We have problems in America. The most obvious is a busted budget, an overtaxed citizenry (at least for the 53% who pay into the system), another push on gun control, a broken immigration system, a socialist healthcare model and gay marriage rights. The litany of challenges we face goes on. They plague our political discourse with negativity and dissension.
This in a country that can find cures for certain cancers, use technology to discover new galaxies, and perhaps most stunning to this parent, a country that create devices that can hold my children’s attention for more than an hour. And yet why can’t we find a solution to these never ending arguments?
It’s simple, really. Those on the left don’t want America to find a solution! They thrive and survive on the concept of making sure there will always be a victim.
A solution would bring peace. A solution would bring harmony. A solution would also be devastating to the Democratic Party, which thrives on misery and conflict.
Take immigration. The left loves to reignite the immigration debate, if for no other reason than they practically hear the 12 million illegals registering as Democrats every time they hurl around the word “amnesty.” Then they try and invoke sadness by telling stories of families ripped apart by our border, unable to celebrate holidays together because anchor provisions don’t exist. Last, they appeal to our ego by saying American citizens don’t want to do the work these migrant workers perform.
The Republicans play into their trap by offering half-measure solutions and “compromises” which cause major splintering within our own party. Great Tea Party supporters like Sen. Marco Rubio are instantly demonized despite their almost perfect Conservative track record except in this issue.
The truth is the main reason why immigrants aren't going home is because of legislation like this. We are incentivizing people to break the law, just like the 1986 immigration "reform" bill did.
I have sympathy for those who want to become Americans, and those who are here. But I also have sympathy for the hundreds of thousands around the world who want to come here legally. They wait for hours at consulates, go through lotteries, and sometimes that takes years. Why should they go to the back of the line?
Imagine someone breaks into your home and then the police show up and say they can stay because they can't do anything about. Is that going to encourage criminals or discourage them? If we're not a nation of law and order and process than we're not really a nation. It's said the reason we need to pass this law is because we are ineffective at enforcing our existing laws. That's a sad commentary on America.
Gun control is one issue that should unify the Republican base. The other side’s playbook is as tired as it is predictable. There is the constant grandstanding with victim’s family members of mass shootings. What we have yet to see is any press conference held on an inner city street corner with gang members vowing to turn in their handguns.
The playbook also requires trotting out easily punctured myths. Take for example the gun show loophole.” A Bureau of Justice Statistics report on “Firearms Use by Offenders” found that fewer than 1% of U.S. “crime guns” came from gun shows, with repeat offenders even less likely than first-timers to buy guns from any retail source. Gun shows are touted by the left (and right) as a problem- but they’re not.
Pro-gun legislators often will say they’re not looking to ban private sales; they just want background checks to occur. But again, how can a sale be a private sale if it must first be run through a federal agency? But more pressing than any other question, how can ANY of these measures would have or could have stopped Sandy Hook? The gun used was grandfathered in and exempt from an “assault weapons” ban that had been in place in Connecticut since 1994, the mother was allowed to have it. Days before the killing, the shooter went to a Dick’s Sporting Goods to buy a rifle and was denied- the current system worked. He went home, killed his mother and used her gun.
No matter what happens, the left will continue to paint conservatives as bloodthirsty and heartless. The ironic part is that we hear silence from the left when the issue of killing unborn children is raised. Only through the intrepid efforts of a few citizen journalists on the right did Americans ever hear the name Kermit Gosnell.
What would the left do if Republicans proposed a series of bills that gave them everything they have been wishing for yet because the Republicans proposed it, we would get all the credit with the different demographic groups? Would the left fight us as we gave them back a taste of their own medicine, as the Democratic Party would be in certain chaos? I predict we would see that exact same problem occur on the left that is now happening on the right. Infighting, division, demonization, and ultimately implosion would eventually occur, as the Democratic Party would not be able to exist without the concept of a victim. The only problem would be that if we accepted the complete liberal agenda as they propose, America as we know it today would be the ultimate victim.
A bi-partisan group of Senators, known as the Gang of 8, have put together a framework for the immigration reform that supposedly America is waiting for.
Provisions of the agreement have been widely leaked and, from what I see, these Senators should return to the drawing board.
If we are going to tackle immigration reform, there should be agreement at the outset on what objectives should be achieved. In my view, there should be three. It should enhance the freedom, fairness, and security of the nation. If not, why bother?
The Gang of 8 proposal makes no gains on any of these fronts, and on at least one – fairness–makes a bad situation even worse.
It seems to be the way of Washington these days to take issues that are huge and complex, devise comprehensive mega-reforms--too massive for any single person to read or grasp, and pass new law that exchanges one set of problems for different even bigger ones.
We just finished going through this with reforms of our financial services system and our health care system. Now we’re about to do the same with immigration.
It’s not smart to think that in one new law we can secure our border, deal with 11 million illegals now in the country, devise a new way of allowing skilled labor to enter the country, and devise a way for employing unskilled foreign labor.
But Washington is trying to do it all and it seems that another legislative disaster is waiting to happen.
A purported achievement of the Gang of 8 is an agreement between big business and unions regarding the hiring of unskilled foreign labor.
As our nation buckles under the load of excessive government, the proposal here is to give Washington even more power and build yet another new government bureaucracy.
The plan calls for a new Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research. And why yet another new bureaucracy at a time of trillion dollar deficits and cancelled White House tours for students?
Quotas, which can be adjusted over time and market conditions, will be set for how many visas will be permitted for unskilled foreign labor. We’ll need a new army of bureaucrats sitting in Washington to study and report on conditions of different labor markets.
The quota starts at 20,000 and can reach, over time, a ceiling of 200,000. At its peak, illegal immigration was around 500,000 per year. So in boom times, even at full quota, we could still have illegals sneaking over the border.
Government bureaucrats not only will determine how many can be hired, but also what they can be paid.
In this case, “prevailing wage.” “Prevailing wage” is a defining provision of the Davis Bacon Act, passed in 1931 to keep unskilled black labor from competing with union workers – at the time uniformly white – on federally funded projects.
“Prevailing wages” are generally union wages and assure that taxpayers pay top dollar for government construction projects. Now, in the name of immigration reform, the “prevailing wage” standard is brought, for the first time, to the private sector.
Which gets to the fairness issue. Employment set asides designated for unskilled foreign workers, with wage levels set by government, is nothing but a stick in the eye to competing low wage workers in the American market.
It so happens that today these would be black workers. At 13.8%, black unemployment now is almost double the national average. But according to analysis done by Remaking Debate (remakingdebate.org), unemployment among young black men with no high school diploma is 51.6 percent. Unemployment among all black men and women with no high school degree is 30 percent.
The Gang of 8 immigration reform proposal is a non-starter. We must reject any reform that doesn’t make our nation freer, fairer, and more secure.
For decades, Democrats have had success in portraying Republicans as being a party of older white males. They have often portrayed us as insensitive to the needs of our weakest citizens – most notably women and children. Recently, President Obama played the latter card as he announced a new policy on illegal immigration. He predicated his announcement of amnesty for the children of illegal aliens by saying we are a “better nation” than one that deports innocent children. For a moment, I thought he said we were a “better nation” than one that aborts innocent children. Unfortunately, I was mistaken.
President Obama is a smart man. As a supporter of unrestricted abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy, he cannot seriously contend that it is worse to be deported than it is to be aborted. He opposes the deportation of innocent children and supports the abortion of innocent children, not based on principle but on politics. Turning a blind eye to illegal immigration wins votes among young Hispanics. Turning a blind eye to abortion wins votes among young women. But nowhere is there a concern for anyone but the president himself. He is willing to sacrifice children by the millions if it will help secure his re-election.
That no pro-abortion president can call himself “pro-child” is axiomatic. But it is also impossible to support abortion and call oneself pro-woman. This should have been evident in light of the Democrats’ recent opposition to the ban on gender-selective abortions. The ban failed only because of unified Democratic support. This should have tipped women off that they have become pawns in a political game that values women who vote – not women per se.
Regardless, the Democrats and their pro-abortion leader continue to justify abortion by harkening back to the days when “thousands of women” died in back alleys because they had no access to abortion that should have been “safe, legal, and rare.” Of course, human dismemberment can never be “safe.” And if it is not really human dismemberment then there is no reason why it should be “rare.” So we have to call into question the motives of those who would defend its legality. And we must examine carefully its true effects upon women.
After abortion became legal in America, it peaked at 1.6 million abortions per year. That means about 800,000 unborn baby girls were murdered in a single year. The pro-choice lobby has never asserted that 800,000 women would die in back alleys if abortion were illegal. They just continue to say “thousands” did die in back alleys every year when abortion was illegal. This assertion is false – in fact, the “thousands” statistic was made up by NARAL co-founder Bernard Nathanson who later admitted to the fabrication. It is also irrelevant. “Thousands” is less than hundreds of thousands and pro-choicers can offer no convincing evidence that those unborn girls were not human. Each one had beating heart that was detectable at four weeks – long before abortion can be “safely” performed. That means they were living beings. To deny their humanity is simply appalling.
Some readers of that last paragraph will undoubtedly take me to task for assuming that only half of those aborted in America’s peak abortion year were female. I was just being kind with my estimates because I do not have reliable evidence that, in that particular year, a disproportionate number of those aborted were female.
Of course, evidence is irrelevant to my opponents. No amount of evidence of racism among Planned Parenthood founders can shake their allegiance to that organization. Nor can any amount of evidence of Planned Parenthood’s recent facilitation of gender-selective abortion soften that allegiance.
Amnesty notwithstanding, Democrats will continue to slaughter children by the millions. In the process, they will make America a little older, a little whiter, and a little more male-dominated.
We have problems in America. The most obvious is a busted budget, an overtaxed citizenry (at least for the 53% who pay into the system), another push on gun control, a broken immigration system, a socialist healthcare model and gay marriage rights. The litany of challenges we face goes on. They plague our political discourse with negativity and dissension.
