William Rivers Pitt: The Rift

An interesting report popped out of the blogosphere on Tuesday concerning some political upheaval in Arizona. Ben Smith, writing for Politico.com, revealed that long-time Republican Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain was staring down the barrel of a stout primary challenge from his right flank. "Social conservatives tolerated John McCain as the party's nominee," wrote Smith, "but never trusted him, and he now appears to be facing a serious primary from the right in Arizona next year. Chris Simcox, the founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and a prominent figure in the movement to clamp down on illegal immigration, will be announcing tomorrow at an event on the Mexican border that he's resigned from the group to run in the 2010 Senate primary."

Smith's post contained an excerpt from Simcox's forthcoming press release regarding his candidacy:

John McCain has failed miserably in his duty to secure this nation's borders and protect the people of Arizona from the escalating violence and lawlessness. He has fought real efforts over the years at every turn, opting to hold our nation's border security hostage to his amnesty schemes. Coupled with his votes for reckless bailout spending and big government solutions to our nation's problems, John McCain is out of touch with everyday Arizonans. Enough is enough.

Ouch. As if McCain didn't take enough of a beating last November at the polls, and from his own party's base, here comes Simcox to clout him about the head and shoulders, again, with immigration. This is nothing new; the issue of immigration has been shredding the Republican Party for three straight years now, was an integral part in two consecutive national drubbings at the polls, and has the potential to leave not just John McCain's Senate sinecure, but the entire GOP, in ashes.

It started in 2006, months before that year's midterms, when McCain accepted an invitation from Democratic Senator and liberal icon Ted Kennedy to co-sponsor legislation aimed at reforming immigration in America. The Kennedy/McCain bill, in short, created a framework through which 12 million undocumented immigrants could earn American citizenship in less than ten years. If they paid back taxes, did not break the law, learned English, and fulfilled several other requirements, those 12 million immigrants could become full-fledged citizens. It was not a perfect solution to the immigration problem by any means, but it was a move in the proper direction that gained eventual endorsements from senators on both sides of the aisle, from the business community, and even from George W. Bush.

And then, it exploded.

A theory has been floating around ever since regarding Senator Kennedy's motives behind the crafting and co-sponsorship of this piece of legislation. He may very well have only been interested in crafting as good a bill as possible, and may have pulled in John McCain to stamp the bill with a bi-partisan seal, and that's it. The consequences for McCain and the GOP at large, however, leave one wondering if there was some method behind the move. Kennedy's bill, along with the immigration issue in general, has become a long dagger with which the Republican party has been stabbing itself in the heart ever since. An accident? Only the Shadow, and the senior senator from Massachusetts, knows for sure.

Whether he meant to or not, Kennedy's bill - and McCain's involvement - caused open warfare to break out within the GOP. The House of Representatives, reacting to the Kennedy/McCain bill, drafted their own immigration reform legislation, a truly draconian piece of work that essentially banished all 12 million undocumented immigrants in America to the moons of Neptune, and declared any assistance provided for undocumented immigrants to be illegal.

The lines were drawn. Right-wing demagogues within the GOP who had made political careers out of screeching about illegal immigrants, found themselves in a terrible bind; the GOP base had been electing them on the basis of their stance on immigration and, thus, expected those officials to back the House version of immigration reform. But many of those GOP officials had been cashing checks from the same business community which had come out strongly in support of the Senate version of immigration reform, mostly because that business community didn't want their 12-million strong pool of undocumented and underpaid labor to get deported out of their fields and factories.

The Republican National Committee found itself crushed between a rock and a hard place with the two competing bills as well. On the one hand, the GOP had been making overtures to the Hispanic community in an attempt to woo those voters away from the Democrats. That whole program would come crashing down if the party at large was seen supporting the House's brutally anti-immigrant legislation. On the other hand, the Senate bill paved the way for the creation of 12 million new citizens, most of whom would be voting Democratic, according to all available demographic studies. Neither option was palatable to the GOP, and the resulting stresses further fractured the party.

The GOP base, which had been inculcated with exactly the level of vitriol against immigrants their officials had intended, saw McCain and then Bush come out in favor of the Senate bill despite their howling, and it was torch-and-pitchforks time on the far right. This particular mud fight, coming on the heels of an unpopular GOP president, a disastrous GOP war in Iraq and a whole cavalcade of GOP sex-and-bribery scandals in Congress, caused a wide swath of the GOP base to stay home for the November 2006 midterm elections. The result, of course, was a wholesale rout on election day, and for the first time since 1994, the GOP found itself not only out of the Oval Office, but in the Congressional minority as well.

For McCain, the inter-party debacle over immigration had intensely personal consequences. He was forced to spend an inordinate amount of time during his 2008 campaign running far, far away from the immigration bill he'd co-sponsored with the despised Kennedy, but try as he did, that unforgivable sin wound up costing him dearly in the end. For the Republicans at large, McCain's overwhelming defeat last November was coupled with yet another pasting in the Congressional races. Today, thanks in no small part to the immigration issue, the GOP is out of power in the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, and unless the Angry Jesus they pray to comes swooping out of the sky next year to save them, the political damages will continue to mount.

Specifically, the GOP faces the threat of extreme irrelevancy if their numbers in the Senate dwindle any further. Already in disarray after the bloodbaths of 2006 and 2008, roiled by the question of who's in charge of the party and incapable of mounting a coherent rebuttal to the Obama administration and the majority Democrats, even more GOP Senate seats lost in 2010 takes away the one club they have left in the bag: cloture.

No longer will Republicans in the Senate have the power to frustrate Democratic legislation with the threat of a filibuster. Without the 41 votes needed to throw up that roadblock, the GOP will become spectators within the chamber they so recently dominated. With as many as three Supreme Court justices expected to step down in the next several years, and with much of President Obama's ambitious legislative agenda still to come, the Senate is poised to become the arbiter of America's future. If the GOP loses any more power, they face the prospect of getting swept completely off the board.

"Simcox," wrote Ben Smith on Tuesday, "with a national base and a high profile on the right, is well positioned to give McCain a serious local headache. He'll find some allies among the conservatives who recently took over the Arizona Republican Party from McCain's allies, and he has a national fundraising base."

Whether or not Simcox manages to defeat McCain in the primary is irrelevant; a bruising primary fight will leave both candidates damaged, making either one easy pickings for a determined Democratic challenger. Such a scenario playing out in deep-red Arizona is not so absurd; the state elected a Democrat, Janet Napolitano, as governor not too long ago, so the idea of a Democrat winning McCain's Senate seat is actually well within reach.

And that's just one state. The electoral map is dotted with Republican senators who will be lucky to have a job after 2010. McCain is a national political presence, which means a serious primary challenge against him will be nationally covered, which means immigration will once again be a national issue for the GOP next year.

Purging fires are a natural part of any ecosystem, literally a fact of life. The same goes for political parties; sometimes, they become so laden with duff and underbrush that their very existence is threatened unless the sickness within gets burned out. It has happened to both parties more than once in the past over a variety of issues, and to some other parties which did not survive the blaze. For three years now, the Republican Party has been on fire over the issue of immigration. Whether or not the flames will help the party, or will raze it down to the stumps, only time will tell.

But the fire is burning, for sure, and not just in Arizona.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress.

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