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The Consequences of Amnesty for the GOP

Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that an amnesty bill wouldn’t be the end of the GOP: We cannot predict how the addition of new immigrants will pressure and cleave the Democratic coalition. But, in general, our two political parties have accumulated so much inherited power, including the power to change, that it is difficult to imagine […]

Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that an amnesty bill wouldn’t be the end of the GOP:

We cannot predict how the addition of new immigrants will pressure and cleave the Democratic coalition. But, in general, our two political parties have accumulated so much inherited power, including the power to change, that it is difficult to imagine either of them ever being mortally wounded.

Dougherty’s main point about the staying power of the major parties seems right. Our major parties have existed for over a century and a half, and while they have undergone significant changes neither one has ever been in real danger of disappearing or being reduced to a “fringe.” We have every reason to expect that there will be something calling itself the Republican Party contesting elections all over the country in fifty years, but we can’t know what the make-up and size of its coalition will be. Having said that, there have been periods when one party is so dominant that the other is rarely able to win majorities except in presidential elections, and sometimes not even then. It seems likely that an amnesty bill or something like it would compound the GOP’s existing electoral problems to the point that Republicans would once again be the minority party in Congress most of the time, and they would also win presidential elections much more rarely than they have in recent decades.

The problem for the GOP in this scenario isn’t that it will become a “fringe party in about a decade,” as Coulter warned, but that it is already a badly weakened party that has long-term demographic woes that an amnesty bill would make worse. While Dougherty may be right that many of the great-grandchildren of new immigrants will eventually end up voting as part of a Republican coalition, there could well be decades of Democratic dominance in between. Obviously, many other things will happen in the years to come that will have a greater effect on the political landscape, but for the GOP the passage of an amnesty bill would be like attaching a weight to the leg of someone who is already just barely staying above water.

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