Thread: Christie’s Immigration Catch-22: Help Illegal Aliens or Win GOP Primaries

Christie’s Immigration Catch-22: Help Immigrants or Win GOP Primaries

By Dean Obeidallah November 19th 20135:45 AM

If the New Jersey governor signs a bill providing in-state tuition benefits to children of undocumented immigrants, he’ll anger the very people he needs to win the GOP nomination.

It’s not easy being Chris Christie. And it just got tougher.

Now the New Jersey governor doesn’t just have to deal with Sarah Palin calling his weight “extreme” or Rand Paul calling him a “moderate.” (Remember when being a moderate was a good thing?)

Christie’s got a new challenge, one that could have a profound impact on his presidential ambitions: whether to sign into law a measure that will provide in-state tuition benefits to children of undocumented immigrants.

The proposed law, known as the New Jersey Tuition Equality Act, would affect up to 10,000 students, offering them significant savings in tuition costs. The bill passed the New Jersey Senate on Mondayand is expected to sail through the Democratic-controlled Assembly.

If Christie signs the bill into law, he’ll anger the people he needs to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. But if he vetoes it, he will likely lose the support of many Hispanic voters—the people he needs to win the general election.

It’s like Sophie’s Choice, except without Meryl Streep or the Nazis. Or maybe it’s more like “Zugzwang”—a word I can barely pronounce—a chess term used when a player has only two possible moves, and both are painful.

What will the governor do? Well, if a speech he gave in 2011 at the Ronald Reagan Library is any indication, he will veto the bill. “I do not believe that for those people who came here illegally that we should be subsidizing with taxpayer money through in-state tuition their education…Let me be very clear from my perspective—that is not a heartless position, that is a commonsense position,” he said then.

Christie even publicly criticized Texas Gov. Rick Perry for signing similar legislation in Texas.

It looks pretty cut and dried. Based on Christie’s statements in 2011, we can assume he will veto the Tuition Equality Act.

But flash forward two years later. It’s October 2013, and Christie is in the midst of his reelection campaign with an eye toward 2016. He is speaking before the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey, thousands of miles from the comfy conservative confines of the Reagan library, and his words are strikingly different: “I believe every child should be given the opportunity to reach their God-given potential. That’s the moral requirement…We need to get to work in the state legislature around things like making sure that there’s tuition equality for everyone in New Jersey.”

Will he veto it to bolster his conservative credentials? Or will he sign it and let the chips fall where they may?

Wait a second. Isn’t this the blunt-talking Christie, not the typical Etch a Sketch politician who alters his views depending on his audience? Could he be pulling a “full Romney,” or are we just reading too much into Christie’s words at the Latino event?

No, just a few days later at a gubernatorial debate, he reiterated that he now supported the proposed Tuition Equality Act. Christie had flip-flopped on the issue—at least during his 2013 reelection campaign.

Did Christie’s reversal help him attract Hispanic voters in his reelection bid? In the words of Sarah Palin, “You betcha.” Christie won 51 percent of Hispanic voters, up from the 32 percent he attracted in 2009. And that’s well above the 27 percent of Hispanic voters that Romney attracted in 2012 nationwide.

So when the Tuition Equality bill is placed on Christie’s desk, what will he do? Will the governor try to find some technicality that will allow him to veto it but claim he still supports the policy in principle?

Will he veto it to bolster his conservative credentials? Or will he sign it and let the chips fall where they may?

The right choice for Christie is to sign the Tuition Equality Act. There are numerous reasons to do so, not least the moral aspect Christie articulated at the Latino Leadership Alliance gala. A less squishy reason: People with college degrees have a lower unemployment rate and earn higher incomes than those who didn’t graduate college. So college grads can better support themselveswithout government assistance and in turn contribute to the tax base.

Let’s see what Christie chooses. Either way his opponents will use it against him. But at least by signing the Tuition Equality Act, he will know he did the right thing from a public policy point of view, even if it hurts him politically within the Republican Party. But that’s what leadership is all about, and in the long run I believe that’s what voters desperately want in our grotesquely dysfunctional political climate.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...primaries.html

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PAT GAROFALO

Chris Christie Shows Why the GOP Is Hopeless on Health Care

By PAT GAROFALO
November 19, 2013

• 

With the rollout of the health care exchanges created by Obamacare hitting some bumps, to put it mildly, and President Obama's approval rating falling to new lows, it seems like now would be the perfect time for Republicans to take control of the health care issue. Yet they haven't.

Why? To figure that out, look no further than the GOP's darling of the moment, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Fresh off a re-election rout, plenty of conservatives are pointing to Christie as the hopefor a new, modern and revitalized GOP. And at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council 2013 yesterday, Christie knew his cue, saying, "Obamacare is a failure, it's always been a failure and it will not succeed. It just won't."

[See a collection of political cartoons on Obamacare.]

But when asked what he would replace it with, Christie first demurred, saying he didn't have enough time to flesh out a solution, but then added:

Obamacare is wrong, it's a failure, it's the most extraordinary overreach of government power in the history of our country. And it's being run by people who have never run anything. So why are we surprised it's failing?
…
What do we need to replace it? We need a robust debate among both sides. Unlike last time, where the president jammed this down everybody's throat and got not one Republican vote because he was unwilling to make any compromise, including tort reform, for god's sake. Well, then this time we need a robust conversation between both sides where everybody brings skin to the table and everybody compromises. And if we do that we can craft a solution.

[See a collection of political cartoons on the Republican Party.]

This is just red meat, not a constructive discussion of the nation's health care problems. And it's emblematic of the mainstream GOP's fact-free approach to health care reform and the problems it's having landing punches against Obamacare.

For starters, it's simply incorrect that the Obamacare exchanges are "being run by people who have never run anything." Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, after all, ran a state (she was the governor of Kansas, not exactly a socialist utopia), which I imagine Christie counts as executive experience. And President Obama, like it or not, has been at the helm of the world's largest economy and military since 2009.

But far more importantly, Christie's only solution to the health care conundrum is more "debate." He seems to believe that health care reform would have gone just fine if mean old Obama hadn't "jammed this down everybody's throat" without making any compromises. That's revisionist history, to say the least.

Back here in reality, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., spent months fruitlessly trying to get Republicans to sign onto a health care bill, which was also endlessly debated in committee, in each chamber of Congress and on the airwaves. There are a slew of provisions in the law that come from various proposals

Republicanshave put forth over the years, including some lifted from their Obamacare alternative, but they earned Obama not one Republican vote.

[See a collection of political cartoons on Congress.]

Obama also ditched the public option – a government run plan in the health care exchange – as a concession, for which he got nothing in return except accusations that he was engineering a "government takeover" of health care. Oh, and Christie's magical tort reform, the GOP silver bullet? Obama has offered it to Republicans multiple times, and in response, they did nothing. (Tort reform, in the end, would result in scant savings anyway.)

This is not to deny that Obamacare has its problems, but simply to highlight that the GOP had the opportunity to be constructive during the health care debate, and instead chose across-the-board opposition and obstruction as an explicit political strategy to bring about Obama's "Waterloo."

Now, years later and with Obamacare faltering, the best the GOP's newest star can muster is to tell the same old tales in the same old way.

Complicating the matter is the fact that the few ideas conservatives do have for health care reform would result in many of the same things which Republicans are now criticizing. Reforms favored by the GOP would cause people to lose their insurance plans, even if they like them. And they would cut Medicare. Gasp!

Christie either knows this and can't say it, because he would then be vilified by the conservative base, or he is just another Republican who doesn't understand the tradeoffs involved in reforming America's inefficient, wasteful and oftentimes completely backward health care system.

And his refusal to even try to formulate a coherent health care alternative shows why, even after 40-something repeal votes and a disastrous rollout of the exchanges, Obamacare is still very much the law of the land.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/...ors_picks=true