Sunday, June 23, 2013
Sunday Question for Conservatives
I have a piece up at Salon this weekend defending the Speaker, and I haven't asked this one for over a year so I suppose it's time: what do you think of the job that John Beohner is doing as Speaker of the House?
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He's doing a reasonably good job so far. He prevented the Bush tax cuts for people under $450 K per year in income from expiring, and he made permanent the estate tax exemption of over $5 million dollars, a huge win for the upper middle class and the lower end of the upper class. If he prevents amnesty for illegal immigrants from passing the House, I'll give him an A+ as Speaker. If the Senate bill is enacted into law, the Republicans are finished by the 2020s as an economically conservative party who can win elections, in which case his Speakership will have been a failure. So we'll have to see the resolution of the immigration issue before we can evaluate his Speakership from a conservative perspective.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand this perspective. Why wouldn't conservative ideas survive an influx of new immigrants?
Delete@Anonymous - Thanks for your clear and thoughtful response. I'll just observe that even if the Senate immigration bill does not become law, current demographic trends suggest that Republicans will have an increasingly difficult time winning elections. Every year approximately 4 million American citizens reach voting age. In recent years young American voters have tended to vote Democratic by at least a 3-2 margin. Add in the 2.5 million deaths---disproportionately elderly, and thus disproportionately Republican voters---every year, and the estimated 11 million potential new immigrant-citizens (assuming they all go through the 13 year process the current bill envisions) are a relatively minor concern, electorally speaking.
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