Conservative Principles Now

In another affirmation of the truism, “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time,” President Obama’s base has noticed that his promise to push through an amnesty bill looks pretty hollow. “Thirty-seven words,” writes Ruben Navarrette Jr for CNN, “In this week’s State of the Union address — which was more than 7,000 words long and lasted longer than an hour — all President Obama devoted to the issue of immigration reform was 37 measly words.”

Ruben is right. Something is afoot.

The White House commitment to amnesty is anemic.

Loss of appetite for amnesty does not end with Obama. The President expects the Congress to lead. Speaker Pelosi has already said the House won’t take up the bill unless the Senate passes it. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY has so little confidence in his bill that he would not bring it to the floor before Christmas out fear members would be savaged over the proposed legislation during the holiday break. The best guess is that they will throw something on the floor this spring, watch it die a quick death, and then claim: they tried.

Apparently, not everyone on the left thinks that is a good idea. Topping the list is Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos. He wrote a commentary for The Hill arguing the best way for the progressive cause to regain momentum is to push through a massive amnesty bill. He is dead wrong.

There are three reasons amnesty is not likely to happen—reasons that explain why Obama should rightly have a limited appetite for anything related to immigration reform.

1. The bill is a really bad idea. An amnesty bill won’t solve the problem of illegal immigration. It will just make it worse. We know that for a fact. That is exactly what happened in 1986.

2. The notion that this is a winnable issue for the Congress is, pardon me, laughable. Pelosi can get any bill she wants passed in the House. All she needs is 218 votes. The Democrats control 256. She won’t move on immigration because she knows members will get hammered by the American people for endorsing amnesty.

3. It is wrong to frame immigration reform as a left-right issue and assert that liberals want to solve the problem and conservatives do not. The Heritage Foundation, for example, has been a strong proponent of honest and sensible reforms.

No, Obama will walk away from amnesty because politically it’s a loser for him.

Sadly, the issue will only get solved when the White House quits playing politics with immigration and adopts the security, enforcement, citizenship, and workplace reforms needed to get employers the workers they need; protect US sovereignty and security; respect the rule of law; and address the issue of those unlawfully here in a rationale and compassionate manner.

Massive amnesty is not practical, rationale, compassionate, or fair. It’s a bad place to start.

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that the health care legislation he is drafting will include a government-run health insurance plan, or as many on the left like to call it “the public option.” The new wrinkle that Reid has thrown into the proposal is an “opt out” clause which would require states to pass legislation by 2014 rejecting participation in the federal government run plan. None of the committees in the House or Senate ever even voted on this new opt out scheme. But that does not really matter. Whether it is first implemented through a co-op, or a trigger, or an opt out, the end goal is the same: government-run health care for all Americans.

Hotel Harry Reid: Reid provided very few details for his “opt out” proposal, but here is what we do know: the government run plan would be available on the first day that major provisions of Obamacare would take effect in 2013, and states would have until 2014 to pass legislation declining participation in the program. This means that a one-vote majority of obstructionists in one chamber of a state legislature, by refusing to act, can consign a state’s residents to an eternity of government-run health care. In 17 states Democrats control both houses of the legislature and the state house. In another 24, Democrats control at least one legislative chamber or the governor’s mansion. That leaves a total of only 9 states where Republicans run the entire show — Texas, Utah, South Carolina, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Idaho, Florida, and Georgia. That means Americans in 41 states are all but guaranteed to have no choice but to endure the government run health plan. What opt out really means is: You’re already checked in, and if you don’t do so by 2014, you can never leave.

The Co-op Co-opt: Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Kent Conrad (D-ND) have both pushed slightly different plans they both call co-ops. However, they both share the same fundamental flaws: advantageous federal funding and regulation designed to tilt the playing field in their direction. Heritage fellows Edmund Haislmaier, Dennis Smith, and Nina Owcharenko have explained why this model is guaranteed to fail: “Simply calling some form of a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) a “cooperative,” for instance, would be only another type of public plan in disguise. … One need look no further than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to see how GSEs can distort the market and leave taxpayers with huge liabilities. Decades of market distortions generated by their implicit government backing, compounded by the effects of repeated political meddling by Congress, put those GSEs at the very epicenter of the mortgage market collapse that triggered the current financial crisis and recession.”

The Trigger Trap: A trigger is a legislative tool that would put in place automatic benchmarks that if not met, would immediately unleash the government-run system into the market. For example, if 95% of Americans as defined by the bill, don’t have adequate health coverage by a certain date, the public option would be “triggered.” What a trigger does is hold off the tough decision until future, uncertain circumstances. The public option would essentially become law today, but not go into effect until an undetermined time when economic conditions could be even worse. Had Congress enacted a trigger to save Clintoncare, the trigger would have forced states to implement HMOs at exactly the time everyone was moving away from that overly rigid version of managed care. We don’t want to repeat that mistake. It is a travesty of democracy because it allows legislators to vote for a plan now, but passes the blame for the catastrophic consequences onto their successors.

Throughout the legislative process the White House has coyly denied that the establishment of a government run health plan was essential to their health care plan. But in 2003, President Barack Obama told the AFL-CIO: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. … And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.” Opt out, the trigger, and co ops will not get to government run health care immediately. They will all take time to develop. But no matter what road they try and bring Americans down, the destination is always the same: everybody in out, nobody out; that is, was, and always will be Obama’s ultimate goal.

Quick Hits:

• Political uncertainty on health care, taxes, energy, and transportation is putting a freeze on small business hiring.
• In July, Obama administration officials said companies could make 80 million to 120 million flu vaccine doses by mid-October, but only about 16.5 million doses have become available so far.
• According to federal tax records, the AARP stands to reap millions in royalties should Obamacare become law.
• House Democrats are using an annual spending bill to exempt home state interests from new environmental rules which the party typically supports.
• Britain’s climate chief Lord Stern says a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.