Wednesday Open Thread [6.5.13]
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), “the leading Republican behind the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill, says he will not vote for the legislation he helped write and has staked his political future on, unless substantial changes are made before final Senate consideration,” Byron York reports. What a tool, and such an amateur. And what a coward.
Bob Moser, author of “Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority,” kicks off a four-part series in The American Prospect with “The End of the Solid South.” Moser, the Prospect’s executive editor, makes the argument that the South will return to its prior status as a competitive region, at least in Presidential elections.
Over the next two decades, it will become clear to even the most clueless Yankee that the Solid South is long gone. The politics of the region’s five most populous states–Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas–will be defined by the emerging majority that gave Obama his winning margins. The under-30 voters in these states are ethnically diverse, they lean heavily Democratic, and they are just beginning to vote. The white population percentage is steadily declining; in Georgia, just 52 percent of those under 18 are white, a number so low it would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
By the 2020s, more than two-thirds of the South’s electoral votes could be up for grabs. (The South is defined here as the 11 states of the former Confederacy.) If all five big states went blue, with their 111 electoral votes, only 49 votes would be left for Republicans. (That’s based on the current electoral-vote count; after the next census, the fast-growing states will have more.) Win or lose, simply making Southern states competitive is a boon to Democrats. If Republicans are forced to spend time and resources to defend Texas and Georgia, they’ll have less for traditional battlegrounds like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Even if Democrats aren’t competitive in those states for another decade, they will benefit from connecting with millions of nonvoters who haven’t heard their message. They are building for a demographic future that Republicans dread: the time when overwhelming white support will no longer be enough to win a statewide election in Texas and Georgia.
Florida, NC, and Virginia are all winnable because they have been won by a Democrat recently, two of those three twice in a row. For Texas and Georgia, though, I will believe it when it happens.
Rubio *is* a coward. I still think that the border security provisions on this bill are a dumb predicate to dealing justly with those who are here. There’s been a ridiculously massive investment in border security and it will NEVER be 100%. What you want to be much more efficient is the temporary visa system. But everything about the border security thing is about handing the GOP a way to put the brakes on all of it.
Enforcement First immigration policy benefits the private prison industry. The GEO group is one of those private prison companies and they told journalists that they wouldn’t lobby on the bill, not it turns out that they lied on that. Then there’s this:
Just out of curiosity – being this is an OPEN thread….has there ever been an update on Eric Bodenweiser? What happened to the rape case?
From Ezra Klein:
This sure looks to me like Rubio is joining his clownshow colleagues to kill immigration reform.
Re: Bodenweiser, several case reviews, plea deal offered and rejected by the defense
And
Postponements, also requested by the defense and graciously allowed by the prosecution.
Stalling, stalling stalling, but the light at the end of the tunnel is still a train
Standing up for what you believe in is not being a coward, quite the opposite, look it up in the dictionary,you will find your definition is incorrect
If the state had any case against Bodenweiser they wouldn’t be offering a plea deal. The truth is the prosecution has no case, no witnesses who can corroborate the claims of a convicted felon who is less than credible. We’ll soon find out just how politically motivated the Bodenweiser accusations were when Phillips case progresses.
I’m pretty sure the AG’s office has gone to court before with “convicted felons who are less than credible.” And failure to convict is not proof of innocence. You have no idea now and never will have any idea of whether this was truly “political.”