants’ rights activists in recent years, has pushed a narrative that’s very different from the one embraced by the nativists. Corporate America argues that newly arrived workers take jobs that Americans won’t do. Yet that’s only partially true; many unauthorized immigrants fill nonunion jobs that are impossibly crappy, pay poverty wages, and are rife with workplace violations, and they work those jobs side by side with millions of natives and legal residents. The reality is that there are not enough Americans who are willing or able to tolerate poverty wages and other workplace abuses.

At the same time that spending on immigration enforcement was going through the roof, the resources allocated to enforcing overtime, minimum wage, workplace safety, and other protections for workers were cut and cut again. According to research conducted by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, the number of workplaces that fell within the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor’s wage and hour division more than doubled between 1975 and 2004, and the number of workers in those establishments increased by 55 percent. Yet during that period, the number of inspectors available to enforce basic labor standards declined by 14 percent, and the number of “compliance actions” the agency completed plummeted by more than a third.

Those who advocate more law enforcement to tackle the immigration issue often invoke images of the United States descending into anarchy-- of a nation losing control of its borders and therefore its sovereignty. There is anarchy in America, there is lawlessness, but you’ll find a lot more of it in the kitchen of your favorite diner than along the Rio Grande.

Unfortunately, there’s not much in the way of nationwide data on workplace violations, but we do have a large body of local and state studies, and all point to the same conclusion: they are simply rampant at the lower end of the economy and among vulnerable populations.

Consider the findings of just a few of those studies, as compiled by the Brennan Center:

• A 2004 study of two hundred workers conducted at multiple sites in Fairfax County, Virginia, found that

• 54.6 percent were paid less than agreed on.
• 53.1 percent reported nonpayment for work done.
• 35.6 percent said they’d been victims of racial discrimination.
• 25.8 percent had been given bad checks.
• 16 percent reported that they’d been subject to violence on the job.
• 14.9 percent said they’d received threats from employers.

• A 2002 study of chicken processors found that six in ten plants failed to pay workers overtime.

• In a 1998 study of restaurant workers in Los Angeles, only two out of forty-three establishments complied with basic labor laws.

• A 2005 study of grape pickers in California’s Central Valley found that half of all workers reported pay stubs that reflected less than the total number of hours worked, and half reported that they had not received all of the overtime pay they were owed.

• A 1998 study looking at workers in the restaurant, garment, hotel, and motel industries-- all occupations with large numbers of unauthorized workers-- found that only one in twenty restaurants complied with minimum wage laws and only a third of hotels and motels were in compliance, as were only four of ten shops in the garment industry.

Study after study reported similar findings. And it bears repeating: although these illegal jobs are clustered in industries in which many unauthorized workers toil, millions of legal immigrants and U.S. citizens work those same jobs and are also victims of widespread employer abuses. According to one 2003 study, the percentage of workers being ripped off via minimum wage violations is not that much lower for natives than it is for immigrants-- 13 percent versus 9 percent among women and 9 percent versus 6 percent among men.

Most of the focus of the immigration debate in this country has been on the immigrants themselves, especially unauthorized immigrants. But very little attention is paid to the other side of the transaction: the incentives that U.S. companies and households have to hire an unauthorized worker over a citizen.

For one thing, enforcement efforts rarely target employers. As the Washington Post noted, while “federal immigration authorities arrested nearly four times as many people at workplaces in 2007 as they did in 2005... only 92 owners, supervisors or hiring officials were arrested in an economy that includes 6 million companies that employ more than 7 million unauthorized workers. Only 17 firms faced criminal fines or other forfeitures.” Those raids devastate workers’ families, but they represent little more than an inconvenience to employers, who have little reason to improve working conditions when they can hire new employees who are just as easy to exploit.

Illegal immigrants sell their labor on a black market that’s similar in many ways to those for other illicit goods and services, such as the drug trade. The sellers’ incentives are well-understood: the lion’s share of those who have moved to the United States in the last decade are economic refugees, fleeing home countries where they can’t eke out a dignified life. Human traffickers, who can realize enormous profits from shipping people across national boundaries, provide for the market; their incentives, again, are well-understood.

The buyers, of course, are Americans-- and not only corporate America. Middle-class households and many small firms use illegal labor, but their side of the transaction goes largely undiscussed. Without looking at both sides of the coin-- demand, as well as supply-- it’s impossible to arrive at a reform agenda that can result in an effective, humane, and sustainable system of immigration control.

An unregulated sector of the economy, rife with illegal jobs, is the largely unexamined “pull factor” for much of the (low-skilled) immigration to the United States. Most recent immigrants work at jobs that fall somewhere between what’s available in their native countries and the kind of jobs one would expect to find in a highly advanced economy. They also tend to be jobs that can’t be easily outsourced to countries with an abundance of cheap labor.

A good example of these kinds of jobs can be found in New York City, where the cost of living is among the highest in the country. A report in Crain’s New York Business News found that in underregulated New York restaurants, green grocers, retail corner laundries, and private households, “Typically, workers will be quoted a flat weekly salary of $300 and then have to work 60 hours a week, receiving an effective wage of $5 an hour with no provision for overtime.”36 New York State’s minimum wage was $7.15 per hour, and federal and state laws require overtime pay for any hours worked over forty per week.

In order to create a sustainable model for immigration control, we need to look at decreasing the demand for workers who are willing to fill those jobs. This means breaking Americans’ addiction to exploitable labor. As long as there are $5-per-hour jobs in New York City that few natives can afford to work, and millions of workers who don’t have jobs that pay that much in poorer countries, we’ll have a large number of people who want to migrate to our shores. As long as our immigration system doesn’t permit enough of them to migrate legally, we’ll have an “illegal immigration problem.” It’s simply the law of supply and demand at work.

Yet it’s not true that all unauthorized immigrants work those kinds of jobs. There’s no question that employers are sometimes legitimately unable to find citizens or legal residents to fill even decent jobs. That’s especially true in rural communities, where young people tend to take off for the big city and the population is aging and in decline. In 2007, I spoke with Oklahoma state senator Harry Coates soon after his state passed one of the most restrictive immigration laws in the nation. Employers in Oklahoma weren’t only having problems filling low-paying “McJobs,” he told me. “In the oil fields, they’re paying $18 to $20 per hour to start,” he said, “but they can’t find enough willing workers to fill the jobs. We’ve told our young people to work with their minds, not with their hands.” Coates added, “We’ve shot ourselves in the foot by running off willing workers for willing employers.”

Progressive immigration and workplace reform would focus our enforcement resources on cleaning up the bottom end of the labor market: on the jobs that bring people to our shores, rather than on the immigrants who work them. Guaranteeing workers-- immigrant and native alike-- the right to organize and enforcing wage and overtime laws would equalize the price of hiring unauthorized and legal workers and would go a long way toward addressing the demand for illegal labor without the ugliness of raids and deportations.

Once the goal of eliminating substandard and often illegal jobs-- un-American jobs-- from the U.S. workplace is accomplished, there would be far less resistance to new workers coming in to fill jobs that can’t be staffed by Americans. Public opinion research shows that when people perceive the economy to be functioning well for them, much of the anxiety over immigration disappears.

Instead we get a bigoted, right-wing ideologue like Ted Cruz sitting on the Judiciary Committee's Immigration, Refugees and Border Security subcommittee singing tunes for his Know Nothing base:

Cruz Claimed Obama Wants Immigration Reform Bill To “Crater” So Democrats Can Use It As “A Political Wedge.” According to Ted Cruz in an interview with the Dallas Morning News, “[Obama’s] behavior concerning immigration leads me to believe that what he wants is a political issue rather than actually to pass a bill. What he wants is for the bill to crater, so that he can use the issue as a political wedge in 2014 and 2016. That is why I believe the president is insisting on a path to citizenship for those who are here illegally. Because by insisting on that, he ensures that any immigration reform bill will be voted down in the House.” [Dallas Morning News, 3/24/13]

Cruz: “I Do Not Support The Dream Act And Categorically Oppose Amnesty.” In an interview with the blog Conservatives in Action published on Cruz’s campaign website, Cruz said, “I do not support the Dream Act and categorically oppose amnesty. I categorically oppose amnesty and I strongly support legal immigration for those that have followed the rules and come here to pursue the American dream.” [TedCruz.org, 7/18/11]

Cruz: “End Benefits Like In-State Tuition For Illegal Aliens.” According to the Texas Tribune, Ted Cruz said, “We need leaders who will get serious about enforcing the border: triple the border patrol; use walls, fences, and technology; end sanctuary cities; repeal Obama’s newly ordered amnesty; and end benefits like in-state tuition for illegal aliens." [Texas Tribune, 6/25/12]

Cruz Called On Romney To End Obama’s “Deferred Action” Policy Toward Young Undocumented Immigrants. According to the Huffington Post, “Ted Cruz, a Republican senatorial candidate from Texas, said Monday he thinks presidential candidate Mitt Romney should end President Barack Obama's deferred action policy, going beyond Romney's line that he doesn't need to because he'll fix the problem quickly through Congress. Asked by Telemundo whether Romney should reinstate deportations of young people granted deferred action, Cruz said, ‘I do.’ ‘I think it is without authority, and we're a nation of rule of law, and it is not defending anyone's freedom to be undermining rule of law,’ he said of President Obama'sJune announcement that his administration would grant work authorizations and deferred action-- reprieve from deportation concerns for two years-- to some undocumented young people.” [Huffington Post, 8/28/12]

Cruz Attacked Primary Opponent’s Support For Guest Worker Program. According to Fox News Latino, “Cruz went on the offensive against Dewhurst on illegal immigration-- a key issue in the state that shares the longest stretch of U.S.-Mexico border-- calling attention to Dewhurst’s 2007 support of a guest worker program for the state’s undocumented immigrants, announced at a speech in South Texas. Cruz called the guest worker idea more expansive than President Obama’s decision to call off deportations for immigrants without criminal records who came here illegally as children-- a policy that Cruz opposes and called ‘illegal.’” [Fox News Latino, 7/18/12]

Cruz Supported Border Wall, Including Possibility Of Confiscating Private Property. According to Fox News Latino, “Cruz also distinguished himself from Dewhurst with his full-throated support for a border wall estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to cost $7.3 billion, or $6.5 million per mile. Cruz defended the border wall proposal even if it meant expropriating private property-- a position that the debate’s moderators, WFAA reporter Brad Watson and Gromer Jeffers of the Dallas Morning News, said contrasted with Cruz’s message of fiscal conservatism. ‘One of the specific powers and responsibilities of the federal government is to secure the borders,’ Cruz said. ‘Property can be taken with due process of law and just compensation.’” [Fox News Latino, 7/18/12]

Cruz Criticized Idea Of Providing Green Cards To Unauthorized Immigrants. According to the Washington Examiner, “Sen. Ted Cruz signaled yesterday on FOX News that he was concerned about allowing illegal immigrants to get a green card-- reportedly part of the Gang of Eight Senate bill for immigration reform. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., supports the idea of allowing illegal immigrants to apply for a green card after a 10-year wait. ‘The problem with the green card is the green card is a permanent legal residence status, and anyone who has a green card is eligible for citizenship within five years,’ Cruz explained to FOX News host Sean Hannity. ‘And so, if someone can get a green card, that is a path to citizenship.’” [Washington Examiner, 4/2/13]

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Ted Cruz's NRA Filibuster Crushed

The failed filibusterers

With only two conservative Democrats caving to NRA pressure-- Mark Pryor (AR) and Mark Begich (AK)-- but with 16 Republicans agreeing that there should at least be a debate on gun safety, the Senate ended the filibuster led by Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Miss McConnell. The filibuster was shut down 68-31.

When Mark Begich first ran for the Senate in 2008, Blue America endorsed him and helped him raise some money. He's been a disappointment ever since, the polar opposite of courageous, seemingly only interested in extending his own career. His overall ProgressivePunch crucial vote score, 78.96, is putrid enough, but, with his reelection campaign gearing up, he's made a conscious effort to move further to the right. His score for the 113th Congress is a shocking 57.14. The only Democratic senators voting more frequently with Miss McConnell are Mark Pryor (his fellow filibuster), Joe Manchin (WV), Claire McCaskill (MO) and Kay Hagan (NC). Needless to say, if there was any chance Blue America would have re-endorsed Begich-- and, realistically, there wasn't-- he blew it today by attempting to deny the right of the Senate to even debate gun safety regulations. Good luck getting those Republicans in Alaska to vote for you, Mark.

These are the Republicans-- several willing to court primaries for the neo-fascist right and the deep-pocketed gun manufacturers lobby-- who voted against the filibuster yesterday:

• Lamar Alexander (TN)
• Kelly Ayotte (NH)
• Richard Burr (NC)
• Saxby Chambliss (GA)
• Tom Coburn (OK)
• Susan Collins (ME)
• Bob Corker (TN)
• Jeff Flake (AZ)
• Lindsey Graham (SC)
• Dean Heller (NV)
• John Hoeven (ND)
• Johnny Isakson (GA)
• Mark Kirk (IL)
• John McCain (AZ)
• Pat Toomey (PA)
• Roger Wicker (MS)

Now the debate begins. It's expected to last a couple weeks before the Senate finally votes on the weak and watered down gun safety proposals.

“With the vote we take today, we are turning the page. Against the NRA’s dominance, we are turning the page to do what is right by these families and by the American people,”  Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference with the family members.

Turning to the families, Schumer said Newtown was the reason the Senate acted. “The only reason we are turning the page is because of you. You spoke to Congress. You spoke to the American people. We looked in your eyes, we saw your loss. We saw the hole where your child, your sibling, your parent used to be.”

Despite the vote to proceed, several Republicans said they would continue to oppose the legislation.

“The government should not punish or harass law-abiding citizens in the exercise of their Second Amendment rights,” Senate Minority Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.

Miss McConnell can lisp all the misleading NRA talking points he wants, but he very well aware that nothing in the legislation punishes or harasses any law-abiding citizens and is completely unrelated to the Second Amendment.

But Reid said Thursday that the first amendment to be debated is a bipartisan agreement to expand the gun background-check program that was announced Wednesday by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Schumer. The agreement would extend the current background-check requirement from covering only sales at licensed dealerships to any sale that takes place at a gun show or that is advertised in print or online. However, checks would not be required for many sales between private individuals-- a key concession by Democrats that gun-control advocates eagerly sought.

The proposal also would permit gun dealers to sell firearms across state lines, and gun owners with state-issued permits to carry concealed weapons would be allowed to take their firearms through states that don’t allow concealed weapons. The bipartisan agreement also calls for establishing a national commission to evaluate causes of mass violence.

Other proposed changes to the bill will come from members of both parties.

Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) plan to introduce changes to the gun-trafficking provisions that would bolster legal protections for lawful gun owners who purchase weapons to give as gifts or raffle and contest prizes and are later used in a crime.

In a nod to groups seeking tighter gun restrictions, several Democratic senators plan to support amendments to ban military-style assault weapons and to limit the size of ammunition clips, but those measures are expected to fail. Another bipartisan group of senators plans to propose expanding programs that provide mental health assistance to military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

By yesterday afternoon, Boehner was pushing back against NRA operatives inside his House caucus who are demanding he kill the legislation-- if it passes the Senate-- when it comes to the House. He said the Hastert Rule was "never a rule anyway," opening up the possibility of him working with Obama to put together GOP-Democratic majorities to pass gun legislation, immigration and, of course, a budget, all of which are opposed by most Republican House members. It would be hilarious to see him thrown out by his own caucus and watch Cantor become the first Jewish Speaker before the loathsome Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who inherited that dream from her mentor, Rahm Emanuel.

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Hunting-- At Least For Animals-- Has Exactly Nothing To Do With The Gun Safety Debate

Can you even call it a debate? All the NRA cares about is protecting the interests of the gun and ammo manufacturers who finance the organization and the comfy lifestyles of the people who work for it. That's not part of the debate. Theoretical debate. There is no debate. Why can't Obama get on TV with one of the extreme right-wing filibusterers-- Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio-- or even Miss McConnell if the other three are beneath his dignity-- and have it out? That's easy, the Republicans have no real leg to stand on.

The extremists who are fueling the anti-gun safety jihad are all afraid to talk about what's at the heart of their mania: paranoia that the government will have to be fought. That's the real ugly heart of the GOP side of the debate. It's why hunters and sportsmen all scratch their heads wondering why someone needs assault weapons and magazines that can kill dozens of men. It's what extremists like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are talking about-- and what idiots like Marco Rubio and Miss McConnell have blundered into. And it's why law enforcement officials-- not to mention most Americans-- are siding with Obama and not the lunatic fringe. The KKK and the Aryan Brotherhood, on the other hand, stand behind sociopaths like Cruz, Paul and, most of all-- now that Helen Chenoweth is at that great shooting range in the sky-- domestic terrorist Steve Stockman (R-TX), the Republican congressman who was involved with the Oklahoma City bombing.

Yesterday the headlines in the Dallas Morning News were about the brutal shooting deaths of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, in the heart of gun nut Jeb Hensarling's district (TX-05). They were murdered in their home, apparently as part of a vendetta by right-wing extremists against law enforcement in Ted Cruz's land of liberty. On January 31, right-wing lunatics had stalked and gunned down Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse and they are likely the same extremist gang responsible for the March 19 murder of Colorado Department of Corrections head Tom Clements, who was gunned down after answering the doorbell at his home. Evan Spencer Ebel, a former Colorado inmate and a member of the right-wing 211 prison gang and white supremacist who killed Clements died in a March 21 shootout with Texas police about 100 miles from Kaufman. Texas law enforcement officials are in a state of shock over the murders.

A law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity described the scene at the McLellands’ home as an awful scene.

“There are shell casings everywhere,” the official said. “This is unprecedented. This is unbelievable. This is huge.”

...In December, the Texas Department of Public Safety had issued a statewide bulletin warning that authorities had received “credible information” that the Aryan Brotherhood was “actively planning retaliation against law enforcement officials” who helped secure indictments in Houston against dozens of members, including the gang’s leadership.

“High ranking members … are involved in issuing orders to inflict ‘mass casualties or death’ to law enforcement officials who were involved in cases where Aryan Brotherhood of Texas are facing life sentences or the death penalty,” the bulletin stated.

Ted Cruz, apparently, is siding with the right-wing extremists and white supremacists against law enforcement.

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