RIGHT SPEAK: IMMIGRATION: Stop Illegal Entry Before Doing Anything Else

Border Patrol agent on the U.S.-Mexican border near
Calexico, Calif., 2009 (Reuters photo: Lucy Nicholson)

GOP should focus on illegal immigration first.

Conservative efforts at health-care reform are, for the moment, a shambles. Conservative efforts at tax reform are foundering as well, though their prospects may be sunnier, given the habitual Republican appetite for tax cuts of almost any description, including irresponsible ones.

Both the tax-reform project and the health-care project have run into trouble because of a lack of intellectual and political leadership: Washington’s sock drawers are stuffed full of conservative proposals to rationalize taxes and to nudge health care in a more market-oriented direction, but herding those congressional cats — and conservative activists, think-tankers, PACs and super PACs, aspiring presidents, etc. — in the same direction requires real political leadership. That is made difficult by the fact that the loudest conservative voices — the talking mouths of cable news and the talk-radio ranters — have a very heavy financial incentive to be dissatisfied, or at least to pronounce themselves dissatisfied, with whatever it is that Republican congressional leaders decide to support, while the president himself, who has decided that railing against Congress will be his substitute for leading them in his direction, has similar incentives.

If these two issues are any indicator, then the Trump administration’s keystone issue — immigration reform — is on a course to end up wrecked upon the same rocky shoals.