Earlier this month, it was announced that Bob Barr, Tom Tancredo, Alan Keyes, and Chuck Baldwin would be joining together for an anti-immigration press conference organized by the Minuteman during the Democratic Convention in an attempt to inject the issue back into the presidential campaign.
A rally by the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps featuring Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr drew just a few dozen people.
Held at a Denver park a few miles away from the Democratic National Convention, the rally was more of a picnic, where even some counter-protesters shouting obscenities at the anti-illegal immigration activists failed to stir much emotion.
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Even Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Republican who launched a short-lived presidential bid earlier this year largely based on his call for an immigration overhaul, showed up late to the rally wearing a golf shirt and loafers and started his remarks by quipping, "I'm like yesterday's news."
Tancredo added, though, that the public interest in immigration issues has been understated by the media and even his own political party.
"I don't care how many times people tell me this issue is no longer important, that voters don't care about it anymore, it's still out there," Tancredo said.
Maybe so, but many of the anti-illegal immigration activists seemed unconvinced the topic would influence this fall's campaigns.
After independent presidential candidate Alan Keyes addressed the group, he was surrounded by supporters — who asked about abortion.
Minutemen organizers insisted the rally was a success, and that the immigration debate hasn't faded.
The reason nobody showed up, said Minuteman President Chris Simcox, was because the media, the Republicans, and the Democrats are colluding to keep the issue out of the campaign and away from the public eye. But Simcox is undaunted:
"This is a national movement," said Minuteman President Chris Simcox, who said membership was either holding steady or increasing across the country. "This is just the beginning."
“Left unchecked, illegal immigration will almost certainly put our county on a downward spiral, similar to the patterns to be found in the Third World countries these illegal immigrants left,” Prince William County Supervisor John Stirrup wrote last year of his affluent D.C. suburb, as he promoted its police crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
NPR reported Monday on the effects of this effort to “drive out illegal immigrants,” as residents relocate out of fear and businesses catering to Latinos stand “deserted.”
Members of Prince William’s school board cited the immigration policy last month when they announced more than 600 students learning English as a second language had left in the middle of the year. The chair of county commissioners lauded that as proof of the policy’s success.
Hispanic soccer teams have also relocated out of the county, saying fans were afraid to show up at games. Even legal residents say they’ve moved out, concerned for relatives who are undocumented.
This exodus and economic slump fits the pattern of local anti-immigrant ordinances passed over the last few years in places like Valley Park, Missouri and Riverside, New Jersey. And there are more direct costs. Although the county has only just started its crackdown, the county executive is projecting a $500,000 budget overrun for enforcement of this law. Nevertheless, county supervisor Corey Stewart, urging his colleagues not to back down, called the program a “stunning success.”
While the title of NPR’s story described the crackdown’s consequences as “unintended,” it seems that deporting or driving away undocumented immigrants—along with documented residents and Hispanic businesses—was actually the point of the program. That’s how Tom Tancredo explained the purpose of these local anti-immigrant ordinances in a 2006 speech. By that measure, Stewart can call it a “success”—even if it’s the crackdown that causes the county’s downward spiral.
As we noted last month, Tom Tancredo may have no chance of being elected president, but his campaign is succeeding at one thing: making other Republican candidates compete for who’s taking the hardest line against immigration. Indeed, last week’s GOP debate found the frontrunners trying to “out-Tancredo” each other. Still, Tancredo is trucking on, pushing the limits of what “Tancredoing” is. At a New Hampshire event—in which he offered the line, “They're not all coming here to do jobs Americans won't do, unless you can't find an American to blow up an American city”—Tancredo “mused” about his success (from the American Spectator):
… Tancredo offered another measure of his success. He mused about the early days of his crusade, the hundreds of hours spent on talk radio shows. "I used to ask myself, 'Does anyone care? Is anybody listening?'" He doesn't wonder anymore. The Hillary driver's license flap and his Republican opponents' surprisingly brutal dogfights on sanctuary cities and lawn workers are proof enough. When Tancredo repeated his debate one-liner about the other Republican candidates trying to "out-Tancredo Tancredo," everyone laughed appreciatively, then sighed. Predictably, Tancredo has his doubts as to whether anyone can actually out-Tancredo him. "I love the rhetoric," he said. "But how can we really know who believes in their heart and who is just watching polls?"
While Tancredo has never shied from advocating mass deportation of undocumented immigrants—“why not?” he asked at this Heritage event—his past proposals have been for “mass attrition,” the idea that immigrants will clear out on their own once the government gets aggressive enough in cracking down on them. But now that other candidates are pushing “attrition,” Tancredo is complaining it’s not enough:
Yesterday, he released a stark television ad here that shows photos of bloody bodies, including those of children, lying in a street, victims of gang violence. The ad warns that the violent criminals behind those kinds of attacks are sneaking into the U.S., and calls for deportation of illegal aliens — something most other candidates have shied away from, calling for attrition through better enforcement instead.
And he’s managed to distinguish himself in another way: He’s boycotting the GOP debate scheduled for this Sunday on Spanish-language network Univision. The debate is actually Republicans’ second chance, since most of the candidates snubbed them back in September, but this time everyone is coming except Tancredo. According to Tancredo, it’s about the rule of law:
"What all my colleagues — what the other candidates are doing — it's encouraging violation of the law because it's saying, 'Don't worry about the fact that you have to know English to earn citizenship,' " said Mr. Tancredo, the only Republican to turn down the invitation from Univision for Sunday night's debate and who said the other candidates' participation was worse than pandering.
For the Colorado congressman, it's a matter of principle: He said the other candidates are contributing to the Balkanization of the country by joining the debate, in which the candidates will speak English, but their answers will be translated into Spanish for broadcast on the nation's largest Spanish-language network. …
Mr. Tancredo said he expects his voice is being heard this way. "My not being there is probably the strongest statement I can make on this issue," he said.
But Tancredo may be finding it hard to “out-Tancredo” himself. While his last ad equated immigrants with terrorists (and included a dramatization of a terrorist attack), his new one only equates them with violent gangsters.
Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo has made no secret that even he believes he has no chance of actually becoming the Republican nominee for president. Instead, he says, his goal is to promote his hard-line anti-immigrant position, and by that measure, he can argue that he’s winning. From an interview with the Washington Monthly (via Kevin Drum):
What happens is, you provide people with some space to get into where they can say, "That guy is a racist xenophobe. That guy is just so crazy that we can take a more moderate stance." To tell you the truth, that's okay with me. It is not the worst thing in the world to have changed the debate so significantly, at least among Republicans running for office, that they are willing to say things like "We will secure the border" and "We will go after employers." That's the moderate position now. …
I have to set the bar as high as I can. I'm being completely candid with you. If I had actually set out to become president, then of course it would be ludicrous for me to do it in the way I'm doing it. I don't have that as my goal; I never have. The only way I can get on that plane and go to Iowa or New Hampshire and spend night after night in hotels in places you've never even heard of is by saying, "Think about why you're doing this, Tom. It is because the issue is important. You are the person that is advancing it." I have the luxury of saying, "I will set the goalposts as far as I can down the field because then I will have a better chance of getting the game played on my side." In one recent debate, we spent the first thirty-five minutes on immigration. That has never happened before. It's wonderful—I've got the two top guys attacking each other. Romney can spend a great deal of money, and he is enormously articulate, and the fact that he will take on Giuliani on this issue—I have to tell you, I don't get many questions, I stand there like a bookend for most of the debates, but it's still enormously gratifying.
Indeed, an applause-line about taking a tough stand on immigration is now de rigueur in GOP stump speeches, alongside cutting spending and appointing Supreme Court justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas, and Tancredo can claim a big part of the credit for that. Even Mike Huckabee—who likes to say he’s just as far-right as anybody but not “angry” about it—caught himself comparing himself to the angriest candidate out there:
I think I am as clear on immigration as anybody. But because I also say, "Look, let's not just be angry at these people. Let's recognize that if we were them, we'd want to come here too." That's not amnesty. I'm not for amnesty. I'm not for sanctuary cities. I'm no liberal when it comes to that. I think I am almost as hard-line as, well I was going to say [Tom] Tancredo, but ... I think I am pretty adamant that we ought to obey the law. But my frustration with the immigration issue is not directed so much at desperate people as it is at a dysfunctional government.
Adopting Tancredoism may be an okay tactic for collecting fragments of a divided right-wing base, it seems counterproductive for candidates hoping to prove their general-election electability. Virginia’s GOP hoped anti-immigrant sentiment would carry the day in Tuesday’s legislative elections, but the results provedotherwise, as Democrats took control of the state Senate. A similar pattern was evident in the 2006 national congressional elections.
The organizers of the Values Voter Summit are hoping that the event will be a catalyst for the Religious Right to coalesce around one champion, and Republican hopefuls are happy to oblige—“all nine major Republican candidates accepted” their invitation, boasted the MC. (Sorry, Alan Keyes!) The first morning of the conference was loaded with four presidential candidates, each vying for the favor of the religious-right activists gathered here.
The House passed a resolution this week recognizing the commencement of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, denouncing extremists of that faith, and praising moderates. No members of Congress voted against the symbolic measure, but—in a move reminiscent of protests when a Hindu chaplain gave an opening prayer in the Senate—41 Republicans and one Democrat declined to approve of the resolution, instead voting “present” in an act of protest.
"To offer respect for a major religion is one thing, but to offer respect for a major religion that has been behind the Islamic jihad, the radical jihad, that has sworn war upon the United States, its free allies and freedom in Iraq, is another thing,” explained freshman Michigan Rep. Tim Walberg, who won his seat last year by defeating an incumbent of his own party in a right-wing primary challenge. Colorado Rep. Doug Lamborn—who similarly captured the support of the far Right in a bitter primary, earning the repudiation of the retiring Republican who had held his seat—said, “I couldn't bring myself to vote 'yes' on that resolution,” adding that he “hope[s] that we have more and more moderate Muslims speaking out about the cause of peace in the future.”
Another argument made by opponents of the resolution is the claim that it represents an unfair treatment of Christianity. Rep. Tom Tancredo—who has suggested the U.S. threaten to bomb Mecca as a means “to deter them from attacking us”—claimed that the Ramadan resolution was “an example of the degree to which political correctness has captured the political and media elite … I am not opposed to commending any religion for their faith. The problem is that any attempt to do so for Jews or Christians is immediately condemned as 'breaching' the non-existent line between Church and State by the same elite."
Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) likewise said he was “troubled”:
"There were a number of members who, as we call it down here, 'stayed off' that vote and did not support it because I think that they looked at it as something that Congress really should not be doing, should not be picking one faith out and commending that faith."
Garrett says during his five years in Congress he does not remember the House ever approving a resolution commending Christians for celebrating Christmas or Easter.
Garrett may not have noticed that, among other acts, the federal government marks Christmas as an official holiday every year, a recognition significantly more substantial than a symbolic House resolution imparting “respect.” Similarly, Garrett might not remember voting less than two years ago for a resolution in favor of Christmas. One can almost understand Garrett’s difficulty in making the connection, because while the Ramadan resolution is designed to encourage moderate Muslims while condemning violent ones, the purpose of that Christmas resolution was to escalate a trumped-up “war on Christmas” charade then making the rounds on the Right.
Given the radical right’s longstanding obsession with denying legal recognition or protections to LGBT Americans, it’s not surprising that several questions at the "Values Voter Debate" were about protecting America from the gays. Also not surprisingly, these candidates lined up to oppose equality.
The first question of the night, from the American Family Association’s Buddy Smith, was about “protecting” marriage. Every candidate except libertarian Ron Paul pledged to push for a federal marriage amendment. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee touted his record of pushing a marriage amendment in his state and promised to lead an effort to have a constitutional amendment that would affirm marriage as “one man, one woman, for life.” Rep. Tom Tancredo pledged to do everything possible to pass a federal constitutional amendment, warning that Americans are just “one kooky judge” away from having homosexual marriage forced on them. Sen. Brownback bragged of his efforts in the Senate to pass the FMA and complained that President Bush had not done more to pass it. Alan Keyes, who had just tossed his hat in the ring, took a shot at the absent Mitt Romney, calling him “single-handedly responsible” for gays getting married in Massachusetts (not, shall we say, a view widely shared among marriage equality activists).
Paul Weyrich, a founder of the modern Religious Right political movement, closed the first section of the program by asking what candidates would do to counteract “the homosexual agenda.” Most candidates went back to the need for a marriage amendment to prevent, in Keyes’ typically tempered words, the “destruction of traditional marriage.” Brownback and Rep. Duncan Hunter talked about keeping gays from serving openly in the military. Libertarian Ron Paul, while saying he is opposed to legislating morality, called for eradicating hate crime laws. Brownback also attacked hate crimes laws as criminalizing thought and moving into an agenda of not allowing people to speak their beliefs. Businessman John Cox talked about common sense but spouted nonsense, talking about opening floodgates to bestiality and polygamy and warning darkly of “transvestite” teachers in public schools as a reason to support “school choice” and homeschooling.
During the “yes or no” segment of the program, Stephen Bennett, self-proclaimed “former homosexual,” argued that homosexual behavior is immoral and dangerous, and asked whether, as president, candidates would support legislation ensuring that schools would forfeit federal funding if they expose children to “homosexual propaganda” that puts them at risk. All the candidates clicked their green lights to answer “yes.” A later question asking whether they would pledge to veto ENDA also won unanimous support.
During a segment in which questions were directed at a single candidate, anti-gay zealot Peter LaBarbera asked the absent Mitt Romney why voters should trust him when he spent so much of his career promoting “anti-life” and “pro-homosexual” policies and not challenging Marriott’s providing pornography in its hotels as a member of its board. But perhaps the most memorable anti-gay question came from Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver, who cited Abraham Lincoln in criticizing Fred Thompson’s “federalist” approach to marriage, essentially making marriage equality the moral equivalent of slavery:
While you were senator you opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment, but recently you stated that you would support a marriage amendment that would prevent judges from imposing same-sex marriage, so long as it would not prohibit state legislatures from adopting same-sex marriage. This reasoning is like saying that you favor a constitutional amendment that prohibits judges from imposing slavery, so long as the state legislatures were free to do so. Does not your position fundamentally misunderstand the universal importance of marriage in the same way my latter example about slavery indicates a misunderstanding of human dignity?
During last evening’s Values Voter Presidential Debate, debate organizer Janet Folger displayed an ultrasound image to the candidates and asked the candidates what they would do, if elected, to “restore legal protection and the full rights of personhood to every American waiting to be born.”
The candidates quickly tried to outdo one another, with Sam Brownback proclaiming that he wanted to opportunity to nominate the Supreme Court judge who would overturn Roe v. Wade and Tom Tancredo explicitly pledged to have a specific abortion litmus test for choosing judges, while Duncan Hunter went so far as pledge to show a sonogram to any potential judicial candidate and only appoint those who see a “viable human life.”
Alan Keyes, for his part, promised to issue an executive order committing the entire Executive Branch to protecting “life in the womb,” while Mike Huckabee talked mostly about his pro-life credentials and made some odd comparison to trying to save “six coal miners in the womb of a coal mine in Huntington, Utah.”
The idea that undocumented immigrants are causing a crime wave in the U.S.—while not supported by evidence—has been a mainstay of anti-immigrant activists for decades. For example, in instituting ordinances against hiring or renting to immigrants, Hazleton, Pennsylvania Mayor Lou Barletta claimed that immigrants were “terroriz[ing]” the city. But defending the ordinances in court, Barletta could not back this claim up. “The people in my city don’t need numbers,” the frustrated mayor declared when confronted with the city’s own statistics showing the opposite.
Similarly, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist have been touting phony numbers on immigrants and crime.
But if statistics don’t back up their claims, anti-immigrant activists can always latch on to anecdotes. A recent multiple-homocide in Newark, New Jersey has implicated illegal immigrants, and national activists quickly descended upon the city, claiming that the crime was linked to local police not questioning suspects’ immigration status.
Sen. Sam Brownback got the ball rolling last week when he started running “robocalls” in Iowa questioning the pro-life credentials of Rep. Tom Tancredo and Gov. Mitt Romney. Tancredo was especially outraged that Brownback was targeting his campaign for accepting money from population-control zealot John Tanton, whose views the Brownback campaign characterized as “racist:”
"Conservatives and liberals alike have abandoned Tanton once they learn about his bizarre obsession with population control.”
The Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly has now come to Tancredo’s defense and has recorded her own calls targeting Iowa voters:
"I want to go on record as saying I've known Tom Tancredo for 30 years and I know for sure he has always been a champion of the right to life of the unborn.”
Both Tancredo and Romney have called on Brownback to apologize and pull the calls, which he refuses to do.
For his part, Tancredo has not been content merely to defend himself and his own record. He had unleashed his own ads attacking most of his opponents – ads which are themselves drawing complaints from other candidates:
Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Thursday called on rival Tom Tancredo to stop airing a "blatantly dishonest" campaign ad in Iowa that accuses Huckabee of favoring amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Huckabee said Tancredo either did sloppy research or deliberately mischaracterized Huckabee's position.
"When people engage in a completely false attack, it's usually an act of desperation. To me, it's a badge of honor because he sees that we are reaching the people we are trying to reach," Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, told The Associated Press.
Tancredo campaign spokeswoman Bay Buchanan said the ad would not be pulled and insisted it was accurate. She said Huckabee supported a plan by Bush that would have allowed illegal immigrants to earn the right to stay in the United States, and that Huckabee refused to sign a pledge opposing amnesty.
"All indications are that Huckabee supports amnesty. He's a pro-amnesty politician who is in denial. There are a lot of pro-amnesty politicians in denial," she said.
The radio ad calls Mitt Romney a flip-flopper on abortion, amnesty and gun control, then attacks Sam Brownback, Fred Thompson and Huckabee, claiming "they're all for amnesty."
Phyllis Schlafly is weighing in on the Brownback-Tancredo fight, recording phone messages for Tancredo targeting Iowa voters: "I want to go on record as saying I've known Tom Tancredo for 30 years and I know for sure he has always been a champion of the right to life of the unborn," Schlafly says in the calls.
While two of the front-running Republican presidential candidates, Giuliani and McCain, have withdrawn from the Ames, Iowa straw poll, and with Fred Thompson yet to announce his candidacy, the results of the August 11 survey won’t carry too much weight. Even Mitt Romney, who is still in the race, is scaling back his ambitions, hoping he doesn’t embarrass himself with a poor showing against the remaining, less viable candidates: “[W]e're not trying to overwhelm anybody,” he said.
But for those second-tier candidates, Ames is a chance to shine. That’s why it’s no surprise to see Brownback, whose campaign strategy seems to depend on showing strongly in Iowa, coming out aggressively against Romney. In an attack reminiscent of their early jockeying for religious-right favor, Brownback is accusing Romney of being a newcomer to anti-gay politics. In a press release from Brownback’s campaign:
Earlier this month, Sam Brownback attacked Tom Tancredo, questioning his pro-life committment due to the latter's ties to John Tanton. Tancredo says the phones calls being made by the Brownback campaign are "despicable," but the Brownback campaign blasted back at "Tanton's bizarre obsession with population control," saying Tancredo's ties to him "are an embarrassment to his campaign." Update: Romeny is demanding an apology for calls targeting him as well.
