While conservatives are divided on the political path forward, Democrats are showing themselves to be united in a war against the Republican Party — with one-party rule for America as the endgame. One need only look to the political priorities Democratic lawmakers have recently adopted to gauge this reality.
Led by the Obama administration, a party hijacked by far-left radicals is determined to pass comprehensive immigration reform, prevent the passage of election integrity laws, and use the IRS as a billy club to suppress free speech. Republicans who are inclined to dismiss this agenda need only look to California to see the cost of complacency and denial.
Mass immigration and sweeping amnesty initiatives are the Democrats’ primary tools for realizing their ambitions. A devastating report produced by Phyllis Schlafly, ”How Mass (Legal) Immigration Dooms a Conservative Republican Party,” details that reality in no uncertain terms. Citing surveys from the Pew Research Center, the Pew Hispanic Center, Gallup, NBC News, Harris polling, the Annenberg Policy Center, Latino Decisions, the Center for Immigration Studies and the Hudson Institute, Schlafly reveals that immigrants have always been the mainstay of the Democrat Party, emphasizing that this dynamic has been occurring for at least a century. Furthermore, as a result of the current rate of accelerated immigration that brings 1.1 million newcomers to America every year, the GOP will be reduced to fringe status within a decade.
The statistics are daunting. A 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey revealed that 62 percent of immigrants favor single-payer, government-run healthcare. A 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study shows that 69 percent of immigrants favor Obamacare. The Pew Research Center revealed that 53 percent of Hispanics hold a negative view of capitalism and that 75 percent favor bigger government and more social services compared to only 41 percent of Americans. Only 37 percent of naturalized citizens believe the Constitution takes precedence over international law, compared to 67 percent of native Americans.
The state of California represents the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Ronald Reagan carried California with 59 percent of the vote in the 1984 election. Yet beginning in 1986, the amnesty bill that legalized 2.7 million illegal aliens began the transformation of that state from red to blue. Amnesty recipients began becoming citizens, reaching a level of 40 percent by 2009. By 2012, a combination of Hispanic voters naturalized by that amnesty, or related to people who were, gave 70 percent of their vote to Barack Obama. And until yesterday, when a pair of California state senators went on indefinite leaves of absence to fight corruption charges, Democrats had an unassailable supermajority in the state legislature. They still maintain one in the lower house, the State Assembly, while they also control every statewide office and both seats in the U.S. Senate.
Yet there are far more insidious forces at work here. As Ann Coulter explains in a recent column, since the 1965 Immigration Act went into effect, 90 percent of those who have entered the nation on an annual basis have been unskilled, Third World workers. That has produced a glut of low-wage workers whose wages have steadily declined as a result of the influx. But when Republicans counter with economic reality and a list of demands in return for a “pathway to citizenship,” they are labeled “heartless” and “uncaring” with regard to economics and business and “nativist,” “bigoted” and “xenophobic” with regard to immigration.
Democrats have also been unanimous in their opposition to any attempt to improve fairness and oversight of elections. With regard to commonsense voter ID laws, Democrats have managed to convince a substantial number of Americans that protecting the integrity of the electoral process is nothing less than an effort to suppress the vote of minority Americans. Thus, Eric Holder and his minions at the U.S. Department of Justice will continue to pursue lawsuits against the states of Texas and North Carolina to prevent newly enacted voter ID laws from being enforced. They will do so despite a 2008 Supreme Court decision validating the constitutionality of a picture ID requirement for voting in the state of Indiana. Liberal Justice John Paul Stevens declared that the law ”is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.’”
The Supreme Court upped the ante on that reasoning last year, when it struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. Prior to the change, states that had historic records of voter discrimination were unable to change their election laws without approval in advance from the federal government. States like Florida were prevented from purging their voter rolls of non-citizens, a situation unanimously hailed by the Left. “Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”
Holder, whose contempt for the rule of law was made plain when he urged state attorneys general to literally ignore those laws they themselves determined were discriminatory, is essentially ignoring two Supreme Court rulings in pursuit of his agenda.
There are glaring problems with that agenda. Nearly three-out-of-four Americans support photo ID requirements for voting. Moreover, despite charges of racism that the demand for photo ID elicits from leftists, the idea that any particular subset of Americans is less capable of procuring such identification is itself bigoted. Democrats’ charges of racism are nothing more than projections of their own warped worldview.
Yet far more important is the reality that voter fraud is a genuine problem. Statistics compiled by the True the Vote website reveal the extent. They note that in 2012, voter fraud cases were being pursued in 46 states. In addition, 24 million invalid voter registrations remained on the rolls nationwide, 1.8 million dead voters remained registered to vote, and 2.75 million Americans are registered to vote in more than one state.
Ironically, the principal architect of the problem is Eric Holder and the DOJ. According to former DOJ employee J. Christian Adams, the department refused to enforce Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) that tasks the Department with bringing voter rolls up to date by purging dead and ineligible voters. Once again, Holder’s determination to selectively enforce the law is the key element here.
Moreover, the reality that True the Vote was involved in illuminating the issue of voter fraud ties directly into the Obama administration’s most egregious effort to undermine the GOP: using the IRS as its vehicle to suppress free speech.
True the Vote’s self-described mission is focusing on election integrity issues, and much of that effort was focused on the Texas Democratic Party and Houston Votes, an ACORN front group. When True the Vote discovered irregularities that were pursued by Texas law enforcement officials, the American left declared war.
That war was pursued with vigor by the IRS after True the Vote applied for their 501(c)(3) non-profit status in July 2010. Hundreds of questions were asked over and over again. The agency demanded to see owner Catherine Engelbrecht’s tweets and Facebook posts. Aggressive audits of her and her husband’s businesses, that included investigations by the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the Occupational Safety Hazards Administration, and the state version of the EPA, the Texas Commission on Environment Quality, were vigorously pursued.
Unfortunately, Engelbrecht’s ordeal was hardly an anomaly. As the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel reveals, Obama’s contention that there’s not a “smidgen” of corruption occurring within the IRS is as truthful as his contention that American would be able to keep their doctors and health providers once ObamaCare was passed. “Perhaps the biggest fiction of this past year was that the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups has been confronted, addressed and fixed,” Strassel writes. “The opposite is true. The White House has used the scandal as an excuse to expand and formalize the abuse.”
The formalization of that abuse consists of offering conservative groups an “expedited” process for getting approval of their 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status –sold under the guise of pursuing reform. In reality the deal was a thinly-veiled effort to continue inhibiting the activities of those groups. Current rules governing 501(c)(4)s allow for spending as much as 49 percent of a group’s funds on political activity and as much time as they choose to engage in those efforts. In exchange for quicker approval from the IRS, groups had to agree to spend only 40 percent of their funds and time, calculated by the number of hours employees and volunteers worked, on political activity. “The clear point of the ‘deal’ was to use the lure of 501(c)(4) approval to significantly reduce the political activity of targeted conservative groups going forward,” Strassel explains.
Some groups, desperate to be approved, took the deal. But at least two that didn’t, including one that had been waiting three years and three months for approval, were once again targeted by the IRS, who demanded resubmission of information previously supplied, along with new details, such as the groups’ 2012 fundraising letters.
For perspective sake, it should be noted that prior to Obama’s presidency, the IRS approval process took an average of three weeks.
Strassel further explains that the IRS’s efforts to control speech are transparently political, because the bipartisan Federal Election Commission (FEC) can enforce rules regarding political speech. “But the FEC can’t be controlled by the White House, and Democrats have been unable to pass new speech restrictions through Congress,” she reveals.
Nonetheless, in a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee markup last Thursday, Democrats made it clear exactly where they stand. At that meeting, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) proposed two amendments aimed at protecting all Americans from IRS abuses. The first one would have imposed a ban on IRS employees targeting individuals or groups based on their political viewpoints. It would have also made it a crime for any IRS employee to engage in willful discrimination against any groups based solely on their political beliefs, or any policy statements held, expressed, or published by that organization. The second amendment would have amended the tax code to use the definitions promulgated by the FEC to determine whether an organization is engaging in political activity, leaving the IRS to focus solely on taxation.
Both amendments were unanimously opposed by Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, leading to their defeat.
This toxic combination of promoting a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal aliens, along with laying a foundation for voter fraud and codifying suppression of their opponents’ political speech, are odious activities when they are examined individually. Taken as a whole, it becomes clear that Democrats are engaged in a concerted effort to fundamentally transform the United States of America into a one-party political system with their party in permanent control. And if it takes ruining millions of workers’ futures, destroying the integrity of the electoral process and undermining the Constitution to do so, so be it. As with every historical effort to seize unassailable power, the ends justify the means.
On Jan. 22, Gov. Rick Snyder proposed spending $350 million in tobacco settlement money to shore up the Detroit’s two city employee pension funds.
