It's Not Dead Yet

Did ♡bamaCare!!! kill immigration reform? We should be so lucky! All kidding aside, that’s Marc Thiessen’s take. Thiessen says Professor’s Wiggleroom’s small-ball threats to use his pen and phone announce his lame-duck status, but —

The one exception — his one last shot at a major legislative achievement — was comprehensive immigration reform. But that isn’t happening either.

And the reason can be summed up in one word: Obamacare.

“Comprehensive” is Washington-speak for “big.” And in the wake of the Obamacare debacle, no one is interested in anything big from Barack Obama.

“I try to focus not on the fumbles but on the next plan,” Obama said this weekend. But when you fumble as spectacularly as the president did with Obamacare, people don’t trust your next plan.

It’s not just that Americans don’t trust the president’s competence. Increasingly, they don’t trust him — period.

That’s all fine and good and also true. But I’m not so sanguine. Never underestimate the power of a bipartisan consensus to produce staggeringly awful legislation. Now the rank and file GOP might be against reform, but the leadership sure seems to be for it, in the sense that they’ve been bought and paid to be for it. So I just don’t know — it could easily go either way.

What I don’t understand is the GOP leadership’s reckless pursuit. They don’t need the big money to win the Senate in November; they only need six credible candidates. And if they succeed in this immigration push, they’ll find that all the money in the world can’t get disgusted GOP voters to actually vote for the party which sold them out.

The Stupid Party is getting more stupider.