Senator Ted Cruz appeared on Hannity last night, ostensibly to discuss a key amendment in the immigration reform bill that will now proceed to the Senate floor and likely pass. But, near the end of the segment, Cruz made it clear that his real purpose was to campaign for viewers to join him in his fundraising crusade against the bill.
After Cruz and Hannity whined about the bill for about seven minutes, Cruz broke out his pitch for his self-aggrandizing crusade:
The way we stop this, though, is for the American people to stand up. You know, on (he named a website with his name in it), we’ve got a national petition – over a hundred thousand people have signed up in the past week. Call your senators and that’s how we can stop this from becoming law.
…It’ll likely pass the Senate but we can stop this in the House. And we can prevent a whole lot of Republicans from jumping on board this week if you call your senators this week. There’s 20 Republicans on the fence, Sean, who haven’t decided how to vote.
Gee, do you think that petition might also serve as a handy-dandy fundraising tool since you leave your email address as well as your zip code?
The masses must stick The Cruz Ship to the GOP in future elections.
So that we can allow fewer immigrants into the country . . . like Ted Cruz.
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The end of Cruz’s comments was once again revealing of the far right strategy. As with the ACA, their intent is to try to obstruct and delay this idea as much as possible in the hope that they can keep anything from being passed. Since the GOP does have the majority in the House, they can use that as a fallback for when the bill passes the Senate. Last week, Hannity was discussing strategy about this with his guests, opining that the GOP in the House should just pass NOTHING or keep it off the floor, thus refusing it to even get a hearing.
They will equate this with the Senate’s refusal to bring up the umpteen House GOP political budget bills – but there’s a difference. The Senate didn’t take up those bills, which were all usually just GOP propaganda moves to defund or repeal “Obamacare”, because those were never intended as serious governance. In the present case, there’s a bipartisan push to get something finally done in this area. But some GOP’ers simply want to continue the stonewalling of any Obama or Democrat initiatives.
In truth, there is an interesting alliance of obstruction here between three factions of the right wing. One faction is the business owners who make good money from keeping the current situation with undocumented workers as is. One faction is the AM radio crowd, who want to play on the xenophobia of their hard right constituents with the thought of building an impregnable wall to keep the Other People out. And one faction is, again, the group that just wants to say NO to anything the Dems try to accomplish, purely out of spite. Together, these factions are clearly growing more desperate, as some of the rhetoric from people like Laura Ingraham is revealing when she began to openly threaten GOP moderates yesterday.
Regardless of this, it’s clear that the GOP leadership does want to see something get done, just out of tactical necessity. They know that if they’re seen obstructing this, they’ll pay for it in upcoming elections as the Chicano/Latino voting base becomes larger and more influential. Murdoch certainly recognizes this – he’s thinking both of the GOP base and of what could happen to Fox News as its viewer pool constricts with time. I believe the GOP establishment hopes to win some Chicano votes, particularly from more traditionally minded Chicano families, who actually do tend to be more conservative. And I find it interesting that the hard right response from Limbaugh and his ilk is “well, they’ll never vote for us anyway so why try”.
The Cons are against immigration because they
know it means they will neva, eva, eva, EVA!! win
another election and their party is, for all intents
and purposes, DOA!!!
R.I.P. GOP