What You Should Think, Straight From <em>The Hill</em>

This week, we sat down and read The Hill's opinion section, mostly so you don't have to. Here's a sampling of what we found: "Scare Quotes" How do you write a nearly-700 word column and say everything, yet nothing all at the same time? Ask The Hill's editors, because they published a piece yesterday from Republican "pollster" David Hill that did just that. We put "pollster" in quotes because that's what Hill (not to be confused with the name of the newspaper) did over and over again—around words like "organized" (in reference to religion) and "rich people" and "average" (in reference to "not rich") and "global warming" and "climate change" and even "good thing" (in reference to a poll answer). Oddly, he left gay marriage, the one phrase we usually expect a Republican to wrap up in those scary punctuation marks, naked and alone. This belies a bigger issue with the piece, in that Hill doesn't seem to know exactly what he wants to say. He starts by listing a host of left-wing accomplishments under President Obama and then warns that more! is! coming! but he doesn't actually know what the more will be. How could he? But he also can't seem to lay it on the line and make a solid prediction (or, for that matter, let "words" stand on their own without the quotes). Instead, he just throws everything from gun control to what he calls a "newly impassioned green movement" against the wall on the odds that something will stick. Politicians = Politicians Mark Mellman, president of the left-leaning Mellman Group, breaks down for us why Republican senators were apt to vote for immigration reform, but why he thinks the House won't. It comes down pretty simply to demographics. Young and minority voters tend to be packed into cities, so that particular block—in favor of reform—impacts only a few House districts while almost every senator has to deal with it at some point or another. His argument, while it could've been laid out a little more clearly, comes to a sobering point: what we saw happen in the Senate with immigration reform doesn't signal any kind of new era of bipartisan cooperation, nor does it mean Congress will actually start resembling anything like a functioning institution in the near future. It just means they're politicians. But then, we already knew that. Pass the Damn Thing! Ah, but wait. While Mellman thinks the House won't come together on an immigration bill, we also have a piece from Dick Morris, former adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and pollster to President Bill Clinton, that says otherwise. Morris thinks Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will pass some kind of reform, because he has to. Good luck, though, guessing what said law will look like when the process is all said and done. No matter which way Boehner moves his bill, to the right or the left, he's going to run the risk of alienating crucial votes and riding right of the rails, says Morris. It's almost like Morris thinks we've elected a Congress that's incapable of... being a Congress. Why would we expect them to ever do something so complicated as pass legislation? Still, the leadership of the national Republican Party has made it clear that it now believes consistently demonizing a huge group of voters—namely Latinos, who, go figure, identify strongly with the immigration issue—isn't a good thing to do any longer if they want to continue to be a national political party. So Morris puts a pretty fine point on it: "It is important that Boehner remove the issue from the national stage by passing the bill and ending an irritant that keeps Latinos voting Democratic." Good thing he clarifies this is all about staying in power. We'd have been real confused if a Republican had hinted at having any kind of... we don't know... social justice or humanitarian reasons for seeing a need to fix the unfair and odious immigration system we have now. Phew! That was a close one.

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What You Should Think, Straight From The Hill

Justin McLachlan

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Justin McLachlan