Is the new illegal immigration offensive about Miers?
We’ve heard as much, and it does seem so very odd that the solution to the problem can be achieved within a year, when it has been decades in its creation. Odder still that the solution is a “comprehensive approach” and “re-engineering,” when we thought it was (a) not having a wall; (b) not having enough agents; (c) not overruling local government efforts to protect illegals; (d) not using large holding facilities, such as closed military bases, pending deporation; and (e) not having the will to enforce the laws.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department aims without exception to expel all those who enter the United States illegally. “Our goal at DHS (Homeland Security) is to completely eliminate the ‘catch and release’ enforcement problem, and return every single illegal entrant, no exceptions. “It should be possible to achieve significant and measurable progress to this end in less than a year,” Chertoff told a Senate hearing…..”Through a comprehensive approach, we are moving to end this ‘catch and release’ style of border enforcement by reengineering our detention and removal process.”
Certainly it appears that this new get-tough rhetoric, unbacked by anything serious in terms of resources, is a sop to conservatives by an administration whose basic policy seems to have vacillated between indifference to, and approval of, illegal immigration. Whether the cause of the new rhetoric is Miers, 2006, or something else is hard to say.
October 19th, 2005 at 9:11 am
Michelle Malkin believes the new “get tough” policy will apply only to illegal aliens who are OTM (“Other Than Mexican), so it will not satisfy the base. who have been upset about illegal immigration for years (back into the 1980′s) — long before 9/11 made illegal immigration a national security hotbutton.
October 20th, 2005 at 1:28 am
The answer to the headline is YES!
Bush is in trouble because of Miers. Many politicians will fall if this split isn’t fixed, but pure stubborness on the part of King George, means Miers wont be pulled unless and until the world falls in. The carrot and stick tone the Whitehouse is taking (read the Tucker Calson interview with one of the WH hacks) is not one of persuasion, but of attack, while the conservatives also get a nice bone to chew on hoping it distracts them.
Everything has been tried, including damaging the image of Bush’s own wife by using her as a cheap attack dog .(you sexists anti-Miers pigs!)
This final “camels-straw” if you will, has opened all the wounds conservatives have been carrying silently for the greater cause, one of which is the porous borders.
Nothing is more obvious than the fact that what is being announced now (not done-just promised like another “Scalia” was) about the borders could easily been announced anytime during Bush last four or five years. It wasn’t and wouldn’t have been except for the fact that things have suddenly changed.
The change? Miers!