As his colleagues tiptoed in reverse, Steve King made sure they would never take another step forward. He rented out the East Lawn of the U.S. Capitol for the entire business day of June 19, setting up a stage and attracting thousands of supporters waving signs that read, “The Melting Pot Floweth Over.” (Boosting turnout for this event was a neighboring “Audit the IRS” rally, which was sponsored by Tea Party Patriots and held on other side of the Capitol.)
King had boasted for weeks that he had a silent majority of the House GOP on his side. Only a dozen or so joined him at the rally, but everyone else watching from the windows could feel the visceral passion of the activists in attendance. Right after former Fox News host Glenn Beck whipped the crowd of Tea Partiers into a frenzy, King bounded onto the stage. “I can feel it!” he cried. “I can feel we’re going to defend the rule of law! We’re going to defend the Constitution! We’re going to defend our way of life!”
Michele Bachmann received the most boisterous welcome of any speaker that day, calling the event “a beautiful family reunion.” It could have been: The crowd was almost exclusively white. At one point, she invited children onto the stage as she argued that bad immigration policy could imperil their future. “Amnesty costs a fortune,” she announced, cradling an infant in her arms. “It could also cost us our nation.” The crowd responded with booming chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”
There was only one senator invited to speak: Cruz. The Texas freshman had made a conspicuous effort to befriend King upon arriving in Washington, and quickly earned an ally in the Iowa lawmaker with considerable clout in the first presidential-nominating state. Cruz, like Rubio, was the son of a Cuban immigrant. But unlike Rubio, he was an immigration hard-liner. Standing before the crowd, Cruz warned that his Republican colleagues—he did not need to mention Rubio, whose name had already been booed countless times that day—were peddling the same proposal that had failed them in 1986: amnesty now, promises of border security later. “If you fool me once, shame on you,” Cruz declared. “If you fool me twice, shame on me.”
Cruz wasn’t wrong. Ronald Reagan had been duped in 1986, offering legal status to nearly three million undocumented immigrants in exchange for enforcement mechanisms that never materialized. Even so, in this case, the Texas senator’s motives were suspect.
Much like Obama in the run-up to his own presidential bid, Cruz observed the electoral implications of the problem and saw no upside in seeking out compromise. He sponsored an amendment in the Judiciary Committee that spring to substitute legalization for citizenship, but privately boasted of doing so as a “poison pill” to destroy the overall effort. Cruz, who would deploy the “undocumented Democrats” line while running for president, was concerned more with politics than policy. And the politics were clear: Historical data13 showed that Hispanics had voted for Republicans in lower numbers after Reagan’s 1986 amnesty, and present-day feedback showed that the base would impale anyone who repeated the Gipper’s mistake.
The Senate bill passed eight days later, but the tide had already turned. Boehner refused to bring it to the floor of the House. He knew that the legislation would pass on the strength of Democratic votes; that only 40 or 50 of his Republican colleagues would support it; and that conservatives would banish him for overruling the popular will of the House GOP. The Speaker was willing to be sacked over a budget deal, but not over immigration.
Boehner had a veneer of plausible deniability in scuttling the immigration bill: Obama, he said, had demonstrated through his unilateral actions that he could not be trusted to enforce immigration laws, old or new. This was a tad disingenuous, but it bought the Speaker time. It also squared with the rhetoric of his most conservative members. They had long accused the administration of being underhanded and deceitful, and in May 2013, just as the immigration debate was reaching its climax, their beliefs were substantiated. The Internal Revenue Service had “used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions,” according to a blockbuster report by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.
Since the emergence of the Tea Party in 2010, conservatives had accused the IRS of systematically targeting right-wing groups. Now their allegations had been substantiated. In the long run, the IRS scandal would prove endlessly useful to conservatives in their war on the Obama administration, especially given the dog-ate-my-homework routine from IRS officials claiming to have lost thousands of pertinent emails. In the short term, the inspector general’s report handed Republicans the justification they needed to claim they had an untrustworthy partner in the executive branch.
As the August recess approached, Boehner’s resolve stiffened. Nothing, not a visit from Ryan or a call from his friend Jeb Bush, could convince him otherwise. The timing wasn’t right, Boehner told them. They would revisit immigration in 2014, when things cooled down.
King took a victory lap. Referring to the undocumented minors who remained in limbo, he told Newsmax, “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another one hundred out there who weigh 130 pounds, and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”14 King lauded Boehner for his rejection of the Senate bill—the sort of praise that convinced the Speaker he’d made a big mistake.
Looking back, Boehner says that not solving immigration is his second-biggest regret after the failed Grand Bargain. He blames Obama for “setting the field on fire.” But it was the inaction of the House of Representatives—not voting on the Senate bill, not bringing up any conservative alternative, not doing anything of substance to address the issue—that enabled the continued demagoguing of immigration and of immigrants. Ultimately, Boehner’s quandary boiled down to a choice between protecting his right flank and doing what he thought was best for the country. He chose the former.
It wouldn’t be the last time.
RIGHT AROUND THE MOMENT IMMIGRATION REFORM DIED, SO, TOO, DID one of the longest-standing alliances on Capitol Hill.
Since their inception in 1973, the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee had worked in tandem. Heritage would supply conservative lawmakers with policy blueprints; conservative lawmakers would keynote Heritage dinners. Heritage would pay for conservative lawmakers to go on retreats; conservative lawmakers would hawk Heritage materials back home and encourage their constituents to donate. For decades, this codependent relationship revolved around the presence of Heritage staffers at the RSC’s weekly meeting in the Capitol basement.
But with the creation of Heritage Action in 2010, that bond had begun to fray. Whatever promises of legal separation between the think tank and its lobbying arm proved insincere; the wall crumbled almost immediately and came crashing down entirely once DeMint became president. In raising large sums of money for his Senate Conservatives Fund by picking on “moderate” Republicans, many of whom had solidly conservative voting records, DeMint had created a model for the organization he now led. Heritage Action was increasingly belligerent, baiting Republicans into fights they could not win and then monetizing their failures with fund-raising emails decrying the impotence of the GOP.