Have I overstated Republican hostility to ratifying the new START? Max Bergmann would say yes:

With the support of the four fairly moderate Republican Senators from New England – Collins (R-ME), Snowe (R-ME), Gregg (R-NH), Brown (R-MA) – and the two retiring moderates – Voinovich (R-OH) and Bennett (R-UT) – the New START treaty would pass.

Yes, I suppose that’s true, but that would require all these “moderates” to be in support of ratification. Last I checked, Scott Brown has been following the lead of John McCain on national security matters, which makes it far from certain that he would vote to ratify. It is a significant mistake to assume that Republicans that happen to have a reputation for being “moderate” on domestic social or fiscal policy will be reliable yes votes. Bennett has expressed support for the treaty, and Gregg and Voinovich are possible, but Collins has already expressed reservations about the treaty, Brown has echoed Romney talking points on tactical nuclear weapons, and Snowe’s position remains uncertain. The one new Republican who will be serving during the lame-duck session, Mark Kirk, is so far uncommitted either way.

These calculations also take for granted that Democrats can still count on all of their 58 votes during the lame-duck session. The administration may need just six more Republican votes, but it is not at all obvious that the votes are going to be there. That assumes that there will be a vote. For one thing, a debate and vote would eat up a lot of time during the session. As Josh Rogin reported last month, there is some Republican opposition to holding any vote on the treaty during the lame-duck session:

Senior GOP senators, most of who have yet to signal their positions on the treaty, are also making it clear they don’t support voting on New START during the lame duck session. They don’t think there’s enough time, and they still have substantive concerns about it.

This could be a tactic to win more concessions from the administration on modernization funding or other issues, or it could simply be a way to drag out the process until ratification becomes impossible.

What was revealed was a world of thought in which authentic patriotism and, more specifically, authentic Zionism, were defined by one’s political beliefs. Incorrect political beliefs do not merely signal a lack of Zionism, but active anti-Zionism.* (When the right uses the label “post-Zionist” this is, for all effective purposes, what they mean.) ~J.L. Wall

This is perfectly recognizable as the same structure of belief that Americanists have. Authentic patriotism and authentic Americanness are defined by one’s political beliefs, and incorrect beliefs are taken as evidence of active anti-Americanism. This is construed very, very narrowly so that it excludes not only adherents of “un-American” ideologies, but also everyone outside of a limited range of political and policy views. Indeed, one reason so many Obama critics prefer to accuse him of being “post-American” is that it allows them to impute anti-American hostlity to Obama without being quite so blunt about it. The “post-American” charge is based on most of the same assumptions as the more outlandish “anti-colonial” sort of attacks, but it sounds less absurd. Despite being extremely polemical, it can come across as being merely descriptive.

We encounter this structure of belief most often during debates over foreign wars and national security. One of the interesting, pernicious effects of much of the right’s growing embrace of democratist rhetoric over the last twenty to thirty years is that it has become possible to accuse someone of insufficient attachment to American values for “failing” to support foreign dissidents. To take just one example, consider this passage from the newly-elected Sen. Mark Kirk’s essay on Iran:

As Americans, how can we justify this apparent retreat from human rights? Is the President afraid that public discussions of human rights abuses in Iran will offend the regime and undermine talks over the Iranian nuclear program? If that’s the case, this Administration has lost its way when it comes to our most basic American values.

Kirk is judging administration’s dedication to “basic American values” on the basis of whether or not it has disbursed funding to Iranian dissident groups. Kirk seems to have no notion that direct U.S. funding of Iranian dissidents might actually be harmful for those dissidents by making them appear to be American agents. Three years ago, the National Iranian-American Council was protesting Bush administration democracy funding:

A coalition spearheaded by an Iranian-American group Thursday urged Congress to cut 75 million dollars in funding for democracy promotion in Iran, saying it did more harm than good.

A total of 26 organizations, including the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and human rights groups, argued there was overwhelming opposition to the program among activists within Iran.

“The money has made all Iranian NGOs targets and put them at great risk,” said Trita Parsi, president of NIAC, which bills itself as the largest Iranian American group in the United States.

“While the Iranian government has not needed a pretext to harass its own population, it would behoove Congress not to provide it with one.”

The activists said that the Iranian government sees the US funding, in a program launched in 2006, as designed to enforce regime change, and conservative leadership elements had used it as a pretext for a crackdown.

In a letter to lawmakers who will merge Senate and House of Representatives appropriations bills containing the funding, the group said the money would be better spent on activities outside Iran to promote civil society.

“We believe this program, intended to aid the cause of democracy in Iran, has failed and has instead invigorated a campaign by conservative regime elements to harass and intimidate those seeking reform and greater openness.”

“Iranian reformers believe democracy cannot be imported,” they wrote.

Kirk doesn’t even attempt to engage with this claim, and I’m fairly sure he would dismiss it out of hand. Like much of the rest of Kirk’s essay, he takes for granted that direct, overt American government support for Iranian dissidents is the best and really only way to lend support to their cause, and more than that he concludes on the basis of this that the “failure” to provide such support demonstrates a lack of “basic American values.” Some of these people are so far gone that they actually believe that the administration is somehow betraying or failing to live up to American values because it is not actively subverting another government on ideological grounds. What makes the accusation that much more odd is that many Iranian dissidents would see the halt to U.S. funding as a desirable development. How could it mean that the administration has “lost its way” concerning basic American values when Iranian democrats don’t want this kind of “help”? Obviously, it can’t, but that won’t stop Kirk and those like him from making support for reckless democratism into a litmus test of what it means to be a true American.

Near the end of his essay, Kirk repeats a couple of overused canards that also deserve some scrutiny:

A dictatorship that murders its own people in the streets on television will not be an honest broker in international affairs. A country that denies its citizens their basic freedoms will not be at peace with its neighbors.

Of course, it is possible for repressive regimes to keep their agreements with other governments, and it often happens that authoritarian regimes are at peace with their neighbors. If Kirk doesn’t want the U.S. to negotiate with Iran on anything so long as it engages in repressive behavior, he can say so, but the one doesn’t actually have much to do with the other. Democratists want to link them because they believe foreign relations should center around using American influence to dictate the internal affairs of other states, but there is no necessary connection between the two things. Internal repression does not have to be associated with deal-breaking or aggression abroad, and governments that mostly do not violate their citizens’ rights do not have to be respectful of international law or peaceful. Indeed, the latter have made a bad habit of breaking international law and starting or escalating wars in recent years, and that has happened partly because shoddy arguments similar to Mark Kirk’s have been taken seriously.

Before the election, I argued that “reformist” conservatives would likely wind up wielding inordinate influence on Republican policy thinking in the event that Republicans won a House majority. This seemed likely to happen because their arguments will seem more timely during a slow recovery than they did before the bursting of the housing bubble, and it seemed likely to happen because there will not be any serious competition from those conservatives that have sometimes been dubbed “traditionalists” or those conservatives who believe that there is no policy problem that a “return to first principles” cannot solve. However, looking at the sheer scale of Republican gains in the House, the political case for following reformist conservatives does not appear all that compelling.

It might be deplorable and maddening to watch, but what incentive do Republicans have to reflect on the errors of their former ways? None. What incentive have their supporters given Republicans to do this? None. What incentive do they have to abandon their tired refrains and formulate policies that address existing problems? None. Yesterday was a clear sign from Republicans’ core supporters that casting some symbolic nay votes and using the right kind of rhetoric are more than enough to keep them loyally voting for the very same people who just a couple years ago were seen (correctly!) as subverting and tainting the party and the conservative movement with their corruption and folly. There was a brief timeout followed by empty promises of doing better, and now one could assume that all or almost all is forgiven. Not only is there no reason why the Republican leadership would act differently this time, but they would be acting irrationally if they sacrificed the benefits of promoting corporate interests for the sake of principles in which they do not really believe.

The midterm results didn’t represent a dramatic shift in the overall public’s views, but they did confirm that rank-and-file Republicans and movement conservatives are quite happy to enable a party that badly disappoints them every time it is given an opportunity to govern. Four years ago, movement conservatives were looking for the exits and claiming that they as conservatives had nothing to do with those unpopular Republicans. Today, Republican triumph is taken as conservative vindication, and the deeply dysfunctional, unhealthy identification of conservatism with the cause of the GOP has become stronger than ever. In a little while, maybe a few months or a year or two years, the people who made John Boehner the next Speaker of the House will be groaning and complaining that Boehner and his colleagues are reverting to their old ways. That is inevitably what Boehner and his colleagues will do, and why wouldn’t they? They have every reason to return to their old habits, and they have just been shown that change or reform is entirely unnecessary to advance their careers. For a while, the disillusioned movement conservatives may be receptive to critiques of Republican leadership, but as soon as the 2012 campaign gets going they will begin rushing back to empower another batch of Republicans so that their interests can be neglected some more.

The refomist case takes for granted that Republicans need to have relevant policy ideas to be able to compete as a national party with a changing electorate. The GOP has just won one of its largest midterm victories in the last century while having no relevant policy ideas (as opposed to slogans, of which it has many) and relying heavily on its traditional constituencies. Yes, it was a midterm election and the electorate was more heavily slanted towards constituencies that tend to favor Republicans, but that isn’t going to register unless 2012 proves to be a particularly bad year. If the GOP’s overwhelming concern is to acquire and wield power, rather than actually serve the interests of its constituents, the brief four-year period in the minority would seem to be a small price to pay if the party can come storming back to better than 2004-era levels of control in the House without doing anything to earn it.

Reformists argue that Republicans have to be more than a rejectionist party, but rejectionism has rescucitated the party and undone most of the political losses of the last six years. It doesn’t matter that this is akin to the reanimation of a zombie. As long as there is some sign of life or undeath, that will be enough. Reformists and dissident conservatives alike have insisted that Republicans have to answer for their years of disastrous misrule and incompetence before they could hope to win back the public’s trust. Granted, the GOP doesn’t really have the public’s trust now, but they have been entrusted with much more power anyway, and they did this with an unreformed, unchanged party leadership. The Republican Party that the public rejected and repudiated four years ago has not meaningfully changed, and all that it had to do to regain power was engage in reflexive opposition and wait. Even if one believes, as I do, that time is not on their side, and that they are throwing away their future with the next generation, why would the current Republican leadership care? Their preferred way of doing things is to reap the benefits in the present and defer costs and responsibilities until later.

During the last few months, I have been reading the argument that angry Americans want to restore some measure of justice and order in society so that rewards go to the deserving and failures are not bailed out. It is a significant problem that the chosen method to express this anger has been to reward the undeserving and promote the failures.

In his Senate victory speech, Republican megastar Marco Rubio announced that “America is the single greatest nation in all of human history. A place without equal in the history of all mankind” because “almost every other place in the world…what you were going to be when you grow up was determined for you.” Almost every other place in the world? From China to India to Brazil, hundreds of millions of people are rising economically in ways their parents could scarcely have imagined, in part because their governments are investing in infrastructure in the way the United States did in the late nineteenth century. The American dream of upward mobility is alive and well, just not in America. And rather than looking at what those other countries are doing right, the Republicans have taken refuge in an anti-government ideology premised on the lunatic notion that America is the only truly free and successful country in the world. ~Peter Beinart

If there has been one unifying theme to the GOP’s attacks over the last two years, it seems to me that the “lunatic notion” Beinart identifies is it. For the purposes of his own argument, Beinart exaggerates the extent of “anti-government ideology” in all of this, but there is no question that Republicans have sought refuge in a form of American exceptionalism that has remarkably little to do with the real America. Republicans have made a defense of “American exceptionalism” the thing that is supposed to distinguish them from Obama, and in order to make that claim they have defined American exceptionalism to mean an absurd overconfidence in the political and economic uniqueness and supremacy of America. To take pride in economic opportunity available here, they feel that they must deny that it exists elsewhere. Lacking answers for, or even awareness of, the growing social and economic stratification in their own country, they project it to “almost every other place in the world.” Rubio’s CPAC speech in February marked him as one of the strongest advocates of this notion, which he repeated again in his victory speech last night. It didn’t matter to Rubio then that the U.S. actually lags behind a great many industrialized nations in terms of social mobility, and it still doesn’t matter.

I have cited the old Chesteron quote about patriotism from The Napoleon of Notting Hill many times before, but it bears repeating:

The patriot never, under any circumstances, boasts of the largeness of his country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of its smallness.

The sort of American exceptionalism that has become the defining feature of Republican rhetoric over at least the last two years seems to require “boasting of the largeness” of America at every turn. This is not healthy admiration for one’s country, but an idolatry that prevents its devotees from seeing things as they are. Last night greatly empowered that idolatry.

Via Andrew, Marc Lynch worries about the foreign policy implications of tonight’s vote:

Dan Drezner’s going to bed early tonight because he doesn’t think the outcome of Congressional elections matters much for foreign policy. But at least on Middle East issues, that’s crazy. If the GOP takes Congress, it might overwhelmingly approve an Iran sanctions bill which ties the hands of President Barack Obama’s administration and undermines its efforts to construct an effective negotiation strategy. Or it might irresponsibly fail to confirm ambassadors to Syria and Turkey, two key players in the region, for no good reason.

Certainly, irrational hostility towards Iran is worrisome. Consider Mark Kirk’s rather laughable essay in “support” of the Green movement, and ask yourself if you think his foreign policy contribution in the Senate will be a net positive in the event that he wins tonight. Lynch is right that there is no good reason to refuse to confirm these ambassadors, but Republican foreign policy leaders have reasons that reason knows not. I remember Ackerman mentioning hostility to Frank Ricciardone’s nomination as ambassador of Turkey, which Josh Rogin detailed here. My favorite quote from the Rogin report is this quote from Danielle Pletka:

Now is not the time for us to have an ambassador in Ankara who is more interested in serving the interests of the local autocrats [emphasis mine-DL] and less interested in serving the interests of his own administration.

Some democratists are bothered by Ricciardone’s understanding of why the Egyptian government was annoyed by the Bush administration’s anti-terrorist authoritarianism alongside its promotion of the “freedom agenda” in the Arab world. Perhaps some of them also think that the current Turkish government is too authoritarian, despite its efforts to hold its military more accountable to civilian courts. Ricciardone is eminently qualified, actually knows the local language, and would be well-received in Ankara. It seems clear that he should be confirmed. Presumably these facts will be used against him as proof that he is far too familiar with other nations, and has a dangerous habit of understanding their concerns. The fight over Ricciardone’s confirmation is just a stand-in for more general Republican hostility to Turkey since the Gaza flotilla raid and resentment that State Department FSOs are not mindless adherents of the failed “freedom agenda.” The bad news from tonight’s election results is that there are going to be several more Republicans in the Senate sympathetic to the nonsensical attacks on Ricciardone than there were before.

More to the point, if Israelis and Palestinians are really ready to conclude a peace treaty, no Congress will deny the president the security, economic, or technical assistance they need. In this regard, the national interest pursued in a smart way by a capable president always triumphs narrower domestic policy interests. ~Aaron David Miller

Miller is kidding, right? Admittedly, all of this speculative, since none of us, Miller included, believes that the Israelis and Palestinians will be “really ready” to conclude a peace treaty in our lifetimes. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that this improbable event occurs. Does Miller really think that its implementation wouldn’t be held hostage by opposition in Congress? Obama’s opponents in Congress fundamentally reject Obama’s handling of Israel policy and believe him to be an enemy of Israel. They would be the last to accept a treaty, because they would be convinced that the treaty had been “forced” on Israel or was too favorable to the Palestinians. We don’t need to be able to see the futue to know that Obama’s partisan foes extend their reflexive hostility to foreign affairs. Just look at the lock-step rejectionism that has greeted the new START.

The new START is a good test of Miller’s argument. The arms reduction treaty is something that has overwhelming support from the military, most arms control experts, and former national security officials, and it is a good example of Obama trying to do “something serious abroad.” It is also almost certainly dead, thanks to near-universal Republican hostility. It won’t even be debated during the lame-duck session if there aren’t enough votes to ratify, and after January it has no chance of passing with the addition of five or six new Republicans in the Senate. A modest, but important arms control treaty will go down in flames to satisfy a Republican fantasy that they are resisting “appeasement” and “weakness,” and the U.S. will be worse off for it. We can expect more of this in the coming years if the GOP should win a majority in the House.

So I agree with Miller that Obama should not focus on foreign policy for the next two years, but that is because anything substantial he is likely to achieve will most likely undermined or sabotaged by political opposition at home.

There are parts of this Michael Lind article that make sense. Of course, Lind overdoes it when he tries to give an entirely ideological explanation for the weakening of center-left parties in Europe and America. Dan is right that it is not enough to say, “The Third Way did it!” and leave it at that. Circumstances specific to each national electorate explain the fortunes of different center-left parties in Europe and America. Still, it is important to acknowledge that center-left parties over the last 20 years followed the advice of “centrists,” won a few elections, but alienated or disappointed many of their reliable constituencies in the process without gaining many loyal new supporters. The size of the GOP win in 1994 was made possible by NAFTA, and the thing fueling general disgust with the Democrats today has been the financial sector bailout as much as anything else. These were hardly great moments in left-liberal or social democratic governance. They were quite plainly the products of a Democratic Party that wanted to show that it was friendly to business and finance. The shift to the “center” that made Democrats competitive in the last 20 years has also created a much more unstable and shaky coalition, and it has been falling apart under the pressure of the recession and slow recovery.

There is something to be said for an argument that rightly identifies the “centrists” in center-left parties as chief contributors to the financial crisis and the political undoing of those parties. Conservatives who look askance at the cozy relationship between Republican office-holders and corporate and financial interests can appreciate that it is the “centrists” in power for the last two decades who bear most of the blame for the public loathing of the parties to which they belong, and they are also the ones who bear most of the blame for the policies that have created our current predicament.

There is also something worth considering in the claim that disillusioned, neglected, abused core constituencies gradually abandon party leaders that cease to represent them and their interests. Faced with the same old Republican leadership that excels at doing just that, we should hope that this is true. Center-left parties’ indifference to the public’s concerns over immigration may not be the main cause of their weakness, but it helps explain how they have been collapsing from France in 2002 to Hungary in the last parliamentary election. While I am guessing he will hang on, Raul Grijalva gave himself a much more competitive race in AZ-07 than he should have ever had by supporting a boycott of Arizona on account of its immigration enforcement law. The Democrats will likely lose PA-11 to a strong restrictionist candidate in northeastern Pennsylvania. Immigration is an issue that has and will continue to divide both parties in the U.S., but to some extent this division is more dangerous for center-left parties because their natural constituencies are so much more adversely affected by large-scale immigration.

We should not forget Gordon Brown’s participation in creating New Labour and serving as Blair’s supposed economics and financial wizard. His tenure as Chancellor was to Blair’s government what Bob Rubin’s turn at the Treasury was to Clinton’s second term. It is hard to separate Brown’s political collapse from the consequences of Britain’s loose monetary policy, housing bubble, overreliance of the government on revenues derived from the financial sector, and the financial crash. Brown’s expertise was suposed to be in economic competence and financial management, and as PM he presided over the disaster that his decisions as Chancellor had helped create. Blair got out just in time avoid taking the blame for his government’s policies. It was Brown’s demonstration of incompetence and the public’s recognition that Brown’s claims of expertise had been nonsense that broke Labour’s seemingly unshakeable grip on power. By the time “bigotgate” came along, Brown was already finished.

There isn’t much to add to the chorus of laughter that has greeted David Broder’s silly column advocating war with Iran as a means of economic stimulus. It should be enough to mention that no less than Daniel Pipes proposed an Iranian war as Obama’s political salvation, which should have thoroughly discredited the idea by now. What I do find worrisome is that Broder is nothing if not the embodiment of Washington conventional wisdom, so when he casually claims that “Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century” it confirms that this nonsense is widely shared and unquestioningly held to be true.

For his part, George Friedman at Stratfor speculated on this scenario without endorsing an attack. What I find interesting about Friedman’s analysis is that he seems to assume that war with Iran can solve Obama’s political problem at home. Friedman puts it this way:

The most obvious justification would be to claim that Iran is about to construct a nuclear device. Whether or not this is true would be immaterial. First, no one would be in a position to challenge the claim, and, second, Obama’s credibility in making the assertion would be much greater than George W. Bush’s, given that Obama does not have the 2003 weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle to deal with and has the advantage of not having made such a claim before. Coming from Obama, the claim would confirm the views of the Republicans, while the Democrats would be hard-pressed to challenge him. In the face of this assertion, Obama would be forced to take action. He could appear reluctant to his base, decisive to the rest. The Republicans could not easily attack him. Nor would the claim be a lie. Defining what it means to almost possess nuclear weapons is nearly a metaphysical discussion. It requires merely a shift in definitions and assumptions. This is a cynical scenario, but it can be aligned with reasonable concerns.

Part of the trouble is that the claim really would be a lie. For that matter, Obama has given the hawks all they could want in Afghanistan, but that has not stopped them from railing against him as the second coming of Jimmy Carter because he set a withdrawal deadline. If Obama claimed that Iran was about to construct a nuclear device, Republican hawks would react in a few different ways, and none of them would help Obama politically. Many would formally support the military action, but they would happily attack Obama in the process. Some would berate Obama for having let things get to this point, and they would actually blame him for having previously “failed” to stop it. Despite having spent decades fretting about Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons, they would pin an Iranian bomb solely on Obama, whose alleged weakness and “appeasement” invited the Iranian threat. McCain would be all over cable television saying something like, “This is what happens when you try to engage with dictatorships. Our military is paying the price for the President’s failed leadership.” No doubt they would throw in some added shots at his Israel and Afghanistan decisions in the process. “While Obama was wasting our resources on nation-building in Afghanistan, the real threat was gathering in Iran,” they would tell us. It won’t matter if this is consistent with their own previous statements or not.

Others would suddenly discover that they no longer trust the executive with unchecked, arbitrary power to make war on the other side of the world on the basis of shoddy evidence, and they would start calling for Obama’s impeachment. Other hawks would question the timing of the attack, and they would say that it was just a way for Obama to distract attention from whatever nefarious deeds he and his administration were carrying out back home. Some of the more aggressive hawks would condemn Obama for “limiting” the military action to air strikes and naval operations, and would call for the insertion of ground troops. This is not hard to imagine, since this is exactly what some of the more aggressive interventionists did during the bombing of Yugoslavia. Technically, these hawks “supported” Clinton during the bombing, but they were happy to find fault with him for being insufficiently aggressive.

As for his own party, enough Democratic office-holders were burned by trusting the Bush administration that they would not fall for the same ruse again. Some activists would be good partisans and support Obama, but for most progressives an Iranian war would be the last straw that confirmed the strong continuities between the Bush and Obama administrations. It probably wouldn’t matter whether the war went reasonably “well” or poorly, as the decision to start another war would provoke a primary or third-party challenge from the left that would wreck Obama’s re-election hopes, and it would push the majority into the arms of the Republican nominee in 2012. Then again, there is hardly any way that the war could actually go “well,” as a war would consolidate the hold the Iranian government has on the country, cripple the opposition, destroy any gains Obama has made in repairing America’s reputation abroad, provoke significant Iranian retaliation in the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and it would threaten Russian and Chinese economic interests enough that it could create problems for the U.S. in other regions that aren’t even being considered in these scenarios. On top of all that, an attack on Iran would only slow, not eliminate, Iran’s development of its nuclear program.

Ross:

Jonathan Chait and Stephen Spruiell have already chewed over this a bit, but neither have expressed what I think is an appropriate amount of mystification at the idea that immigration reform, of all issues, represents the toughest possible test for Republicans, and a target of opportunity for the Democrats. This is the kind of thing that makes me seriously doubt the White House’s political acumen.

I agree. Prior to anti-bailout anger beginning in 2008, hostility to the worst-of-both-worlds immigration bill in 2007 was the one thing that could unite substantial numbers of people across the political spectrum against the Washington consensus position. The hostility was strong enough to prevent passage of the legislation and make any future “comprehensive reform” bill politically radioactive for years to come. There is almost nothing that could more quickly turn Obama’s labor allies against him and rile up public opposition faster than a push for a new immigration bill. Obama might even be able to bring Republican leaders in the House along by proposing a guest-worker scheme that would please Boehner and Pence, but regardless of what the party leaders accept there would be a rebellion in the ranks of both parties in the House. Obama would expose himself to a punishing battle he couldn’t win, and he would hand restrictionists in the GOP an opportunity to inflict yet another embarrassing defeat on their own leaders. In the process, any compromise bill that might conceivably have enough support in the Senate would include so many provisions for bringing in cheap, unprotected labor and just enough fines for illegal immigrants that it would offend most of the Democratic constituencies interested in “comprehensive reform.” Another fight over immigration policy would probably have a couple salutary political effects. It would remind leaders in both parties what a political disaster advocating amnesty is, and it would force House Republicans to choose between representing their constituents or representing corporate interests.

Like its mishandling of Arizona’s immigration law, the administration’s plan to pick an immigration fight with Republican House leadership next year suggests that they truly don’t understand that advocates of “reform” (amnesty) are very much on the losing side of the issue. As far as Obama’s political interests are concerned, pushing an immigration bill would be a strange act of self-immolation.