It’s Donald Trump’s GOP now, as House Republicans voted yesterday to file an amicus brief to the Supreme Court against President Obama’s immigration actions.
It wasn’t lost on many that this wasn’t just an anti-immigrant vote, but a boldly political one, too. Five Republicans sided with 188 Democrats to vote against it. But all 234 votes for were from Republicans — or, Trumplicans.
One of our champs in the House, Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, took to the floor to call the vote out as a new low, saying “Republicans in the House are stoking anti-immigrant fears and mass deportation fantasies some more”:
Why does the Majority Party not just say what they want? They want millions of immigrants deported.
Out on the campaign trail on immigration we get lies and demagoguery from Republicans – plural.
The debate has sunk to a level where people are actually throwing punches and worse.
Two refugees from Southeast Asia and one gentleman from Puerto Rico were shot and killed in front of their children in Milwaukee because apparently, the gunman didn’t like that they spoke with an accent.
The gunman reportedly said to the Puerto Ricans “You have got to go,” before he shot and killed the father of a teenaged son.
Two students, a Muslim and a Latino, were attacked by a man who they encountered when he was beating an African-American man in Kansas this week. When he turned to them he shouted racist threats and said Trump would win and they would have to go.
And the punches, the shoving, the shouts of “Go back to Africa,” the Hitler salutes — it is all becoming more than we ever expected and yet, that is the reality we see in 2016.
And now, the Republicans in the House are stoking anti-immigrant fears and mass deportation fantasies some more.
No, they are not leading. They are not calling for calmer rhetoric – let alone more rational policies.
They are playing politics with immigrants, plain and simple.
If Republicans are so secure in the validity of their arguments, they should write the brief and submit it to the Supreme Court, just as 225 Democrats did last week. And as dozens of business leaders and state and local legislators and Mayors have done.
The vote is a political stunt disguised as a legal brief because the Republican Majority sees a crass political opportunity to stand with the anti-immigration wing of their party.
I guess the Speaker thinks, hey, why play it straight when you can force a purely political vote on immigration designed to deepen the partisan lines and validate angry voters.
