House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has taken fire from the right these last two days from two sources that are closely tracking the GOP amnesty movement.
At The Daily Caller, Mickey Kaus is calling Cantor “the new ‘Mr Amnesty.’” Kaus doesn’t focus exclusively on Cantor, who faces a primary challenge from conservative Dave Bratt, but instead opens by offering the reason that amnesty backer Rep. Jeff Denham is pushing his ENLIST Act, which would permit illegal aliens to join the military and get amnesty in exchange.
According to Kaus
– On the surface, it looks like Denham’s amendment would give amnesty only to an almost comically appealing group of illegal immigrants: “DREAMers” who were brought to this country when they were young and who also serve in the military–a relatively small group of people, hundreds rather than thousands in all likelihood. When his proposal drew criticism, Denham, an Air Force veteran, immediately played his cheesiest “get-out-of-argument-free” card, babbling about “members that have never worn the cloth of our nation” opposing it.
– But, of course, Denham’s amendment isn’t about helping a few patriotic DREAMers. It’s about getting an immigration bill–any immigration bill–to the Senate where Democrats led by Senators Reid and Schumer can expand it by adding as much of the massive Gang of 8 amnesty as possible, and then going to “conference’ with the House on must-pass piece of legislation. It is, to use the technical term, a Trojan Horse.
Kaus links to a report from Breitbart News that Cantor supports Denham, but might oppose the amnesty for fear of losing the speakership if John Boehner quits because Republicans don't take the Senate. That’s possible, but don’t count on it.
As one of Cantor’s aides told Breitbart, “Mr. Cantor views military service as the highest service one can perform for our nation and if a young man or woman was brought to this country as a child and knows no other home and wants to serve our nation in uniform, he supports making that possible.”
If Cantor can get away with supporting amnesty and becoming speaker of the house, he’ll do it.
Kaus also mentions Rep. Bob Goodlatte, who also faces a primary challenge, as a possible opponent to amnesty but only because he wants his Judiciary Committee to retain control of the treason. As The Daily Caller noted two weeks ago, Goodlatte favors amnesty, particularly for the illegal-alien children. In other words, amnesty’s OK, as long as Goodlatte, who’s raising money from the Silicon Valley tech tycoons who want cheap labor, gets to put in his two cents.
Says Goodlatte, “We need to have legal immigration, not illegal immigration.”
Actually, “we” don’t need either.
