Mighty clever fox, that Brer Owens seems to be.
First, he appears to sucker Brer Romanoff into tangling with that political tar baby, “immigration.” Then, after the helpless speaker of the House begs, “I don’t care what you do with me, Brer Owens, just so you don’t fling me in that briar patch called a special session of the Colorado legislature,” what does our governor do?
Reading on in our Uncle Remus 2006 edition, we find:
Of course, Brer Owens wanted to get Brer Romanoff as bad as he could, so he caught him by the behind legs and slung him right in the middle of that special session, where the Democratic leader would have no choice but to pass immigration bills to fire up the Republican base for next November’s election.
There was a considerable flutter when Brer Romanoff landed in the middle of the legislature and Brer Owens hung around to see what was going to happen.
By and by, he heard someone call his name and way up on Capitol Hill he saw Brer Romanoff sitting cross-legged at the speaker’s podium, crafting a whole batch of immigration bills calling for things like employer sanctions to divide the GOP from its natural base in the business community. Then Brer Owens knew he had been tricked.
Brer Romanoff hollered out, “Born and bred in the legislature. I’m speaker of the House of Representatives and I was born and bred in this briar patch!”
And so it came to pass that Romanoff, with more than a little help from Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, proved he can play this game of immigration politics.
It doesn’t matter how narrowly Owens tries to craft his “call” for the special session that convenes Thursday. Fitz-Gerald’s Democrats have an 18-17 edge in the Senate and Romanoff rules the House 35-30. They can pass anything they want, forcing Owens to either sign bills that split the GOP base or veto them – and take the heat for “doing nothing” on immigration.
Republican firebrands like U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo and state Rep. Dave Schultheis may think banging the anti-immigrant drum is the key to GOP hegemony. Cool-headed strategists like Karl Rove and President Bush know better.
So does William Kristol, who recently eviscerated Tancredo and his ilk in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard as “the House caucus to return the Republican Party to minority status.”
Kristol, like the president and Rove, has done the math on the immigration issue. As political consultant Dick Morris wrote recently, “A recent poll by Tarrance Associates shows how out of touch the House leadership is with rank-and- file Republican voters. Far from appeasing the ‘base’ by their tough position on immigration, they are alienating the very voters upon whom they most depend.”
Tarrance is a Republican polling firm. It asked Republican voters to compare the Senate and House immigration packages, without labeling either as such. By a margin of by 75 percent to 17 percent, Republican voters liked the Bush-backed Senate plan while splitting 47-46 on the “tougher” House bill.
GOP voters were then asked if they would support “an earned legalization program in which illegal immigrants could earn legal status and eventual citizenship by working, paying taxes, learning English, and waiting their turn behind people in their home countries who are already waiting in line for visas.” They backed that proposal, which is in the Senate plan, 80-17.
In contrast, Republican voters, by a margin of 70-25, opposed “creating a program in which illegal immigrants could earn legal status as a foreign worker but would have no possibility of ever becoming citizens.” As Morris notes, this scheme is “the essence of the House legislation.”
This division in the Republican ranks shows just how difficult it will be for the lead-footed Schult- heis to score points against the politically nimble Romanoff.
Indeed, Republican strategists looking at the Tarrance numbers are likely to reach the same conclusion as the computer Joshua does in the movie “WarGames,” after playing out all possible outcomes for “Global Thermonuclear War”:
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”
Sorry, Brer Owens, it’s too late to change the game. And to make it worse, you chose to play on Speaker Romanoff’s home court.
Bob Ewegen (bewegen@denverpost.com) is The Denver Post’s deputy editorial page editor.
