Republicans

Donald Trump: Amnesty Shill

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Donald Trump Meets DREAMersOne of the reasons attacks on Donald Trump such as National Review’s recent symposium have been ineffective is because they don’t speak to the factors that could actually change his supporters’ minds. Among Trump fans who read conservative commentary, The Donald’s various political heresies, temperamental deficiencies, and personal failings are already priced into their decision—they aren’t prioritizing a full-spectrum conservative, they just want someone who’ll finally shut the border and get our immigration system under control once and for all, and don’t trust anyone else to do it.

So don’t waste space reiterating what they already know and don’t care about. Instead, focus the bulk of your energy dismantling the only good pro-Trump argument—his perceived strength as an immigration hawk—and publicize the truth that, beyond the tough talk about building walls and deporting rapists, he’s as wobbly and inconsistent on the issue as anyone. Continue reading →

Laurence Tribe, Trump’s Eligibility Expert, Is a Liar

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For many of us, the highlight of the latest Republican debate was Ted Cruz demolishing Donald Trump’s attack on his status as a natural-born citizen eligible for the presidency. For added insult to injury, Cruz pointed out the following about the constitutional “expert” Trump has repeatedly cited on the matter:

Let me tell you who Larry Tribe is. He’s a left-wing judicial activist, Harvard Law professor who was Al Gore’s lawyer in Bush versus Gore. He’s a major Hillary Clinton supporter. And there’s a reason why Hillary’s supporters are echoing Donald’s attacks on me, because Hillary wants to face Donald Trump in the general election.

This was devastating not merely for discrediting the legal question, which was never going to be a serious problem, but for demonstrating that Trump is getting his information from liberals and has no idea what an actual conservative would consider a credible authority. Indeed, Tribe prefaces his analysis of the case with an ode to “living Constitution” judges who “believ[e] that the Constitution’s meaning evolves with the perceived needs of the time and longstanding practice”—which anyone who came to conservatism naturally would instantly recognize as code for twisting the Constitution to justify whatever liberals want.

But it turns out there’s another reason why The Donald choose poorly: his expert is not just mistaken, but lying. Continue reading →

Republicans Can’t Do Anything Right: Sean Duffy Edition

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Donald Trump’s authenticity on issues such as ending abortion may be highly questionable, but there’s still a stylistic lesson more conventional Republicans desperately need to learn from him: people are sick of timidity in response to outrageous policies and malicious smears.

Case in point: on Friday, Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) said the following:

I hear a lot in this institution from minority leaders about how their communities are targeted, but what I don’t hear them talk about is how their communities are targeted in abortion […] My liberal friends, Congressional Black Caucus members, talk about fighting for the defenseless, the hopeless, and the downtrodden […] There is no one more hopeless and voiceless than an unborn baby, but their silence is deafening. I can’t hear them. Where are they standing up for their communities, advocating and fighting for their right to life?

So far, so good. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) reacted with the usual hysteria:

After nearly 30 years in public office, not much surprises me anymore. So you can imagine my lack of astonishment when my dear friend and colleague from Wisconsin, Sean Duffy, rolled out abortion statistics among African-American women to lecture black legislators like me about defending the welfare of our constituents […] I don’t expect Rep. Duffy to understand why his comments are offensive […] What he and so many of his Republican colleagues fail to acknowledge is the underlying context behind high abortion rates in African-American communities. High rates of abortion are related to poverty and lack of access to quality care […] Rep. Duffy’s hypocrisy on this issue is as predictable as it is offensive. If he truly, truly wants to fight for the hopeless and voiceless, he should join us.

At which point Duffy falls apart. Moore’s attack is equal parts dishonest and malicious, purely an attempt to distract from his critique by changing the subject. This should have been met with doubling down on the original charge against her and her colleagues, with a healthy dose of shame added in.

Instead, he felt the need to appease his attacker. Continue reading →

Nikki Haley’s SOTU Response Was Even Worse Than You’ve Heard

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Haley’s leadership-approved Republican response to Barack Obama’s State of the Union address has rightly been eviscerated for devoting so much time to attacking a leading Republican candidate rather than the Democrat president she was there to refute, and for condescending to the party’s base that they need to lighten up about their entirely-valid, perpetually-neglected immigration concerns.

Mark Steyn’s takedown of those offenses (as well as her general vagueness on the good positions she did espouse) says it all:

Unfortunately for her, this sentimentalist twaddle is not where the Republican base is. She’s looking at immigration policy from the point of view of the seven billion hard-working soon-to-be-vetted Americans-in-waiting around the planet. But one of the changes this election season is that the party base is considering immigration policy from the point of view of the 300 million Americans who are already here […]

Trump is a monster of the GOP elite’s creation. And their solution to it is to use what’s meant to be a rebuttal to the President as a rebuttal to their own leading candidates and the two-thirds of their voters who support them. Truly this is the dumbest political party on the planet.

So here I’ll focus on a few more than have gone relatively unnoticed amid the uproar, but are also highly indicative of the leadership rot within the GOP. Continue reading →

New at Live Action: Abortion Neglected at CNBC GOP Debate. Let’s do something about it.

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If you were expecting to hear the Republican presidential candidates say anything new about how they would protect the preborn from abortion or getting Planned Parenthood’s hand out of America’s wallets, then last night’s CNBC primary debates were a huge letdown.

Not one question addressed abortion or Planned Parenthood in any way. The excuse would be that the debate was billed as strictly focusing on economic issues – making pro-life issues off-topic – but that went out the window the moment questions were asked about marijuana legalization and gay rights. Those detoured the conversation away from the nation’s finances and into individual freedom, morality, and society’s values — abortion would have been out of place how? (Not to mention the clear economic issue of taxpayer dollars funding Planned Parenthood.)

Moderators with a major political axe to grind clearly weren’t interested in giving the preborn or Planned Parenthood’s crimes any attention, but even so, the candidates could have done more to proactively work abortion into their answers, like Lindsey Graham did with his main issue, foreign policy.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: Pro-Abortion HuffPo Attack on Ben Carson Completely Fails

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Following Dr. Ben Carson’s strong stand for life over the weekend on Meet the Press, the Huffington Post is attacking the presidential candidate with an open letter to Carson by playwright, political science professor, and self-professed “ordained minister and a person of faith” Monica Bauer.

After some lip service to how Carson “seem[s] like a sincere person who wants to do the right thing,” she proceeds to challenge him on “a couple of things that just maybe no one in your circle has ever discussed with you.”

As we will soon see, this condescension is mostly projection:

First of all, if it is as simple as all that, and all abortions were about killing a baby, how do you explain the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade? This was a 7-2 decision. It was not simply liberals versus conservatives.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

How Awful Would Paul Ryan Be as House Speaker?

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Let us count the ways:

  1. His Heritage Action and Conservative Review scorecards are 55% and 58%, respectively. That’s far worse than “imperfect”—Ryan’s record of standing with conservatives doesn’t even rise to the level of “below average.” It’s in F territory. I know liberals believe in rewarding failing grades, but are conservatives ready to join them?
  2. Ryan is an open-borders fanatic of the worst order, from sabotaging efforts to control immigration early in his career to championing the most recent amnesty bill, without regard for how utterly its border and enforcement provisions were proven to be fraudulent. Indeed, his immigration zealotry overrides his other supposed conservative principles so fully that he openly supports “guest workers” for the express purpose of relieving employers of the burden of having to offer Americans higher wages.
  3. Pro-lifers and marriage defenders can’t count on Ryan to have our back when it counts. He has repeatedly voted for budget resolutions that include funding for Planned Parenthood, supports unprincipled and unworkable “truces” on social issues, and voted for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which threatened religious employers’ right to require adherence to a faith’s principles even when relevant to the position.
  4. The sole rationale for Ryan’s stature on the Right is his supposed fiscal seriousness, his reputation as the smartest adult in the room when it comes to getting spending under control. Thing is, even that is wildly overblown. For all the hysterics it inspired at the time, his 2012 budget plan would have actually increased spending by trillions over the next decade, left countless wasteful and destructive programs and agencies untouched, and wouldn’t have balanced the budget until 2040. Worse, a year later he joined forces with Democrat Patty Murray to sabotage one of Hill Republicans’ only substantive accomplishments in recent memory, the sequester budget caps.
  5. Apart from his budgets’ substantive deficiencies, Ryan has never been any good at selling his ideas to the public. The pattern is pretty simple: Ryan churns out a plan, does little to no work helping his fellow Republicans prepare a real campaign to make the case for it, leftists inevitably scream that it means the elderly dying and poor people thrown on the streets, and Ryan responds with wonkish technobabble that impresses political junkies who already know better but means nothing to the voters he needs to reassure. Shouldn’t the fact that he couldn’t even put away Joe Biden have been a red flag here?
  6. Ryan favors other terrible fiscal policies: TARP and the internet sales tax scheme known as the Marketplace Fairness Act.
  7. Here’s Ryan in 2013 saying “if we had a Clinton presidency […] I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now,” and here he is in 2014 saying Barack Obama’s repeated violations of federal law, separation of powers, and the Constitution “do not rise to the high crime and misdemeanor level”…just in case any part of you was still expecting Speaker Ryan to give the Left a real fight.

Straw-Manning: An Amnesty Shill’s Best Friend

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Oh look: Pew got Republican voters to look more liberal than they really are with intentionally-vague terminology — “certain requirements” — that induces respondents to project wildly different notions of what those requirements should be into a single category.

The poll does not say a majority of Republicans are content with the real bone of contention: sham bills that provide amnesty with citizenship but lie about security and enforcement. (It also shows that majorities of Republicans want to end birthright citizenship and build a border wall, and that only 37% favor citizenship for illegals.)

Contrary to the lying cheap-labor toadies who slander conservatives as “xenophobes” for not agreeing with them, very few of us opposed to the GOP’s amnesty-mania insist that every single illegal has to be gone no matter what.

Again, for the unprincipled simpletons who parrot whatever Republican leadership and the Wall Street Journal tell them to, it’s really not that complicated:

  1. Complete a manned and monitored border wall.
  2. Crack down on visa overstays.
  3. Fully implement e-Verify.
  4. Take legal action against sanctuary cities.
  5. Reverse President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty.
  6. Crack down on illegals’ use of public aid.
  7. After Congress has actually done it, rather than given us the umpteenth insincere promise to do it in the indeterminate future, and after the people have seen for themselves that we really have stopped the mass influx of new illegals and meaningfully reduced the number of current illegals, then we can look at how many are left and decide on some sort of regularization (provided it does not allow any possibility of citizenship without first leaving and re-entering legally).

New at Live Action: Don’t Let Iowa Gov. Branstad Chicken Out on Defunding Planned Parenthood

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In July, Iowa Republican Governor Terry Branstad responded to the news of Planned Parenthood’s organ harvesting side business by ordering a comprehensive review of state women’s health and family planning funding to ensure none of it was helping Planned Parenthood perform abortions. Alas, now he says he can’t defund Planned Parenthood after all:

“It appears to me, and the advice that we have received from the attorney general’s office, is that we cannot defund Planned Parenthood,” Branstad said last week, according to The Des Moines Register. “The attorney general’s office has notified us that we don’t have reasons; [Planned Parenthood hasn’t] violated their responsibilities under the grants that they have received from the state.”

The Iowa social conservative group The Family Leader is not impressed, and has been doing a lot of work to refute Branstad’s claims and pressure him into doing the right thing.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

Abysmal Kasich-Rubio ’16 Case Illustrates Why GOP Keeps Losing Elections

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The following article was originally written in August. Given the lack of responses at the time and that the subject of conservative publications giving platforms to disastrously unconservative political advice remains newsworthy, I am publishing it here.

In most fields, past failures to produce results tend to diminish one’s standing as an authority on future successes. So while it’s natural that alumni of John McCain’s presidential campaign would favor a 2016 nominee as centrist as John Kasich and a running mate as amnesty-minded as Marco Rubio, it’s also alarming to see their prescriptions disseminated in a leading conservative publication.

None of Myra Adams’s five points for Kasich-Rubio ’16 are persuasive. In fact, her August 14 National Review column making the case reads more like a catalogue of the Beltway myths, shallow assumptions, and unconservative priorities that have created countless Republican defeats. Continue reading →