...Like Another Hole In Your Head

There's a reason we were not at all surprised about the immigration reform efforts blooming this week in Washington, DC, though our lack of surprise is not directly related to immigration.

As we noted in the links of Monday's expanded edition, last weekend, in the biting cold, there was yet another rally in Washington, DC. This time, the rally was in favor of common sense gun safety laws, like those President Obama and several members of Congress are trying to get passed this year.

While this may shock our more liberal readers, not all Republicans are against common sense gun regulations. In repeated surveys, majorities of Republicans are in favor of those regulations like universal background checks and restrictions on high-capacity magazines, just like their Democratic and Independent counterparts.

One reason so many sane Republicans agree with these kinds of proposed rules is fairly obvious: On six of seven days last week, an American was shot by a gun at a gun show. The numbers don't lie - the more guns Americans have access to, the more injuries and accidental deaths are going to occur from those guns, often due to poor gun regulation laws.

In short, Americans need more crappy laws about guns like we need another hole in our collective head. That's why the common sense ideas that have already been offered on gun regulation - like universal background checks - are significantly more likely to pass this time, because even an idiot can see they're good ideas.

In a nutshell, that's also the reason our staff has very little concern - and maybe even a bit of hope - about many of the ideas offered in the various immigration reform plans being suddenly floated this week.

In case you missed it, a bipartisan group of Senators made a big show on Monday about presenting their blueprint for comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate. President Obama, some time ago, had scheduled his own presentation of a comprehensive immigration reform plan for this week, though the White House has already given clues that it may support the Senate's plan. There are even rumors of a bipartisan immigration plan in the House.

If it seems like a sudden and unexpected turn of events for the notoriously obstructionist Congressional Republicans, you shouldn't really be surprised. As Ezra Klein points out, even Republicans can see the truth about immigration and voting. In the 2012 Presidential election, President Obama received 71% of the Hispanic vote. In 2016, the projected share of the non-white vote is expected to rise two percent.

Unfortunately for Republicans, some conservatives continue to believe that Hispanics are natural conservatives - which, as conservative writers like David Frum have pointed out more than once, they are not.

Liberals and Progressives should not be immediately jumping for joy, however. As most of the immigration proposals currently stand, there is still far too much focus on border issues and immigrants, and far too little focus on employer-related issues like E-Verify and real enforcement - for example, a penalty system for employers that would heavily dissuade them from luring low-wage undocumented workers across the border. Without those solutions in place, Americans will simply be having this same discussion about immigration in another twenty years, just as we did twenty-five years ago.

Overall, the key features we're seeing among the multiple immigration reform plans and rumors - acknowledgement of a need for a fair path to citizenship, registration of applicants, fines and back taxes, and rewards for highly-skilled immigrants  - are mostly common sense measures that most sane partisans on both sides of the political aisle agree with.

Hopefully, our Congresspersons will - for once - have the good sense to approve the common sense reforms on both gun safety and immigration as soon as possible, without consulting hordes of well-paid highly partisan lobbyists, who would prefer a half-assed set of reform bills that solve little, and earn the lobbyists continued fat retainers.

This country needs another half-assed set of reform bills like... well, like a visit to another sloppy gun show.

Do Look Now

Barring another international emergency, tragedy, or mass civil unrest, much of the American national media chatter today will likely surround two kinds of stories.

One will likely be the sudden shift by Republicans to join Democrats in supporting comprehensive immigration reform. The other will surround two interviews with President Obama - one in The New Republic magazine, and the other, Obama's 60 Minutes interview alongside outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

While each of these news items deserve at least some attention, as we warned you in our first edition this year, the real political action to watch has moved to the state and local level.

That fact was evident last week, when media organizations including this one pointed out the Republican Party's underhanded attempts at rigging the vote in Virginia. After the initial Virginia vote-rigging story came to light, other attempts by the Republican Party to try to do the same in states like Florida and Michigan popped up too.

In Nebraska, Republicans appear to be trying to play a bait-and-switch game, at both the state and local levels, that's falling hard on students they claim to care about.

You may recall that earlier this month, Nebraska Republican Governor Dave Heineman pushed all six of Nebraska's University and State College campuses to implement a two-year tuition freeze. Nominally, the freeze was promoted by officials of both parties as a way to help lessen the burden on students.

That rhetoric shows itself to be completely hollow, however, in light of the Nebraska Board of Regents passing an increase for room and board for all students living in the residence halls at each of the six Nebraska state college campuses. While the percentages differ from school to school, the rate increases effectively add between four-hundred and a thousand dollars to the financial burden of those same students that Nebraska politicians claimed they cared about.

The hypocrisy doesn't stop at the state level, though.

Nebraska Republican state Sen. Scott Lautenbaugh also appears to be trying to forcibly downsize the Omaha Public School's board, from the state legislature, taking the board from twelve to nine members and in the process 'conveniently' wiping out the influence of Democratic members of the board.

If the game Republican partisans at all levels are playing hasn't yet become clear to you, we hope this bit of light helps.

Since they can't win at the ballot box with their outdated ideologies, extremist Republican political leaders at all levels are now trying to rig the system, even while they distract the national media by appearing to finally move toward bipartisanship on ideas like comprehensive immigration reform.

Even well-known conservative pundits who've thought about these ideas say Republican leaders who keep pushing ideas like vote-rigging will only end up hurting themselves in the end.

No matter how much cheating those GOP extremists do, it won't change the facts on the ground. The ideas President Obama focused on in his inaugural address aren't liberal - they're progressively centrist. They're ideas that both Republican and Democratic voters mostly agree on.

As soon as Americans notice that Republican "leaders" are attempting to rig systems against those centrist ideas - like they did when their intents were brought to light in Virginia and Florida - Republican "leaders" backpedal away from their cheating ideas so fast their heads are likely spinning round in circles.

There is, after all, a reason it says on Nebraska's state capitol building, "The salvation of the state is watchfulness in the citizen."

It would help everyone if more of our colleagues in the media also kept their eyes on where the action is really happening.

Friday Funday: Wishes

Unless you're living in the farthest Southern reaches of the United States, if you're like most Americans, you've probably been wishing for warmer temperatures this past week. It has been bitterly cold in some regions, especially after the relatively mild winter most of the United States has experienced.

The fact is, wishing the weather was warmer today won't make it so - though traveling to our South Florida offices might help our staff members living in Virginia and Nebraska. Of course, if we received all of our wishes, the world might be a very different place indeed.

Still, we shouldn't belittle the wishes we did see come true this week, starting with the second Inaugural address of President Obama. We also got to see Secretary of State Clinton put a few arrogant members of Congress in their place, and we got Thursday's announcement of full gender equity in the U.S. Armed Forces.

Our staff members didn't get all their hopes and wishes fulfilled this week. For example, we didn't win the lottery. We also didn't get filibuster reform.

True filibuster reform in the U.S. Senate, including the talking filibuster and the elimination of secret holds, was completely thrown overboard by Senator Harry Reid in what appears to have been a deal for a debt ceiling agreement with Minority Leader McConnell. Liberals and progressives are justifiably outraged with Reid, who effectively got nothing from Senate Republicans, except the same kind of handshake agreement that Republicans violated early in the last Congress.

We wish more of the American public had listened to those pundits who said Reid was likely to cave on this issue.

There was one more wish that began to take root this week, and promises to flower later this year.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other Senators presented a new assault weapons ban proposal on Thursday, that addresses many of the problems both supporters and detractors had with the previous ban. The fact that Americans overwhelmingly support many of the pieces of this new gun safety legislation bodes well for key parts of it, especially the overwhelming support for universal background checks.

Overall, while we didn't get every one of our most treasured wishes granted, we did have a positive and healthy week.

Sometimes, that's all anyone can wish for.