Immediately after last year?s presidential election, a former Republican governor in the bipartisan monthly discussion group I belong to warned its more conservative members that their party?s fortunes wouldn?t improve unless the GOP became more inclusive.
Actually, he said, unless the party reaches out to Hispanics and other ethnic groups ? and to women ? the chances of sending a Republican to the White House in the foreseeable future were slim to none.
If the House Republican majority carries through with its threats to reject key provisions of the big bipartisan Senate immigration bill, there?s a good chance the GOP will move further down the road to being just a handful of ideological obstructionists.
Immigration is one of the nation?s thorniest problems. The most viable solution depends on creating a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants ? even if it?s an arduous, 13-year process, as the Senate bill provides. However, House leaders and ultraconservatives in the GOP caucus have announced they want nothing to do with granting illegal aliens the benefits of the American dream.
The Senate bill isn?t the best ever written, but it goes a long way to easing the tension and providing a ration-?al approach to the growing immigration problem. It doubles the U. S. Border Patrol force and provides for 700 miles of fence along the U.S. boundary with Mexico. At the same time, it finally brings some sense to how we treat those already here, especially those young men and women illegally brought into this country as children who?ve shown they?re on their way to becoming productive members of society.
It doesn?t seem to matter to the House Republicans that one of their party?s better hopes for 2016, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, put his weight behind the bipartisan measure that garnered the votes of an additional 13 colleagues. It was hailed as the first real, forward-looking compromise in a Congress bound up by partisanship for much of the last decade.
This situation has earned Congress as a whole the worst ratings in recent memory and convinced a whole lot of Americans that it is a failed institution.
If much of the House majority intends to look backward rather than forward, little can be done to save the GOP from self-inflicted exclusivity and ultimate political impotence and minority status.
During the post-election discussion in my group, the former governor?s warnings drew many murmurs of dissent, discouraging the notion that common sense would prevail. Perhaps it was the fact that there were too many older, white guys in the crowd.
Dan K. Thomasson is a syndicated columnist.
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