The right vs. the right vs. the right

A group of communities and concerned landowners in Texas are filing suit against the Homeland Security Department in order to stop the construction of the border wall along the Mexican border.

The issue is that the Government, according to the landowners and their supporters, lied to the landowners about what they were going to do and how much of their land they would take, and then effectively seized the land while paying the landowners as little as $100 per acre. They did this by not technically taking formal ownership the land, just saying they wanted 'access' (implying they were only there to conduct a survey, not begin construction) and in the process will bisect and render useless scores of parcels of private property in south Texas.

Federal law does allow the Government to seize land for matters of 'public interest' (though it is debatable if the wall is that) but apparently fiscal conservatives balked at the going price for the land in the area and what would comply with a 1996 law requiring fair negotiations with landowners, and operating under the 'whatever it takes, just do it' policies that have marked the Bush administration's tenure, dealt disingenuously and likely illegally with the landowners, paying them practically nothing for the right to destroy their land.

Also an issue is that the wall built in South Texas will already have some sizeable gaps-- some land along the border belongs to Republican donors, such as the Hunt family from Dallas, and there are no plans to build anything on that particular land, just on land belonging to people who never donated large amounts of money to Republicans.

So this case pits rabid right anti-immigration right wingers vs. equally rabid property rights advocates vs. fiscal conservatives vs. rich Republican donors.

Get out the popcorn and watch to see how this one plays out, folks. It doesn't get any better than this. It's the kind of case that really exposes the fissures within the Republican base.

Oh, and the real irony, almost laughable is that by the time the wall is built it may be obsolete. Border arrests are down, despite beefed up security, all the way along the Mexican border from California to Texas. The reason why is because as the dollar continues its free fall, the value of what a Mexican can earn in the United States is declining. More and more of them are opting to stay home and work for pesos as the dollar accelerates downward, making the difference in the standard of living between the two countries less than it has been in the past. If this trend continues then the wall may be a joke by the time it is built, or maybe it will help keep Americans in so we don't hitchhike to Mexico and look for a job that will pay us in pesos that we can wire back home.

Immigration Frankenstein has cost the GOP a lot, and gained them little.

In mid to late 2005, we read a number of stories about how immigration would become the main issue in the 2006 election. The suddenness with which these stories all showed up, followed by how quickly the 'anti-illegal immigrant' crew got in gear, seemed to suggest that the decision to make it a focal point of the election was made somewhere in Washington, D.C., not throughout the length and breadth of America.

No matter. Either way, it certainly did become a major issue in 2006, and remains one today. If it was hatched up in some pollster's office during the desperate search for an issue the GOP could run on last year, it is now a monster that the GOP cannot control.

And it's eating them alive.

The right likes to cite polls that suggest that a large majority of Americans want the border secure, while ignoring the simultaneous polls that suggest that far less than a majority favor mass deportation or other action taken against people who are already here doing nothing more than working for a living.

But the issue here isn't how many Americans favor what. It has to do with how many Americans are being pursuaded to vote for the GOP based on their immigrant bashing, versus how many are being pursuaded to vote for Democrats instead.

The basic flaw is that the anti-immigrant strategy was being used as a 'get out the base' strategy, and it hasn't worked for that, as well as not working for broadening their base.

For a few people, being anti-immigrant is almost like a religion. I'm talking about the real nutcakes, the minutemen, the Tom Tancredo backers, and the like. They certainly would never vote for a Democrat. They might turn out to vote for an anti-immigrant hardliner like Tancredo or Randy Graf (or anti-immigrant converts like J.D. Hayworth) but the results of recent elections prove that there just aren't enough of them. Here in Arizona Graf and Hayworth went down to defeat (as did Congressman Henry Bonilla of Texas in another district close to the border) in 2006, and Tancredo's Presidential bid ended when he (like fellow immigration jockey Duncan Hunter) failed to attract more than one or two percent of the vote, and that was of fellow Republicans. Tancredo's most memorable line in the debates was aimed at fellow Republicans Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney for their hardline stances on immigration in which he said the pair were 'trying to out-Tancredo Tancredo.' Well, clearly Romney fell flat in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina (and only won his other real contest, Michigan, by pandering instead of discussing much about immigration.) Giuliani should be out of the race come Tuesday when he loses the state he bet all his marbles on, Florida (a state which has a whole lot of immigrants, and would still have a lot even if we didn't count the Cubans.) To put the icing on the cake, the candidate that Republican primary voters seem to favor, John McCain, was a co-sponsor of what the radio jocks teed off on as an 'amnesty bill,' the comprehensive immigration reform bill favored by President Bush which was scuttled by the Senate.

Last year, immigrant-bashing was supposed to be the key issue that would save the Virginia state Senate for Republicans. It did not, as Democrats picked up four seats, and in a fifth, heavily Republican district the incumbent went on an immigrant-bashing campaign and clearly hurt himself as he hung on by only a few hundred votes in a race he should have won easily.

This year, immigration was supposed to be a huge issue in South Carolina. Not only did McCain win (and Mike Huckabee, who has only sporadically attacked immigrants finish second) but despite the competitive primary, only 445,000 Republicans voted there, which was the same number of Republicans who voted to renominate President George H.W. Bush in 1992 against minor opposition from anti-Semitic speechwriter Pat Buchanan and white supremecist David Duke. That was also the last time that Democrats turned out in the state in larger numbers than Republicans, until today-- when 530,000 people voted in the Democratic primary.

They may be right that a majority of Americans in polls favor some aspects of what they are saying. But they are dead wrong in supposing that is enough to win an election. Not only do some people (both Hispanics and a lot of non-Hispanics) get turned off by all the bashing and the bigotry, but what they've proven is that while there are certainly some zealous and loud anti-immigrant single-issue activists, there aren't enough of them! And worse for the GOP, it is splitting their base (giving conservatives one more reason to refuse to vote for John McCain if he is the nominee, but threatening to drive away a lot of the independents and moderates who supported him and who the GOP really needs if someone else is the Republican nominee.)

Yet some on the right just won't let go, believing that this issue is a 'sure-fire winner' next election, past results notwithstanding. And that's the beauty of conservatives. I remember when the President was refusing to budge on his support for more tax cuts despite the evidence that the tax cuts he had pushed were just not doing the job, and it mirrored his recalcitrance on foreign policy, someone said about conservatives that if they start digging a hole, they will keep on digging it deeper rather than acknowledge they aren't getting anywhere.

Well, Republicans, keep on digging then. You may find half a dozen more survivalists hiding out in an abandoned missile silo in Montana stocked full of all those Y2K rations who will flock to your cause.

New GOP strategy is to attack Congress for inaction-- but how accurate is it?

Recently the Republicans have begun claiming that this Congress is a 'do-nothing' Congress, in an attempt to undermine the Congressmen and Congresswomen that we have worked very hard to elect.

That is however, absolutely false.

This Congress has passed and the President has signed at least three major pieces of legislation, all on issues that had been languishing and unattended to since the beginning of his administration:

1. Minimum wage increase. This represents the first increase in the minimum wage since 1998. Previous attempts in the GOP Congress had failed every single year.

2. College financial aid bill. With skyrocketing tuition costs and students leaving school tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they even have their first full-time job, this bill cuts interest rates in half and helps school boards with limited budgets recruit qualified teachers by giving college graduates a way to be forgiven of some or all of their debt if they step into the classroom for a few years, and it will cost the local school boards nothing.

3. Ethics reform bill. We saw the 'culture of corruption' last year in Washington, and as we've seen this year some of it still has to be rooted out. So Congress passed the most sweeping ethics reform bill since the Watergate era. Critics like to point out the loopholes that still remain. Sure, but those which remain also remained when the GOP Congress did absolutely nothing about ethics reform (other than DeLay's attempts to 'fix' the problem by packing the ethics oversight committee with his cronies).

There are also three other important pieces of legislation that haven't gotten passed mainly due to the President's veto and/or Republican-led filibusters and opposition in the Senate:

1. An Iraq bill which mandates withdrawal deadlines. The American people are quite bluntly put sick and tired of pouring hundreds of billions of dollars down this rat-hole when there are crying needs to pay for here. And on top of that, we are borrowing money to pay for it, but the GOP members of Congress won't even consider a supplemental tax to pay for Iraq, preferring instead to pass the debt on to future generations (with interest, of course.)

2. A stem-cell funding bill. Our policy restricting research in this area is just one of many examples of the administration's disdain for science and scientific research. Other examples include cuts to alternative fuel programs and backing the teaching of creationism in public schools. The result is that the pace of progress for American science, which had effectively lapped the rest of field by the end of the Cold War, has slowed down considerably so that we are now living on 'borrowed time' until the rest of the world catches up (and they are not so far back anymore.) The stem-cell bill was of course only a piece of this whole but it is the piece where the battleground was drawn with Congress. In fact, even last year's Republican Congress realized how important this was and passed a stem-cell funding bill, but the President, who seems to live in a world of his own where science plays second fiddle to dogma, vetoed it.

3. SCHIP. The GOP has been misleading about this from the get go. SCHIP is not a Federal program except for residents of the District of Columbia, but rather a bunch of 'block grants' to states (recall that is something that the Republican Congress did with many Federal programs in the 1990's). Congress must give some guidelines to make sure the money is being spent appropriately, but it sets intentionally broad parameters as to what those limits are in order to allow the states the flexibility to tailor their programs to the specific needs within their state. Keep in mind this is a Republican reform. But opponents of SCHIP renewal are now implying that it is the federal government that would be paying for it (i.e. 'national' healthcare) and quote the maximum allowable limits for any state (intentionally set high to allow states to cover high-cost of living cities like NY and SF if they exist within the state) and imply that would be the limit for everybody. Of course if you live in most places, $81 thousand for a family of four sounds like a ridiculously high limit and in most places it is, but it would not be in, for example, downtown San Francisco where even small economy apartments can run upwards of $2500 per month plus utilities. In a place like where I live that would be two or three times the typical mortgage, so there is little comparison. But count on Republicans to take a good idea like flexibility to the states which they should be taking credit for and twist it into a way to deny funding for kids health insurance (at current levels, Maine and several other states will soon begin running out of funds as health care costs have continued to accelerate rapidly).

4. Comprehensive immigration reform. We can't get a handle on the problem without including a market based solution that addresses the reason why illegal border crossers keep coming-- our own job market (unemployment is at historic lows, so the idea that they are taking jobs from Americans is just not true.) This was one bill that the President would have signed, but it was blocked primarily by Republicans in the Senate (though with the misguided defections of a handful of Democrats.)


So on these bills, the Democratic Congress passed six out of seven, and three of those were signed. Not good enough, but certainly not the 'do-nothing' title that GOP strategists are claiming (that title would belong to the previous GOP Congress which failed even to pass nine out of eleven spending bills in 2006, virtually guaranteeing that this Congress would get off to a slow start as they had to finish last year's work.*)

What needs to be done now? Well, getting larger Democratic majorities in Congress would be a very good start, especially in the Senate where the balance of power hangs by a thread. A veto-proof majority would be nice but probably a very high hill to climb (but not absolutely impossible-- on SCHIP 44 Republicans voted to override, leaving about fifteen short.) And this should make it absolutely clear that we will need a Democratic President next year, someone who will sign these bills if Congress passes them.

*-- the more conspiratorially minded among us might even wonder, given the current assault on Congress in the right-wing media, whether this was actually part of a grand strategy that began last year to gum up the works and lay the foundation for the kinds of charges we are now seeing.

Pulte turns high pressure improvised water cannon on legally picketing workers

Hat tip to Tedski at Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.

Last April, the AFL-CIO announced their intention to organize thousands of construction workers in Arizona and Nevada who worked for Pulte Homes. As the union said according to an article at the time in the Las Vegas Review Journal, it called Pulte the "Wal-Mart of home developers." Pulte employs numerous subcontractors, but according to the union does not hold them to high standards of worker treatment.

On May 29, Pulte responded by announcing they were cutting 1,900 jobs nationwide, including a reduction of their Phoenix based workforce from three divisions to two. While it is true that the housing market has cooled and Pulte recently canceled plans to build a development in Benson, it is clear from this move that they consider their heavy use of subcontractors to be more important than even their own workforce. Of course, people in Anthem already know a little about how Pulte operates: According to an article in the Arizona Republic on May 28 (unfortunately online links via AZCentral are only good for seven days but the print edition is still available)

Del Webb, a Pulte Homes company, built the Anthem community in 1999. Residents said Del Webb didn't disclose that the cost of providing the community with water would come back to haunt them eight years later.

Oh, and one other thing-- most of the workforce is Hispanic, many from Mexico (I don't know what their legal immigration status is and that is irrelevant to the abuses you will see in a moment.)

Maybe you agree with the objectives of the union. Maybe you don't. But workers have a legal right to picket, which is exactly what right they were exercising outside a construction site in Florence, Arizona yesterday.

The workers who were in the picket line were fired from companies Pulte subcontracts with for speaking up about working conditions--specifically for being forced to work during their lunch breaks and for not being given enough water to hydrate during the day (note that the high temperature in Phoenix yesterday was 113 degrees).

Pulte executives responded, after threatening to have leaders of the picket line arrested (I guess they then figured out that the cops know what the law is and wouldn't arrest them for demonstrating legally), by the use of a water cannon-- actually an improvised one, setting the company spray truck to deliver high pressure water. Some of it was sprayed directly on protesters. Whether they would have done this at a crowd of predominantly anglo workers is not an unreasonable question to ask.

The AFL-CIO will show a videotape of the incident at a news conference tomorrow but it is already available on U-Tube linked here.

There is a reason why the police are reluctant to use water cannons as an example of 'non-lethal force.' It is because they can and have at times in the past caused serious injury, both if they happen to hit a vulnerable area of the body (like the eyes or the ears) and if they cause people to fall at an accelerated rate of speed.

This is only going to escalate tensions. But maybe that is what they want. Are the Pulte execs so stuck in the sixties (on the wrong side) that they will try tear gas next?

Virgil Goode's letter about Keith Ellison

Congressman Virgil Goode (R-Virginia) has become the latest in a long list of Republicans and conservatives who are objecting to Representative-elect Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota)'s intention to take his oath of office on the Koran instead of the Bible.

But Congressman Goode went beyond that in his letter to constituents, which was released to CNN after it enquired about the letter. He wrote,

The Muslim representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Quran.

"We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country.

Let's first address the whole issue of Representative Ellison and his desire to use the Koran (which according to his Muslim faith is a Holy Scripture, while he believes the Bible is not). It presents us with a very basic question:

Why is the Bible used to take an oath on?

Why don't lawmakers and other elected and appointed officials who take oaths of office simply swear an oath agreeing that they understand that if they fail to uphold the Consitution or the duties or responsibilities of their office then they may be subject to criminal prosecution, recall, censure, expulsion, impeachment, being fired, bad press resulting in not being re-elected or any of the other various punishments and penalties that the legal system, the legislative body, the executive or the voters can subject them to? Why is the Bible used at all?

The answer is that it is a matter of faith. By taking an oath on a book that is considered Holy Scripture (and often ending this oath with the words, 'so help me God') the public servant (whether elected or appointed) is not only agreeing to serve faithfully and to the best of his or her ability, but is in effect agreeing that if (s)he fails to carry out the duties of the office in an honest and ethical manner then (s)he may be subject to having to answer to God about having violated an oath taken in the name of God. This is supposed to strengthen a public servant, who even if (s)he might be tempted to misuse his or her position to get rich through influence peddling, make inappropriate sexual advances to teenage pages or otherwise abuse the system, is aware that the penalties for this type of behavior may not end at the grave.

Now it is true that swearing on the Bible has not always prevented people like Duke Cunningham, Mark Foley and Bob Ney from abusing their oath of office. What the effect will be beyond this life is between them and that God who they named in an oath with their hand upon Holy Scripture. What it does mean though is that Rep. Ellison absolutely should swear upon the Koran. If he swore on a scripture that he doesn't believe carries the weight of deity, then why would we expect that oath to be given any more credence by the fact that a Bible was there? On the other hand, if he as a Muslim swears on the Koran, then since he believes it is imbued with the power of God, isn't he more likely (for the same reasons mentioned above) to behave honestly and ethically in office, believeing that if he does not he will also have a debt to settle with Allah someday?

It seems to be that those who insist that Rep. Ellison should have to use the Bible exhibit the most profound lack of faith and lack of understanding of why the Bible is used at all.

The other issue that Representative Goode brings up is his continued hard line against immigration that resonates throughout his letter. And it, as well as his support for using the Bible only will probably help him in his conservative, edge-of-the-Bible-belt rural Virginia district.

It is sure to give Republicans headaches though. Not that party loyalty has ever meant much to Virgil Goode, of course-- he was elected as a Democrat in 1994 and then switched parties after the GOP took over the house for reasons of pure political opportunism.

The reason it will give Republicans headaches is this: This year the GOP felt that if they just turned out their base they could win the elections. True, they fell short of this goal in some places, but in others they did turn out the conservative base and still lost the election.

One reason was their hard-line stance on immigration. This year the GOP lost 14% of the Hispanic vote nationally, falling from President Bush's share of Hispanics at 44% nationwide down to 30%. Without the GOP leaning votes of Cuban-Americans, it would be down into the 20% range, as it was in many Hispanic communities in the southwest. The reason is no mystery-- many Hispanics here have extended and immediate family that run across the spectrum-- some U.S. citizens, some living happily in Mexico or some other Latin American country, legal residents, illegal residents and some planning to come. An example is my cousin who is an American and married to a man from Latin America (he is a legal resident). Their kids are U.S. citizens (the oldest will probably be registering to vote in 2008) and they go down to visit his family every other year. I know they have other family here in America, and I haven't had a reason to ask about their legal status (plus I don't care whether they are legal or not-- they are still part of my family by marriage). And La Familia is very important among these people. So when Republicans threatened to build a wall this year, make some of their family members felons or carry out mass deportations, well you mess with a person's family and it's safe to say you've lost that person's vote. This loss of 14% among a group of voters who number into the tens of millions directly cost the GOP at least one congressional seat in Texas and probably two congressional seats here in Arizona (in both contests here, the GOP candidate was a conservative hardliner on immigration and got the conservative base out, but it was beaten by the direct loss of moderates and Hispanics that switched to the Democrats since 2004.) The irony of course is that immigrants from Mexico are 98% Christian, so if the concern is about the erosion of Christianity in America, they are shooting themselves in the foot by railing against undocumented immigrants, since the large majority of them are from Mexico or other Latin American countries.

Rep. Goode then goes on to cite 'diversity' in immigration and immigration from the Middle East. In fact, I agree with most conservatives as well as most liberals that we need to get a handle on who is coming into the country (which is one reason a guest-worker program makes sense) so that we can figure out ways to keep terrorists and criminals from entering the country, and track immigrants when they do come in as a backup if we don't catch some of the criminals or terrorists at the border. What is disturbing about Rep. Goode's letter though is that he speaks about Muslims and people from the 'middle east' (incidentally, the most populous Muslim countries are in Asia, not the middle east). He appears to use that as an argument to clamp down on immigration, as if there is something intrinsically bad about people from that part of the world coming to America. Now there are certainly some bad apples from the middle east, which is one reason I just mentioned that we need to get a handle on who is entering the U.S. But most people there are not bad apples, nor are most Muslims. What it will do is cause those who become U.S. citizens to gravitate toward's Congressman Ellison's party, not Congressman Goode's.

But maybe Congressman Goode doesn't care about that either. As I said before, party loyalty has never been his strong suit.