Ann Coulter tears into Marco Rubio today, and it’s not pretty… but speaking as a longtime fan of the Senator from Florida, I have to admit I’ve been having similar thoughts lately.
Here is how Rubio explained the powerful border-enforcing mechanism in his bill on “Fox News Sunday,” which he denied was merely a meaningless goal:
“Basically, Homeland Security will have five years to meet that goal. If after five years, Homeland Security has not met that number, it will trigger the Border Commission, who will then take over this issue for them.”
So the water torture awaiting the Department of Homeland Security if it fails to secure the border is … ANOTHER GOVERNMENT COMMISSION WILL BE CREATED! Take that, Homeland Security! Ha — we have you now!
The only thing more frightening than “another government commission” is a “strongly worded letter.”
Rubio said his comprehensive immigration plan isn’t amnesty because “amnesty is anything that says ‘do it illegally, it will be cheaper and easier.’” But, he assures us, it’s “cheaper, faster and easier for people to go back home and wait 10 years” — as the law currently requires — “than it will be to go through this process that I’ve outlined.”
Then why is he doing it? If it’s “cheaper, faster and easier” for illegals to apply for citizenship under current law, what exactly does Rubio’s plan accomplish?
To put this another way: the Rubio plan seems very long on promises to the illegal alien community, and very short on enforceable commitments to the actual citizens of the United States. The security “commitment” is such a joke that I’m starting to feel embarrassed for Rubio every time I hear him talk about it. Surely he’s aware the Administration is already quite open about its refusal to even measure border security progress, let alone submit to anything worse than a little congressional browbeating over it? Surely he knows there is absolutely zero point zero percent chance the amnesty bandwagon will be halted because Republicans declare that border security commitments have not been met?
Beyond the absurdity of the bureaucratic slap fight Coulter describes, Rubio is actually handing Democrats a political club they can use to beat his own party into submission… and they will cringe beneath the shadow of that raised cudgel. Is everyone ready for the ads caricaturing Republicans as heartless monsters because they would dynamite the “pathway to citizenship” over their xenophobic obsession with the border, or deny countless undocumented Americans the tender ministry of the welfare state, or even (horror of horrors) deny the sacred voting franchise to these hard-working dreamers, different only from you or I because they lack a bit of paperwork? The reason we’re going through this political agony is because the government pronounces itself completely incompetent to track the 11 or 12 million illegals in the country – it’s not even certain of their approximate number. But now we’re supposed to believe it will carefully weed out the people that absolutely should not be accepted as citizens, or that those people will voluntarily subject themselves to a process that would likely end with deportation?
Also, if we start harvesting taxes from the undocumented community without giving them the vote, isn’t that taxation without representation, even though as a practical matter we know the actual effect of plugging most of them into the tax system will be welfare paid out through tax credits?
How can Senator Rubio believe the end result of “comprehensive immigration reform” will be a process that seems like more of a hassle than decamping for Mexico and getting in line to earn citizenship the old-fashioned way?
Let’s bring this back to the essential principle so many seem to have lost sight of: law in the United States should be made for the benefit of citizens of the United States. Sorry if that sounds a bit harsh, but there it is. There is nothing selfish, xenophobic, etc. about citizens expecting their legislators and executives to act, first and foremost, in their interest.
RIGHT'S RIGHT 
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Thu Apr 18, 2013 7:46 pm
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