Is The KKK The Tip Of The Spear For House Republicans On Immigration Policy?

Ted Cruz has gotten most of the blame for making the House Republicans look like a bunch of monkeys in the immigration debate-- and especially in the debate about how to handle the Central American refugees on our southern border. But a House GOP whip gave equal blame to Alabama KKK-sympathizer Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. The House leadership's plans weren't racist or punitive enough for Sessions and, like Cruz, he worked right-wing extremists in the House to oppose it.

You may not remember that in 1986 Sessions was rejected by the Senate for a federal judgeship because of his "ties" to the KKK and his espousal of their sick worldview. After 2 Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee-- plus every Democrat-- voted against recommending Sessions' confirmation, Reagan withdrew the nomination. Alabama racists soon elected him to the Senate, where he's one of the most extreme right-wing members of that body-- and one of the most blatantly racist, of course. And obstructionist. Watch that interview with a KKK "imperial wizard" from a couple days ago. Sessions' beloved Klan is advocating shooting some of these children to solve the problem. "If we can’t turn ‘em back, I think if we pop a couple of ‘em off and leave the corpses laying on the border, maybe they’ll see that we’re serious about stopping immigration." Where do people get ideas that saying something like that is OK. From their leaders-- like Cruz, Sessions, King, Gohmert and Bachmann?

This morning Bachmann-- ecstatic that the GOP extremists had gotten Boehner to change his already repulsive, racist border bill into something much more repulsive and much more racist-- said it is all about "stopping the invasion of illegal foreign nationals into our country."

When the KKK ignorantly whines that these children are potential murderers and that they are "bringing with them the third world diseases," they are just echoing Know Nothing human garbage like Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert.

Last Friday in the House, Gohmert spoke out against the $3.7 billion in emergency funds President Obama requested to address the border crisis. He called Texas "a state that is being invaded [by]...more than twice as many than invaded France on D-Day," and urged Rick Perry "to use whatever means, whether it's troops, even using ships of war," to stop the invasion.

Most of the children who have been apprehended at the border are under ten years old. According to Louie Gohmert, these young children are comparable to soldiers invading the beaches of Normandy, and Texas should send warships to fight them.

The average KKK member has an extremely low IQ and many are barely able to function in a complex, technological world. (Just look at the imbecile playing dress-up and parading around as imperial wizard in the video.) So when a "respected" congressman or senator makes their bigotry look mainstream, they move even further into murderous neo-Nazi mania. Today NDN president Simon Rosenberg explains why Latinos see Boehner's House of Representatives as the most anti-Hispanic ever00 and not just the fringe loons enabling the KKK idiots.

Last year it was conventional wisdom that the existential threat posed by the fleeing of Hispanics from the Republican Party would produce moderation on immigration reform and other matters in this Congress. What is remarkable is that the exact opposite has happened. Consider what the House has done or is proposing to do in this Congress:

• Denied legalization and a path to citizenship to 12m undocumented immigrants, despite overwhelming public, Republican Party and right of center constituency support for Comprehensive Immigration Reform. This will be the second time in the past decade that a GOP House refused to take up a bi-partisan Senate immigration reform bill.

• Passed dozens of bills designed to strip health insurance from millions and even perhaps tens of millions of Hispanics through repeal of the ACA. No group in America is going to be benefit more from the ACA more than the Hispanic community.

• Paul Ryan’s budget framework guarantees dramatic cuts in public school spending, schools Hispanics rely on for their pursuit of the American Dream.

• By passing the “King Amendment” in 2013, the House went on record for stripping legal status and work permits for over 500,000 DACA recipients, and once again making them eligible for immediate deportation. I think this is the first time the Republicans advanced policies that would take existing legal status from a group legally resident and working in the US and advocate their removal from the country.

• The King Amendment would also revoke an Obama Administration policy that specifies that law-abiding undocumented immigrants were no longer priorities for deportation. The King Amendment would restore the threat of imminent deportation to every undocumented immigrant in the country.

• Block efforts to increase the minimum wage, something which would be particularly beneficial to the Hispanic immigrant community.

• End existing legal protections for Central American minors (and only Central American minors) apprehended at the border, denying them internationally negotiated and sanctioned opportunities to apply for asylum and other waivers which would allow them to remain in the US. These rights would remain for European and Asian children, for example.

• Deny funds requested by the Administration for swifter adjudication of the unaccompanied minors at the border, humane detention facilities for the kids here, and a humane repatriation process that would ensure the kids were not sent to violent and potentially lethal circumstances. These are just the things I came up with this morning. Am sure there are more.

Taken together, it is hard to imagine an agenda more hostile to the interests of Hispanics in the US than what the House GOP has done this Congress. Rather than embracing this critical emerging part of our fast changing country, the House Republicans seem to be doubling down on a politics incredibly hostile to their presence here.

By pushing the bill so far to the right, it will be impossible for any Democrats except a few freaks from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party like Barrow, Matheson, Lipinski and Cuellar to support it-- let alone any senators or President Obama. As GOP racist-in-chief, Steve King brayed this morning, "The changes brought into this are ones I’ve developed and advocated for over the past two years. It’s like I ordered it off the menu." So Obama will have to act on his own... while those clowns are off on their 5 week unearned vacation.

This probably will entail shifting more resources from interior enforcement to the border. Republicans are already furious over Obama’s de-prioritization of deportations from the interior, even though that has actually directed resources toward the border, and they are wary of his coming unilateral action to expand that approach. Meanwhile, they objected to Obama’s request for border funding because it spent too much on humanitarian relief for arriving migrants. So it seems likely any further moves in this direction-- whether on funding shifts or on expanding deportation relief-- will further inflame them.

And this underscores a key fact about this whole debate: It is precisely because Republicans won’t move out of their comfort zone on immigration-- where the only response to the immigration crisis they can entertain is further militarizing of the border and expedited/expanded deportations-- that Obama is now going to resort to more action on his own.

If Republicans had passed immigration reform that included some form of legal status for the 11 million, it would have wiped away the need for Obama’s deferred-deportation program and we wouldn’t even be talking about expanding it, meaning no need for Republicans to fear more Obummer Lawlessness. Reform would have spent more on border security and helped unclog the courts, speeding the removal of arriving migrants-- which Republicans support. If it had passed-- or if Republicans gave him the money he’s asked for to deal with the current crisis-- we would not be talking about him acting alone to shift more resources from interior enforcement to the border, either.

No question, the politics of Obama’s coming executive action are dicey for Democrats. But Dems can bolster their position by contrasting unilateral problem solving with GOP inaction on the border-- including the fact that they would not act because they want ever more deportations from the interior-- and on immigration reform in general. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to what this Texas Republican has to say about the House GOP caucus:

“You can’t go home!” Rep. Blake Farenthold shouted in an interview…He suggested such a move would send a terrible message to Obama: “You’re right, we’re a do-nothing Congress.”

This is exactly what Dems will be arguing.

This afternoon, President Obama referred to the House Republicans' insane maneuverings to please their powerful racist contingent "the most extreme and unworkable versions of a bill that they already know is going nowhere… They're not even trying to actually solve the problem. This is a message bill that they couldn't pull off yesterday, so they made it a little more extreme so maybe they can pass it today. Just so they can check a box before they're leaving town for a month."