Immigration

“What we need,” said a wizened little gray fellow who looked a lot like an overstuffed senator, “is a bell for the cat. We can put it on his collar along with his identification tag, though it beats me why anyone would want to help a cat find his way home. Then we can hear the tinkling of the bell when the cat’s around. Then we can hide.”

All the mice cheered and squeaked. “What a great idea,” said one lean little mouse whose fur had gone gray around his ears. He looked something like John McCain. “Yes, yes,” echoed a mouse with a certain Carolina accent. “Let’s do it now.”

The chairman, a fair-minded fellow, asked for further comment.

“No, no, no” a mouse shouted from the back row. “No more talk. No more delay.” Another mouse, an editor from the Mall Street Journal just arrived from a two-hour business lunch at Chez Dumpster, with tiny crumbs still lodged in his whiskers, cried out: “Vote! Vote!”

And so they did, with only one dissenting vote. All the little mice screamed and cheered, mightily pleased with themselves. All but one, a plump, noisy mouse, a curmudgeon who looked like he might be a famous radio talker. He shook his head sadly. “You’ve got an interesting idea,” he said, “but who will bell the cat?”

No one spoke up. Silence fell across the room. Finally, one by one, the mice drifted away, back to their holes in the wall under the kitchen sink. The cat, from his perch on the sofa, licked his lips, and smiled true to the instincts of his Cheshire grandfathers. Lunch would soon be served.

The trouble with the grand schemes of mice and men, meant to solve difficult problems in one great sweep, is that they almost never work. The political way to deal with the problem, much employed in certain Washington precincts, is to smother it with platitude, cliché, argle-bargle and caving in, disguised as artful compromise.

Eight senators, four Democrats and four Republicans, produced what was hailed as the path to comprehensive immigration reform, reform so “bipartisan” and full of compromise that President Obama, who has promised the cult a second term free of all compromise, flew off to Las Vegas to make a speech introducing his own reform that looked a lot like Senate reform.

“The agreement is a breakthrough,” observed the Wall Street Journal, “because it includes compromises from both Republicans and Democrats that, at least in principle, address the main obstacles that have killed reform in the past. The most politically potent of those issues is what to do about the 11 million illegals currently in the United States.”

“Politically potent,” in fact, are the operative words in the “debate,” such as it is. On one side of the debate are the reformers, compassionate and kind-hearted, and on the other are churls, bigots and nativists. The compassionate and kind-hearted want to keep the “cracking down” to a minimum, to preserve an abundance of cheap and easily abused labor. Mr. Obama and most of the Democrats are eager to preserve an abundance of voters drawn to welfare-state schemes. Some Republicans dream of tapping into that abundance of welfare-state voters.

The cruelest con in the schemes of Mr. Obama and the senators is the so-called “earned citizenship.” This would give “undocumented immigrants” a way to “come out of the shadows” and “play by the rules” by passing a background check, learning English and “civics,” paying their back taxes and penalties, and going to the back of the line to apply for citizenship. These are requirements almost no one could meet. The pointy-headed intellectuals (to use an apt phrase from the past) who dreamed up this scheme apparently never met anyone without tidy savings on which to draw “back taxes” and “penalties.”

Most of the 11 million “undocumented immigrants,” as we’re supposed to call illegal aliens, are unlikely to have the thousands of dollars in back taxes and penalties. Offering such an amnesty only mocks their misery. The nation could use workable immigration reform, but this ain’t it. Even a mouse can see that.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, should know better than to make up stuff that won’t stand scrutiny, panic or not. His tall tale about how Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years blew up under scrutiny and when the tale exploded in the face of the Las Vegas boodle man the president suffered the collateral damage.

Yesterday the Obama campaign tried to wash its hands, Pontius Pilate-like, of that campaign commercial featuring Joe Boptic, a laid-off steelworker, telling how his wife died of cancer because Mr. Romney’s Bain Capital closed a bankrupt Kansas City steel mill in 2001 and left his family without health insurance.

The steelworker’s heartbreaking story, as told in the ad put up by an “independent” campaign group called Priorities USA, doesn’t stand close scrutiny, either. But it was briefly effective, which is all that counts when it’s panic time.

The Obama campaign naturally denies any and all responsibility. This is the usual first response of the guilty. “We have nothing, no involvement, with any ads that are done by Priorities USA,” an Obama spokesman told reporters aboard Air Force One. “We don’t have any knowledge of the story of the [steelworker’s] family.” The deputy Obama campaign manager repeated the assurance to CNN: “I don’t know the facts about when Mr. Soptic’s wife got sick, or the facts about his health insurance.”

That sounds pretty unequivocal, but this was soon overtaken by the facts. Politico reported that the Obama campaign had hosted a conference call on May 14, only three months ago, featuring Joe Soptic telling his sad story, that after he lost his job in 2001 he had no health insurance until he found a job as a janitor, but there were no health benefits for his wife. When she was diagnosed with lung cancer he had to put her in the county hospital. When she died “all I got was an enormous bill. It’s upsetting what Mitt Romney and his partners did to us.” (Has anyone got a rope? Let’s get Mitt and find a tree with a low-hanging limb.)

As sad as the story was, from Mr. Obama’s perspective it was too good to be true. Mr. Soptic’s wife had health insurance all the time through her own employer until 2003, when she was injured and could no longer work. That’s when she lost her insurance. Still a sad story, but nothing like the story the White House put out in May, and Priorities USA repeated in August.

This was only a little better than Harry Reid’s confection, which was made up entirely. The senator cited as his source “a man” at Bain Capital – a source no better than “a friend’s ex-wife’s yard man’s sister-in-law.” The White House denied any knowledge of the Reid fantasia, too, and chided reporters for asking about it.

Dirty tricks are old stuff, of course, but the explosion of whistleblowers and fact-checkers on the Internet have rendered it all but impossible to keep a campaign lie alive. Nevertheless, politicians are born with the urge to tell whoppers in the spirit of Lyndon B. Johnson. In a torrid Texas race years ago LBJ told an aide to put out the story that his opponent was once caught taking sexual liberties with a pig. “But that’s not true,” the offended aide (maybe it was the Rev. Billy Don Moyers) replied. “I know it’s not true,” LBJ said, “but let him deny it.”

A famous reckless lie was told by another senator in Wheeling, W. Va., in February 1950, when he pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and told the ladies of the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling: “I have here in my hand a list of 57 names that were made known to the secretary of state as members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” With that Sen. Joe McCarthy was off and running in his hunt for Communists in the government. Unlike Harry Reid, Mr. McCarthy was eventually proved to be only 95 percent wrong.

Barack Obama is trying to stand above the action in the gutter, not necessarily because he wants to preserve the honor and dignity of office, but because it wouldn’t look good for everyone to see him sweat in August. That’s panic for late October.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The president’s remarkable amnesty by fiat – an amnesty that dare not speak its name – has the immediate effect of giving a permanent temporary pass to 800,000 of these children of illegals. But there’s more to this mercy than the casual eye sees.

This amnesty defers until after the election, and probably for good, comprehensive immigration reform of the sort envisioned by Sen. Marco Rubio. He had offered a revision of the DREAM Act that would have enabled some children of aliens who enroll in college or join one of the military services.

Mr. Rubio has all but given up. “People are going to say to me, ‘why are we going to need to do anything on this now?’ It has been dealt with. We can wait until after the election. And it is going to be hard to argue with that.”

This is exactly the result that President Obama and the open-borders Democrats envisioned. The president prefers not to consult with Congress, which is messy, like democracy itself, and congressmen occasionally ask questions that interrupt the messianic oratory. Careful comprehensive reform would have meant sharing the credit and the gratitude; this way Mr. Obama gets all the credit and by making it seem “temporary” he can keep the kids and their parents uneasy about their future. Keeping the peasants uneasy about the future, extending suffering and rationing the aspirin, is the oldest trick in the politician’s playbook.

But there was even more method in the president’s madness. By springing this remarkable expansion of presidential prerogative now, he can test congressional concern for the Constitution and courage to do anything about it, however revolutionary the damage inflicted. An earlier president attempting to bypass Congress and enforce only the laws he likes would have provoked Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, to stand up on its hind legs and roar defiance and retribution. Alas, those hind legs of Congress have withered, replaced by little lady-like nubbins.

Mr. Obama knows better, and said so only two years ago in answer to Democratic pressure for a presidential decree of amnesty: “I just have to continue to say this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true,” he said. “But the fact of the matter is there are laws on the books that I have to enforce. And I think there’s been a great disservice done to the cause of getting the DREAM Act passed and getting comprehensive immigration passed by perpetrating the notion that somehow, by myself, I can go and do these things. It’s just not true.”

Only now he has proved that he can in fact “go and do,” and he can continue to raid the law books in ways the men who wrote the Constitution never imagined a president could “go and do.” Two years ago the Department of Homeland Security – which seems to imagine itself the Department of das Fatherland Security – set out in several memoranda, entitled “Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” just how the president should go about stiffing Congress. This was the roadmap the president used to do what he said he couldn’t do.

There’s more coming, as Mitt Romney breathes closer down his neck and pressure from the left tightens. He can decree asylum, which is not temporary, to ever expanding categories of asylum seekers. Asylum is granted now to those persecuted, or in “fear” of persecution, “on account of race, religion, nationality [or] membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” This could include just everybody, as Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, observes in National Review Online. Asylum already includes women seeking refuge from brutal societies, homosexuals and the handicapped, and it requires little imagination to expand these categories to include residents of Mexico and Central America who fear gunmen of the drug cartels.

Only the heartless want to see the innocents, like the children brought here by their law-breaking parents, sent back to a primitive society and culture they never knew. But allowing a president to make policy based on what he needs to win an election, without consultation with anyone but his campaign handlers, is a heartless disregard of the rule of law we have always held high as the standard that makes America special.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Rage and outrage over same-sex marriage would take everybody’s mind off the dreary economy, which whimpers on. Everybody was then supposed to shut up and get back to work (for those with work).

Instead, the president gets his photograph (with a rainbow halo) on the cover of Newsweek magazine as “the first gay president,” all the Sunday-morning political talk shows were devoted to endless gasbaggery about gays and marriage, and even Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the heartthrob of the Upper East Side, complained that the president’s coming-out might have set back the campaign for “full equality” for gay caballeros.

This is “sex” loosely defined, of course, since most people do not associate the terminus of the alimentary canal with poetry and romance, and not so long ago we did not look to politicians, even presidents, for moral guidance. But who needs such guidance when we have presidents, celebrities and media notabilities as models -- now that we’re unbound by morality, religious faith and ancient tradition?

That celebrated creepy-crawlie that often wanders up Chris Matthews’ leg has jumped to another network, where the celebration of the president’s coming-out party, such as it was, continues without surcease. “Whatever people think about this issue,” said George Stephanopoulos, co-host of the ABC-TV morning talk-show, “there’s no denying when a president speaks out for the first time like that, it is history.”

This was apparently the message sent to Chen Guangcheng, the blind human-rights hero who fled for his life to the American embassy in Beijing. He didn’t ask for asylum, exactly, but he was desperate for help. A blind man who travels 400 miles, evading cops and soldiers to reach the American embassy, fits the definition of desperate. But after six days of negotiations between American diplomats and the Chinese government a deal was struck, and Mr. Chen left the embassy. To the surprise only of the Americans, Mr. Chen said Thursday that the Chinese were not living up to the agreement.

The specifics of the deal are leaking slowly, and outsiders can’t know for sure exactly what’s going down. The U.S. State Department says it did nothing to force Mr. Chen to leave the embassy, which is something the Chinese government devoutly wanted. But the State Department is stuck with the reputation for weakness, vacillation, hesitation, mendacity and shilly-shallying it has earned over the years, so most of us take the account of friends of Mr. Chen as the straighter goods.

So we can’t be surprised that the Secret Service will assign nannies and chaperones to monitor the bedtime behavior of the president’s bodyguards on their trips abroad.

These “senior-level chaperones” will accompany agents to enforce “conduct rules” on foreign trips. This should please Congress, which as we all know is shocked – shocked! – by naughty behavior. Rep. Peter King of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, praises new rules and the introduction of Official U.S. Government Nannies as “very positive steps by the Secret Service to make clear what is expected of every agent and also makes clear what will not be tolerated.”

The General Services Administration (GSA) is still counting what the agency spent to take 300 guvvies to Las Vegas for an “executive workshop,” learning how better to serve the nation (but mostly how to serve themselves). The tab so far is $823,000, but tips might be extra, and that doesn’t count what a “regional commissioner” spent on scouting trips through the Pacific and Asia. There’s no word yet on whether and if so how much the GSA spent on fancy women.

Heterosexuality in high places is clearly running amok. And it’s not just the guvvies, either, and not just in steamy foreign places where furriners lie in wait to lure good Americans into misadventure. Bobby Petrino, who had taken big steps in building a football legend at the University of Arkansas to rival that of the Bear at Alabama, went for a motorcycle ride through the Ozarks with his sweetie and when his big Harley crashed into a thicket of briars and saplings he was fired for lying about the error of erotic ways. He blew an $18 million-dollar buyout when he was fired “for cause.” Love can be a many-splendored thing, but splendor usually costs extra.

The Post’s pollsters find that a record number of Americans now give the president "strongly negative" reviews of his first three years, and nearly 7 of every 10 Americans blame the president for the acute heartburn that strikes every American motorist when pulls up to the pump. Barely 1 in 4 approve of his handling of the issue. (Most of the naïve ride bicycles and the rest ride skateboards.)

In hypothetical match-ups for the not-so-hypothetical November 6 election, both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum run approximately even with the president. It’s only mid-March, but Rasmussen’s pollsters, who have a remarkable record of getting it right, finds the fickle finger of fate pointing to even grimmer news for the president.

The candidate most admired for plain speech made it plain and clear that he doesn't believe in the wall between church and state and doesn't think much of John F. Kennedy for saying he did.

"I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," he told ABC News. "The idea that church can have no influence or involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country."