In the end, the Gang of Eight also understood that immigration gives America a continual infusion of people with talent, energy, and ambition—people who eagerly embrace our democratic values. The gift of citizenship to someone who dreams of becoming an American is also a gift to ourselves.
1 Stephen Miller by his own account helped write President Trump’s inaugural address (which included the first use of the word “carnage” in such an address and, even more remarkable, the modifier “American” before it), took a primary role crafting the president’s failed early attempts at travel and immigration bans aimed at Muslim-majority countries, and assisted former attorney general Jeff Sessions on immigration matters, including the horrific child-separation policy.
2 It was not until the Trump era that I would meet farmers with flyers advertising their own equipment for sale. There is no longer sufficient labor for their operations.
3 The Colorado Compact followed a similar example developed in Utah in 2010. Though substantially different in its content, the Utah Compact was developed as a result of a bipartisan effort to “address the complex challenges associated with a broken national immigration system” and establish a more civil tone in state policy discussions. Colorado was not the only state to follow Utah’s example. In all there were seven others: Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Nebraska, Arizona, Texas, and Washington.
4 The bill was not above the harsh political realities and irrational fears of the day. It made special provision for refugees from the then raging Salvadoran civil war. Near the peak of the AIDS crisis, it also made a “health-based exclusion” to keep out “suspected homosexuals.”
5 Verifying an employee’s immigration status is no simple task. Is it the employer’s responsibility or the government’s? How do you verify the immigration status of a migrant agricultural worker? Is that the same process as verifying the immigration status of a college student? Or of a physicist working in a nuclear plant in Tennessee?
6 As a technical matter, DACA was an action taken by Janet Napolitano in her role as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security: the department, according to a statement, would henceforward “exercise prosecutorial discretion.” In practice, as the New York Times repoted, this meant that the department would forgo “the deportation of illegal immigrants who came to the United States before age 16, have lived here for at least five years, and are in school, are high school graduates or are military veterans in good standing.”
7 The September 12, 2011, Republican presidential primary debate in Tampa included eight of the candidates. When asked what they would do to win the support of Latino voters, debaters jumped on Texas governor Rick Perry for having granted students access to the state college scholarship fund regardless of citizenship status. After Perry defended himself, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman reacted, saying that it was “treasonous” for Perry to suggest he “could not secure the border.” Huntsman, in turn, took a licking for having granted driving privileges to Utahans regardless of their status.
8 Dick Armey, the former Texas representative turned political consultant, made the same point more bluntly: “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you. We’ve chased the Hispanic voter out of his natural home.”
9 Some say the rule dates back to when Newt Gingrich was Speaker. Hastert himself has said that it “was kind of a misnomer” and that “it never really existed” (because, technically, it was never officially entered into the chamber’s rulebook). Although occasionally violated, the rule has remained basically in force.
10 The minute I caught wind of the Gang of Eight’s formation, I was in Chuck Schumer’s and Harry Reid’s offices pestering them to let me participate.
11 The jargon we used for an undocumented person was Registered Provisional Immigrant (RPI). The Gang of Eight principles called for the pathway to legalization and citizenship to be “tough but fair.” To be approved as an RPI, an applicant needed to register and, among other things, to have lived in the United States since December 31, 2011; have had no conviction for a felony or for more than two misdemeanors; have paid assessed taxes; and have passed a background check.
12 This was no imaginary threat. In 2005, despite support from President Bush, the Corwyn-Kyl immigration reform bill was brought to defeat when Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh (among others) drummed up their listeners to join a call-in campaign targeting the bill’s supporters. (This tactic was to reappear in an even more vicious way in 2018.) Republicans in Congress were scared away.
13 Imagine anyone appearing on Fox News making a credible case in favor of immigration reform after 2016, let alone Karl Rove.
14 The bill’s opponents brought many kinds of amendments. The meanest were intended to deny rights to aspiring citizens even after they had crossed the threshold for citizenship. Ted Cruz brought an amendment that would have relegated all of them to second-class status for their entire lives and in so doing deprive them of benefits that you, your neighbors, and I take for granted, including services purchased by the taxes they paid or contributed toward. Jeff Sessions brought an amendment to eliminate use-of-force standards for arresting officers in detaining suspected illegal immigrants, on the ground that such suspects were not yet covered by the Constitution.
15 Cantor’s defeat caught people by surprise. He was rising in the party leadership. According to Politico, he had more than $6 million in campaign funds while his challenger, David Brat, had less than $1.5 million. Cantor opposed the Gang of Eight legislation but not harshly enough for some tastes. The New York Times observed: “Regardless of the exact reason for Mr. Cantor’s defeat, the news media’s focus on immigration is likely to deter Republicans from supporting comprehensive immigration reform.”
16 The HealthCare.gov website, which now works well, is the portal to the Obamacare insurance marketplace. The launch was a disaster; the site didn’t work. As chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2014, I was able to talk directly with President Obama about that debacle. Shortly after a meeting where I told him that our odds of retaining a majority in the Senate were low, we traveled together by helicopter from the White House to Joint Base Andrews, outside Washington. I asked him about the website. President Obama had a lot to say. One of his aides observed: “It’s even worse because he won’t yell at us.”
17 On the plus side, an antique system of hand-filled forms, pencils, and rubber-stamped approvals might protect visa holders’ personal information from Russian and Chinese hacking.
18 I always sort of liked John Boehner. I invited myself over to his office one day, and he kindly pointed to where I should sit to avoid smoke from his cigarette. Since he retired, he has found time to cut his own grass, play golf, and reflect on his erstwhile colleagues. He took the opportunity at Stanford to call Ted Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.” He said, “I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.” Of the Freedom Caucus, the former Speaker told Politico, “They can’t tell you what they’re for. They can tell you everything they’re against. They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mind-set is.” He has criticized the Freedom Caucus’s cofounders, calling Congressman Mark Meadows “an idiot,” and Congressman Jim Jordan “a terrorist as a legislator.” More recently, Boehner has been the face of the National Institute for Cannabis Investing, saying, “Cannabis is here to stay, the industry is only getting bigger, and I am all in.”
19 President Trump is not one to cling tightly to facts, and he throws them completely to the wind when stoking fears in order to generate support for his border wall. According to the Department of Homeland Security, undetected unlawful border crossings have dropped from 851,000 in 2006 to approximately 62,000 in 2016. Customs and Border Protection statistics report a similar decrease in the number of arrests, falling from more than 1.5 million in 2000 to under 500,000 per year since 2009. What has increased is the number of families requesting asylum—a legal pathway to entry fo
r people seeking safety in the United States.
20 In the event, Ryan left in the midst of a government shutdown over the wall and never returned. His final legislative act as Speaker, at the command of Donald Trump, was to pass a bill (containing funding for a border wall) that he knew could never pass the Senate.
21 My friend Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana, told me about the first time Donald Trump came to campaign against him in the fall of 2018. Jon was riding his tractor on his farm in Big Sandy, listening to the rally on the radio, when President Trump started talking about the gang MS-13. Jon wondered why he was focused on a gang no one in Montana had ever seen or heard of. Why wasn’t the President talking about things that mattered to rural communities—things like access to broadband, roads, small business? By the end of the campaign, after President Trump, the Fox News anchors, and Republican campaign committees had done their work, immigration had become a top issue in Montana, as it was for the same reasons in the Senate races in North Dakota, Indiana, and Missouri—all places where there is little evidence of MS-13 gang activity.
22 According to PolitiFact, the video in the ad showing people pouring unchecked over a fence—presumed to be migrants from Mexico and elsewhere in Central America spilling across the US border—was news footage from events in Morocco.
23 Coulter, a virtuoso troll, was especially scathing. She titled a December column, “Gutless President in a Wall-less Country” and warned Trump in a podcast that same day that he was on the verge of being remembered for a “joke presidency that scammed the American people.” Trump blocked her Twitter account but went on to do his part in the shutdown anyway. In the new year, as the shutdown dragged on to become the longest in American history, Coulter continued her attack. “He is dead in the water if he doesn’t build that wall. Dead, dead, dead,” she tweeted. After Trump agreed to reopen the government with no funding for his wall, Coulter told Vice News Tonight, “Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.”
24 The Federalist, for example, was in no small part an argument for Americans to abandon the weak government of the Articles of Confederation and to adopt the more “vigorous” or “energetic” government of the new Constitution. Political theorist Martin Diamond writes that for Hamilton and Madison, “the end of union is palpably inconsistent with the ‘imbecility’ (i.e., weakness) of the Confederation and requires an ‘energetic’ government.” There are positive references to vigorous or energetic government, or criticisms of weak, unstable, or imbecilic government, in almost every essay of The Federalist. Obviously, our government is weak if Congress refuses to govern on the major issues of our time.
ACTING LIKE FOUNDERS
When campaigning never ends, governing never begins.
How can we break the cycle?
I. Reconciliation
We are, as we have been many times before, at political loggerheads and rightly wondering what we can do to emerge as a stronger union—and maybe wondering if, indeed, that is even possible.
On March 4, 1801, after a protracted fight against John Adams for the presidency, Thomas Jefferson, the victor, took the oath of office. Americans had every reason to be gravely worried. The government was scarcely a decade old. During those years, disagreements over everything from trade and taxes to the role of the central government had resulted in the formation of America’s first political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. Newspapers had lined up behind the parties. Partly in response, the Federalist-controlled Congress, in 1798, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a criminal offense to “write, print, utter or publish” any “false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States.” After this legislation passed, the administration of President John Adams prosecuted fourteen journalists and editors, all from newspapers favoring Democratic-Republican causes.1 State legislatures in Kentucky and Virginia declared the Alien and Sedition Acts, along with a companion measure known as the Naturalization Act, unconstitutional. There was talk of secession.
Then, when Jefferson defeated Adams, it was still unclear that Jefferson would hold the office. I won’t recount all the constitutional peculiarities—they have since been fixed—but although Jefferson had clearly defeated the Federalists, he and his own running mate, Aaron Burr, found themselves in an Electoral College tie. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Partly owing to Burr’s ambition but also as a result of mischief by the Federalists, Jefferson did not emerge as the winner of the race until the thirty-sixth vote to break the stalemate.
Even after that—at the end of February, with only nineteen days before Jefferson was to take office—the Federalist-controlled Congress expanded the federal judiciary, adding thirteen federal circuit court seats and packing them with Federalist judges. The last two of these “midnight judges” were confirmed the day before Jefferson took the oath of office. John Adams signed the necessary documents on his last night in the White House.
At his inauguration, President Jefferson would have had every reason to excoriate his opponents. His partisans would have shared with him a sense that the Federalists had done all they could to thwart the will of the people. Jefferson himself was no paragon. Like many of the founders, Jefferson was a slaveholder. In his own lifetime he was taken to task for many things: he mismanaged his finances, nurtured grudges, and stoked intrigue. He left office disillusioned. But Jefferson was also one of liberty’s great visionaries. On the day of his inauguration, he had this to say:
Let us then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance, as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions … We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists.
Speaking as a citizen among his peers and not from above as their ruler, Jefferson called for unity—but not for unanimity. America is sturdy enough to contain disagreements. More precisely, even in a republic where citizens have the liberty to compete on behalf of their passions and interests, there are and must be limits to our disagreements. Jefferson warned against “political intolerance.” Free citizens, entrusted with their own government, have a responsibility to understand that not every disagreement is one of principle. We must try to understand one another’s perspectives and come to resolution when we can. We should expect, and even embrace, vigorous disagreement in our democracy, but we cannot allow it to disable, as it has now disabled, our ability to make decisions. In the end, someone, and it doesn’t have to be everyone, must be there after the argument to do the work of governing.
After the brutal election of 1800, a reasonable citizen might justifiably have questioned how much any republic could endure. Jefferson’s words at the inauguration are pertinent today:
I know indeed that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear, that this government, the world’s best hope, may, by possibility, want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one, where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.
Jefferson placed high expectations on Americans as citizens. The “call of the law” still speaks to each and every one of us. And it is no vague duty.
What is that duty? Part of the answer is to rise to the occasion—as Abra
ham Lincoln put it, to disenthrall ourselves from old ways of thinking and resolve to act. That can mean removing by election those who reject our republican values, whether because their impulses are by nature tyrannical or because they believe themselves to possess a monopoly on wisdom. It is as much a part of the American tradition to peacefully eject a charlatan as it is to elect a champion.2
But victory is not enough. There is also the hard work of governing—enabling the republic, in Montesquieu’s observation, to “correct its faults by its own laws.” This means electing candidates willing to work with those who are not of like mind.
Writing in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, Walt Whitman sought to define what he believed to be our patriotic duty to see the humanity in one another. The word “reconciliation,” also the title of his poem, seems to rise off the page in front of us:
RECONCILIATION
WORD over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
No challenge before us today compares to the one that faced the nation of Lincoln in 1860 or Whitman in 1865. Hopefully no future challenge ever will. To make good on what we owe posterity, we must hand over a republic in better repair than the one we inherited. Those to whom we give it must do the same. Neither we nor they need to make this up from scratch. We have more than two centuries of examples from which to draw.
The Land of Flickering Lights Page 24