The GOP

last updated 8 January 2015

It's hardly a mystery why Republicans lost control of both the House and Senate in last week's elections, said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. They were no longer recognizable as Republicans. The party that once stood for lean government and strong national defense used six years in power to balloon the deficit and become "the party that needed to unbuckle its pants and loosen its belt two notches after every lobbyist-paid meal." Once known for running "wars like a finely tuned machine," they bungled the war in Iraq in a fog of wishful thinking. In other words, said Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe, Republican incumbents were swept out of office because they "hadn't been conservative enough." To return to power, Republicans must return to their roots'”a "principled platform of fiscal restraint, smaller government, and cleaner politics."

Let us add one more item to that list'”a balanced policy on immigration, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. In recent months, House Republicans mistook the angry anti-immigrant rantings on talk radio and Bill O'Reilly's cable TV program for mainstream thought, and tried to scare voters into supporting the GOP with promises to "secure the border." That strategy backfired disastrously. Most voters saw through the ruse, since all the GOP actually did about this "allegedly urgent problem" was authorize a 700-mile fence along our 1,951-mile Mexican border. Even worse, this cynical tactic alienated the "fast-growing bloc of Latino swing voters"'”thus reversing what had been an encouraging trend. In 2004, 44 percent of Hispanics pulled the lever for President Bush. Last week, only 29 percent of Hispanics voted Republican, with 70 percent voting for Democrats. In a nation that depends on immigrant labor, and that has a booming Hispanic population, Republicans cannot win elections by talking about border fences and shipping millions of people back to Mexico.