I don't like opportunists and people willing to sell out the principles they profess to have in order to curry favor with people. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is most annoying when he is most sanctimonious. He has now done the political version of a Greg Louganis double back flip dive:
Liberal columnist E. J. Dionne elucidates:
Is the GOP shedding a birthright?
Particularly depressing is that the idea of repealing the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" was given momentum by one of the nation's most reasonable conservatives.
"People come here to have babies," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). "They come here to drop a child. It's called, 'drop and leave.' To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child's automatically an American citizen. That shouldn't be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons."
For some reason I am not surprised that the liberals' second favorite (or is that second most reasonable?) conservative has joined in:
Just as dispiriting: Sen. John McCain, another once-brave champion of immigration reform, has tried to duck the issue. McCain, facing an Arizona Republican primary challenge on Aug. 24, has said he supports "the concept of holding hearings" on the meaning of the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship clause.
First of all, this has nothing to do with immigration and securing our borders. It is pure political pandering, hoping that the electorate is too dim to recognize how they are being played for fools. Second, there is no chance of a repeal of the 14th amendment (which is a bit of a red herring in any event) occurring any time soon, meaning within the next decade. Such a change in our Constitution would require a tremendous amount of preparatory work and the support of a large majority of our population. It is not going to happen unless there are remarkable shifts in the electorate.
Both Democrats and Republicans have failed us in the last 10 years. They have failed on securing our borders and bringing order and rudimentary fairness (not to mention American interests) to the immigration mess; they have failed to bring our fiscal house in order; they have failed to articulate and define the major struggles of our generation between freedom and tyranny.
It is likely that in November we will be left with a divided government. Paralysis is certainly preferable to the further damaging of our country's institutions and erosion of our freedoms that are part of a one party government, but will also leave us poorly able to respond to emerging problems. I suppose that is the best we can hope for at this point.
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