After the Friend of Romney said, “this deal doesn’t meet the governor’s standards because it has a indefinitely renewable Z-visa, which he sees as a special pathway to permanent residency,” I heard again from the Rival of Romney who threw the flip-flopper charge.
The Rival of Romney pointed to this posting by Matt Lewis, essentially arguing… “nuh-uhh!”
In the meantime, an unnamed campaign is going after Fred Thompson’s opposition to the bill, suggesting that he, too, is flip-flopping, or opposing provisions he earlier according to Politico’s Jonathan Martin.
An aide to a would-be rival campaign wastes no time in tweaking Thompson for coming out against the immigration deal. In an appearance on FOX’s Hannity & Colmes in April of 2006, this source points out, Thompson said he’d “assiduously avoided looking at the details” of “McCain-Kennedy.” In the same appearance, he said of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the country:
“You’re going to get them all together and get them out of the country, which is not going to happen. Or you’re going to have to, in some way, work out a deal where they can have some aspirations of citizenship, but not make it so easy that it’s unfair to the people waiting in line and abiding by the law.”
If Martin’s source is the campaign that I think it is… the politics of the move strike me as baffling.
The immigration stance of a big chunk of the Republican base is “enforcement now, path to citizenship later, maybe, if we’re in a good mood.” The leadership has offered a bill that is essentially, “a little less enforcement, path to citizenship with some limits that we’re iffy on how it’s gonna get enforced, and, uh… well, some fines that we have to rely on an already not-terribly effective federal bureaucracy to enforce.”
The base doesn’t care if somebody whose previous stance was “hooray for illegals” suddenly changes his opinion; they want somebody to stop the bill! If Ted Kennedy suddenly was hit on the head, had a total personality inversion, and started leading the fight against this bill and killed it, the conservative base would say, “You know, there was always something I liked about that hard-drinking sonofagun.”