Congress is a lot like the mythical Augean stables, but with many more show horses than workhorses. In Greek mythology, it required Herculean labor to clean the Augean stables because of how much manure the horses spewed.
In Congress, a handful of self-styled moderate Republican show horses created a mess of a different sort, one that the party will now have to tread carefully to avoid a repeat of Thursday’s sad spectacle, when the House was scheduled to vote on a pair of immigration reform bills.
One, a hard-line anti-amnesty measure backed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), went down in flames, thanks to 41 Republicans who joined 190 Democrats in voting no. The other, more pro-amnesty version backed by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) would likely have suffered the same fate, but was pulled from the floor for another day.
These show horses, led by Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, had forced Ryan to schedule the votes through a procedural maneuver, the discharge petition, a rarely successful legislative tool for going around House leaders. Curbelo fell three short of the 218 required signatures by House members to give petitioners control of the floor, but he still succeeded in forcing Ryan to schedule Thursday’s debate and vote.
The House GOP Conference held a June 7 closed-door session to devise a strategy on immigration legislation ahead of Thursday’s votes, but news reports suggested the party remained “fractured” over the issue after the meeting.
The GOP immigration reformers’ insistence on reviving the amnesty debate is perplexing because it comes despite the fact that there’s no public clamor for it. To the contrary, in a Morning Consult poll of 275,000 registered voters, conducted from February through April, economic and national security issues were, as one would expect, foremost on respondents’ minds.
Immigration reform wasn’t even among the top eight issues cited, unless it was lumped in among unspecified “other” issues, which collectively drew the nod from 5 percent of all those polled, and only 3 percent of Republicans.
The discharge petition process required the support of a majority of the House, but only about two dozen Republican members had any interest in revisiting immigration amnesty, particularly in an election year.
The GOP moderates notwithstanding, Republican reluctance can be explained by February 15 votes in the Senate that showed there’s no consensus on any legislation that could get the required 60 votes to pass the Senate, much less the 67 to override a certain veto by President Donald Trump.
There’s no reason to think any of that has changed since then, especially with Trump’s obliquely threatening to shut down the government in September if the fiscal 2019 budget bill doesn’t contain full funding for his “big, beautiful” border wall.
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“I want to have a vote on something that can make it into law,” Ryan said. “I don’t want to have a vote on show ponies.”
That didn’t stop 192 of the 193 House Democrats from joining the show pony stampede en masse, providing 90 percent of the discharge petition signatures — regardless of how immigration reform didn’t register as a pressing issue even among registered Democrats in that Morning Consult poll.
Congressional Democrats, however, know their party would ultimately be the chief beneficiary if the so-called dreamers — beneficiaries of the proposed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act — and other “undocumented Democrats” are eventually granted a path to citizenship and the right to vote through immigration reform, comprehensive or otherwise.
In other words, for Hill Democrats, it was more than just the desire to embarrass Ryan and his GOP leadership team that motivated them to join forces with the rogue Republicans.
But why any Republican would want to be complicit in this exercise is a puzzlement. If they’re laboring under the misapprehension that enacting comprehensive immigration reform — or just lavishing citizenship on the dreamers —will win for the GOP majority support of the Hispanic vote, they are either self-delusional or suicidal.
True, Trump won a scant 29 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2016, but he was hardly the outlier among GOP presidential nominees, as figures compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center of the prior nine presidential elections show.
In 32 years of exit polling Pew conducted from 1980 to 2012, no Republican presidential nominee has ever won even close to a majority of the Hispanic vote. In fact, none has ever received more than 40 percent.
That high-water mark came in 2004 for George W. Bush, who — if support for immigration reform were a litmus test for winning the Hispanic vote — should have won it sin duda (Spanish for “without a doubt”).
Some in the party hailed that 40 percent as a breakthrough, but it shouldn’t be necessary to point out that winning 40 percent of any vote still constitutes a landslide loss.
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Four years later, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the poster child of GOP support for immigration reform (and who, not surprisingly, backed the discharge petition effort), fared even worse, capturing just 31 percent of the Hispanic vote. Even that was better than the 27 percent Mitt Romney won in 2012.
The bottom line is this: No matter how far to the Left these Republicans tack, they will never be as good as the Democrats in the eyes of the dreamers.
The pro-amnesty immigration reformers. They want Congress to view Hispanics as a one-dimensional interest group that can be purchased with amnesty.
But even if amnesty did win them favor from the pro-amnesty Left, it would be unlikely to help them with ordinary Hispanic-Americans. What they fail to realize is that dreamers are not the same as Hispanics generally, nor are their priorities identical.
Last year, Pew conducted a survey asking Hispanic-Americans their top-five political priorities for Trump and Congress in 2017. Immigration was last among those “top” priorities. Hispanics cared much more about education, national security, and the economy than immigration. Bread-and-butter issues take precedence, just as they do with most other voters.
But you won’t hear that from the pro-amnesty immigration reformers. They want Congress to view Hispanics as a one-dimensional interest group that can be purchased with amnesty. That’s the lie that moderate Republicans behind the discharge petition bought into.
The takeaway for Curbelo and the other renegade Republicans ought to be: When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Or to continue with the Augean stables analogy, stop stepping in it.
Peter Parisi is a former longtime editor at The Washington Times.
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