Monday, June 18, 2007 - 6:12pm
"Heads up, Republicans. You want to be the majority party in 2008? Make the choice simple. Security versus haggling on details. Safety versus partisan bickering. Simple common sense versus Washington silliness. Secure the border, or not."
It was only a matter of time. The Jihadists are coming here. I'd been hoping that we'd never see a headline like this, but here it is.
Little hint for those in Washington: Forget about comprehensive immigration reform. Eventually, we will have to do something with the 12 million illegal immigrants who are already here. Logic and compassion demand it.
But now isn't the time.
Ostensibly, everyone supports a secure border. Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives. It's political suicide to say otherwise.
I believe it's time for Congressional Republicans to put on the full-court press. Someone needs to draft a border security bill, a good one, that deals only with the nuts and bolts of actually securing the border. Then, we need to mobilize everyone in arguing for it. Get talk radio going, start the blogs swarming, get our best and most authoritative spokesmen on all the national TV shows (I'm thinking Shadegg, Pence, Cantor, Boehner, Kyl, everyone), talking up the bill in light of this troubling new revelation. Then the grassroots gets to work. If the conservative grassroots could rally to stop the Senate's comprehensive immigration reform bill, against all odds and with a Democrat majority, imagine what we could do on this most logical of steps.
This is not an evenly divided issue. The American people support border security, by great majorities. No moderate Democrat could vote against a simple proposal to secure the border, with a promise to revisit the comprehensive reform at a later date.
Heads up, Republicans. You want to be the majority party in 2008? Make the choice simple. Security versus haggling on details. Safety versus partisan bickering. Simple common sense versus Washington silliness. Secure the border, or not.
This will require the kind of forward thinking that Congress has been lacking lately. It requires a unified Republican front to get it moving. But once the American people hear that someone wants to secure the border first, and that a bill has been introduced to do it, there is no way the Dems can resist.
Do an end-run around the Democrat majority. Take the case to the American people. Want to reclaim the immigration issue? Want to re-establish the GOP brand? Want to set the agenda again?
This is how.
America's continued safety depends on it.
