Demand for lipstick on Capitol Hill to surge

If you’ve got any extra lipstick lying around, you might want to send it to Rep. Jeff Flake.

An Amnesty Is an Amnesty If…

Any bill or law is an amnesty if it permits a class of lawbreakers to avoid the penalty prescribed by law for breaking the law they broke at the time they broke it.

Currently, the penalty in most cases for being illegally in the United States is very straightforward (not to mention mild and reasonable).

If a foreign national is caught residing illegally in the United States, he has to leave.

So, any bill is an amnesty that grants illegal aliens the legal right to remain in the country, as both the Bush amnesty and the Kolbe-Flake-McCain amnesty do.

Weighing in on the widening Republican rift over immigration policy, the Arizona Congressman told The Washington Times that the two sides in the battle—the pro-amnesty Bush Republicans on the one hand, and the pro-borders mainstream Republicans on the other—"aren’t that far off."

"Once you get past the labels being thrown on amnesty," said Rep. Flake, defending the Bush amnesty, "then we’re pretty darn close."

Get past the labels?

Since the "label" amnesty is simply the correct and accurate term for the Bush plan (and the Kolbe-Flake-McCain plan, for that matter), what Rep. Flake is really saying is that he wants to trick his colleagues into thinking the amnesty is something other than it is.

Flake believes that if the Wall Street Journal Republicans can get this amnesty dressed up as, say, a “temporary guest worker program,” i.e., if they can successfully lie to their colleagues in Congress (and to the voters) they’ll get the amnesty passed.

It’s a harsh accusation, that of lying, but what else can we call it? When the Bush White House and the other corporate Republicans push amnesty, while publicly denying it, then they are not in error, they are not mistaken or confused, they are not even rising to the level of spinning. They are lying.

But does anyone care?

The New York Times certainly won’t call Bush or Flake on the carpet for lying about amnesties. In an editorial that ran as Republicans arrived in New York for the GOP convention last summer, it explicitly advised Republicans to do exactly that. The Times, to its great discredit, welcomed Republicans to town with an exhortation that they embrace an amnesty for illegal aliens– but not call it one!

In a 2003 interview he gave to The Arizona Republic, Congressman Flake accused ProjectUSA of demagoguery and mischaracterization after we publicly labeled his amnesty bill an amnesty — and backed our label-throwing with facts and solid analysis. Yet no Arizona newspaper bothered to look into the controversy and weigh in objectively with a public-spirited examination of this important question.

In Utah, Congressman Chris Cannon claimed repeatedly that his AgJOBS amnesty was not an amnesty, while hurling false and absurd charges at ProjectUSA. The charges against ProjectUSA were printed in the local media, but Cannon’s lies were never examined. Even when we challenged Cannon to submit the amnesty question to an independently chosen panel of legal experts at our expense, and he refused, practically admitting he knew he was lying about his bill, no Utah paper performed the public service of ascertaining whether an elected leader was telling the truth.

So, we can probably count on Rep. Jeff Flake to continue his crusade in the new Congress to dress up the White House pig and the Kolbe-Flake-McCain pig as temporary guest worker programs in the hope he can slip an amnesty past voters, and we can probably count on the nation’s media to bring us every possible detail of Martha Stewart’s lunch.

With every passing month, however, as the public continues to grow angrier over Washington’s immigration policy, the amount of lipstick Jeff Flake will require to dress up his legislative pigs will increase.

Congressman Flake is going to need so much lipstick, in fact, we decided to help out with a little Dress Up the Pig Effort (DUPE).

So that Rep. Flake isn’t caught unprepared, DUPE will send as many tubes of lipstick as possible directly to Rep. Flake’s office in Arizona.

You might want to send him a few tubes of lipstick, too, in case the Congressman is underestimating the amount of lipstick he’s going to need to dress up his amnesty pigs.

Send one tube. Send one hundred tubes (the more you send, the more you help ProjectUSA). But, with Rep. Flake saying he’s going to re-introduce the McCain-Kolbe-Flake amnesty in a matter of weeks, if you’re going to send him some DUPE lipstick at all, send it today.

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