Are congressional Republicans absolutely determined to forfeit this November’s midterm elections? It sure looks that way. The GOP would hardly be acting any differently if it were secretly run by its enemies.
The election-security provisions of the SAVE Act enjoy overwhelming popular support. According to CBS/YouGov polling, requiring photo ID to vote is literally an 80-20 issue, commanding the support of four out of five voters. Yet the Republican Senate, with a 53-47 majority, is struggling to pass the law. Yes, the filibuster gives Chuck Schumer a powerful weapon to use against the GOP, but there are ways around that – ways the GOP chooses not to take. Democrats are killing the bill without even having to be held accountable for voting against it.
“Surrender first, win afterward” is the perfect encapsulation of the GOP establishment mindset
Then there’s ICE funding. That’s already secured, but Democrats want to revoke it in order to neuter immigration law enforcement. To do that, they’re holding the country’s airport security hostage, refusing to fund the rest of the Department of Homeland Security until ICE is crippled. Will Republicans give in to this extortion?
They evidently want to: reports are flying that Senate Republicans are angling for a deal with Democrats to fund the rest of DHS and treat ICE separately, placing a question mark next to the agency’s appropriations. Republicans are signaling to their voters that if they just concede the main point now, they’ll set things right for immigration enforcement later on. “Surrender first, win afterward” is the perfect encapsulation of the GOP establishment mindset. It’s what voters rejected, time and again, by nominating Trump for president over all the useless grandees of the Grand Old Party, and by making the defiant populist president twice over.
Immigration is the issue that galvanizes the right’s activist base like no other. If that base is demoralized ahead of November midterms, Republicans won’t just lose, they’ll be slaughtered. The party is having a terrible time with independents right now, who fault the GOP for high prices and a generally rough economy. Yet rather than rallying the voters they can count on the most, Republicans are rapidly alienating them.
The nomination of Markwayne Mullin to take over the Department of Homeland Security revealed a great deal about how the party’s elected officials feel about what matters to their own voters. “Mullin Explored Bipartisan Deal to Rein in Immigration Crackdown” a March 21 New York Times headline announced, amid reports that Democrats considered Mullin an immigration moderate they could work with. Did this raise eyebrows with his fellow Republican senators? As it happens, the only Republican to grill Mullin during his nomination hearings and vote against his confirmation – both in committee and on the floor – was Rand Paul, who, in addition to taking umbrage at Mullin’s description of him as a “freaking snake,” criticized ICE itself while denouncing Mullin’s attitude to the attacker who had left Senator Paul with broken ribs in 2017.
“I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force,” Senator Paul said, echoing liberal attacks on the agency.
Indeed, the core argument of the Democrats trying to weaken immigration enforcement is that ICE is dangerous. Mullin, for his part, apologized during the hearings for having called the gun-toting anti-ICE activist Alex Pretti “deranged” after he was killed in an altercation with law enforcement in Minneapolis.
Six years ago, Senate Republicans were as eager as any Democrats to praise another martyr to the cause of brawling with police. “Devastating events like the death of George Floyd remind us that we have a long way to go in the fight for equal justice under the law,” Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn said then. “There should never be a time in which the color of someone’s skin determines whether they live or die, and we have to do everything in our power to prevent these tragedies from occurring in the first place.”
The idea that Floyd was killed because he was black was certainly what the left assumed – and a narrative progressives found politically very useful. But was it true? Did Republican voters need their own elected officials to join the chorus? Cornyn chose to do so, just as Republican senators have lately chosen to side with immigration enforcement’s critics.
The unwillingness of so many elected Republicans to stand with their own voters’ priorities has already had electoral consequences this year. A majority of voters in Texas’s Republican primaries last month opted not to cast their ballots for Cornyn, though he received a plurality of votes in his contest. He faces defeat at the hands of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the May 26 primary runoff, unless, perhaps, President Trump intervenes to endorse Cornyn. Texas Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw, meanwhile, lost his primary outright.
Republican voters are not happy with Republican officials, and that displeasure will be felt in November as much as it’s already being felt in the primaries. The only voters who still have any desire to support the GOP will stay home if Republican officeholders keep sounding like watered-down Democrats. There are many elected Republicans who are as conservative as their voters, of course – but a shocking number of officials seem completely divorced from the concerns of right-of-center voters. They instead pander to left-of-center sensibilities.
Why? Part of the answer lies in the fact that Republican officials are products of the same elite culture and institutions that produce Democrats. Republicans are also, even now, the party of business, and corporate America simply wants a more capitalist version of progressivism – there’s no profit in picking fights with the cultural hegemony of elite progressive values. Better just to go with the leftward flow, as long as taxes are low.
Just look at the behavior of “red state” Republicans. They’re in little danger of losing elections to Democrats in Utah or Oklahoma, Texas or Indiana. But life for a Republican politician is more about what comes after holding office than it is about what voters expect you to do while you hold it. Mike Pence, as governor of Indiana, sold out Christian conservatives to the interests of the Chamber of Commerce in the battle over the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 2015. Rejected resoundingly by Republican voters in the 2024 presidential primaries, Pence now leads a well-funded quasi-libertarian think tank. Indiana Republicans, meanwhile, balked at the chance to redraw the state’s congressional map to their advantage, though GOP fortunes in this year’s midterms were in the balance. Were they just too scrupulous to act in their party’s – and voters’ – interests? Or do they answer to interests other than conscience?
All too many Republicans would rather take their cues from Black Lives Matter and anti-ICE activists
Compare them to the Democrats of Virginia, a state that’s not nearly as blue as Indiana is red. Having just won full control of the executive and legislative branches in the commonwealth, Democrats are forcing a ludicrously gerrymandered congressional map on Virginia, without regard for the reservations the state judiciary has lodged. Democrats are even using a snap referendum to evade the usual rules regarding when changes to a map can take effect. (Normally, that would be after November’s midterms.)
Virginia Democrats aren’t cut from different cloth than Indiana Republicans. They act more ruthlessly because there’s no conflict between their partisan interest in office and their personal interests out of office. Red-state Republicans, on the other hand, cater to one constituency – Republican voters – when they run, but to another – elite liberal opinion in all private institutions of prestige – outside of office. While they’re in office, they’re thinking not about how they got there, but where they’re going next.
Because Donald Trump sees himself as the source of all the prestige that matters, he never feels the need to please his social betters. He has no betters, as far as he’s concerned, and he doesn’t need enlightened liberals’ money or moral approval. How unlike the typical Republican he is in that! And that’s won him the loyalty of voters who embrace the Republican party only reluctantly, if at all. Some Republicans have learned from Trump. But all too many would still rather take their cues from Black Lives Matter and anti-ICE activists. They’re going to cost the party its control of Congress this November, but they won’t regret it. They’ll be richly rewarded by those they loyally served, not the GOP’s unfashionably downmarket and middle-or-working-class voters.
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