In May, 2006, Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy were striving to pass a complex piece of legislation through the Senate. It wasn’t going very well. Opponents of the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act wouldn’t stop calling the bill an amnesty.
When it comes to infuriating the citizenry, nothing works so well as a proposal to reward millions of foreign nationals illegally present in the United States with the gift of citizenship.
Voters understand that it is perverse and unfair to extend the protections and privileges of our laws to everyone else in the world, but only if they have violated them.
Voters understand that granting citizenship with its consequent right to have a say in determining our laws to those whose presence in the United States demonstrates a disrespect for the very laws from which the privileges of citizenship spring in the first place is reckless and foolhardy.
Voters understand that rewarding bad behavior tends to encourage more of that behavior.
While senators may not understand any of the above, they do understand voter outrage. Few are anxious to put their names on an amnesty. They’d much rather vote for an earned regularization, or an adjustment of status, or a step-by-step pathway to legalization. As the New York Times helpfully explained in an editorial addressed to Republicans arriving in town for their 2004 convention,
“The word amnesty is anathema to Mr. Bush’s conservative Republican base, but the president has to realize that reform will work only if there is a reasonable way to allow some illegal immigrants a path toward permanent residence and even citizenship.”
A Platform for Immigrants
New York Times
Aug 29, 2004
In other words, according to the New York Times, amnesty itself isn’t a problem. It’s the word “amnesty” that riles Mr. Bush’s conservative Republican base.1 Embrace the amnesty, but call it something else, suggested the most respected newspaper in the United States, the lead dog among the watchdogs of democracy. Deceive the voters, counselled the New York Times.
In Senator McCain, the New York Times editorialists have an able student of political hoodwinkery.
One morning in May, 2006, in the middle of his and Senator Kennedy’s battle to save their amnesty, an angry John McCain took to the floor of the Senate to denounce those who were insisting on calling his amnesty an amnesty.
“Of course, it is not amnesty!” he railed, “Of course, it is not amnesty!…I am going to bring a dictionary out here to confirm the definition of the word ‘amnesty’,” he warned his colleagues. [McCain ducks amnesty challenge, threatens colleagues with dictionary]
Two months earlier, the New York Times, similarly enraged by accuracy run amok describing amnesties in Washington, had printed an editorial titled, “It Isn’t Amnesty:”
Attackers of a smart, tough Senate bill have smeared it with the most mealy-mouthed word in the immigration glossary — amnesty — in hopes of rendering it politically toxic.
It Isn’t Amnesty
New York Times
March 29, 2006
Mealy-mouthed? And “impose law and order on an unauthorized population” is straight talk? Once again, the New York Times gets it wrong. It isn’t the word “amnesty” that renders the bill politically toxic. It’s the fact that it is, actually, an amnesty that renders the bill politically toxic. If the legislation weren’t an amnesty, but were, say, a bill that expressed the Senate’s appreciation of soft fuzzy things, you could call it an amnesty all day long without rendering the bill politically toxic. The reason the word hurts the proponents of amnesty so much is because every member of Congress, including John McCain, as well as the editorialists at the New York Times, knows that the McCain-Kennedy amnesty is an amnesty.
An amnesty is:
- relieving a class of lawbreakers
- of the penalty required by law
- for breaking the law they broke
- at the time they broke it.
John McCain’s legislation permits illegal aliens to avoid the penalty now in law, and grants them the prize that they broke the law to gain in the first place. McCain argues that the amnesties he supports aren’t really amnesties because they come with conditions. McCain’s amnesties require illegal aliens being amnestied to, like, pay a fee and promise to learn English and hire an immigration lawyer and do 20 push-ups and some other stuff.
Since conditions are attached to his amnesty, Senator McCain argues, it’s not an amnesty. Amnesty, he says, means letting a group of law-breakers off scot free.
But his argument is a load of nonsense. Amnesties very often include conditions. For example, a government might announce an amnesty for rebels on the condition they surrender their weapons. Mr Straight Talk should be called Mr. Double-Talk.
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For more John McCain awfulness you’ll never read about in the NewYork Times, Michelle Malkin is a good place to start. Juan Hernandez.
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