Monday, February 11, 2019

Amnesty: Always Disastrous For America

When Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, voted to oppose the trading of amnesty for partial wall-funding, they proved themselves to be the two most consistent GOP members in the Senate when it comes to maintaining their own party’s conservative principles. There can simply be no conservative case for forgiving mass law-breaking, whether it be illegal aliens’ entry through our sovereign borders without inspection or their theft of millions of Americans’ Social Security numbers in order to obtain work and welfare illegally.
It is high time the other GOP members in the upper chamber (and pro-amnesty Republicans elsewhere) brush up on fundamental conservative principles. After that, they can then study up on the disastrous effects previous amnesties have wrought on American society. Unfortunately, the history here is vast.
In his book about the core tenets of conservative thought, Catholic University professor Jerry Muller writes that a central difference between right and left is their respective emphasis on institutions and individualism. From the conservative perspective, he says, liberals’ “humanitarian motivation[s]” too often leads them “to policies that promote behavior which is destructive of the institutions upon which human flourishing depends.” As conservatives argue, Muller says, when liberals exhibit a “[m]oral earnestness devoid of the knowledge of the institutions that make beneficent social life possible” it is a “recipe for disaster.”
Although Muller doesn’t mention our past experiences with illegal-alien amnesties, it’s a “disaster” that would illustrate his point well. A particularly “special object of conservative solicitude,” writes Muller, is the rule of law. For it to be upheld, society must be built on laws which are certain, publicly promulgated and applied equally, or, as 19th century jurist A.V. Dicey stated, applied in way where “no man is above the law [and] every man, whatever be his rank or condition, is subject to [it] and amenable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals.” By contrast, in societies where laws are treated as fluid, non-transparent, or bending to political whims, institutional and social breakdown will follow.
Read the rest from Dale L. Wilcox HERE.

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