Defeat of incumbent Rep. Conner would be a giant step toward defeating the President's/Senate's Immigration Bill. Please read on and help if you can!!


Open Borders/Amnesty Republican On The Edge

John Fund reports that a five-term House Republican from Utah is headed for a dogfight during the upcoming GOP primary:

In the final round of voting at the GOP state convention two weeks ago, (Rep. Chris) Cannon was outpolled, 52% to 48%, by political newcomer John Jacob. Because no one won the necessary 60% of the convention vote to avoid a primary, the two will go head to head at the ballot box June 27.

Mr. Fund thinks the primary race has national implications:
Illegal immigration is the key issue in the race, and should five-term incumbent Rep. Chris Cannon of Provo lose to a restrictionist challenger, look for House Republicans to dig in their heels and block any bill that creates a path to citizenship for illegal aliens.

"House Republicans are already spooked about immigration, and should one of our own lose on the issue, you will see panic break out," one GOP congressman told me.

Fund adds that “Conservative activist Grover Norquist has called the Utah congressman ‘the president's strongest ally in maintaining a pro-immigrant GOP’", so a loss by Cannon may reverberate across Washington all the way to the Oval Office.

Got a few bucks to spare? There may be nothing better you can do with it than visit John Jacob’s campaign web site and chip in. Our contributions may prove necessary, because the last time Cannon faced an anti-illegal-migrant challenger Cannon “outspent him 8 to 1.”

Cannon’s career grade of "C" from Better Immigration is worse than it sounds. In the ranks of House Republicans, 214 have career grades better than Cannon while only 14 have a worse mark. Cannon’s grade is dragged upward by his marks on border and interior enforcement, but as president Bush has shown it’s easy and effective for a politician to score cheap points by supporting policies which can be depended upon to fail.

Here’s what John Jacob’s website says he'll do about immigration:

As your congressman, I will introduce and promote legislation that will effectively control our borders through increased funding for enforcement, technology, equipment, personnel and the necessary infrastructure to house and process illegal immigrants for return to their country of origin. I will promote that legislation which is sufficient to secure our borders as a matter of national security.

It’s a plus that Jacob gives no support to the need for guest-worker programs, amnesty, amnesty-lite or any of the other Trojan Horse scams. However, that paragraph above is incomplete and loose. If you think the entire 2,000-mile southern border ought to be fenced with a physical fence it wouldn’t hurt to let him know.

His site also doesn’t discuss legal migration levels. Much of the focus these days is quite correctly on closing the border to illegal migrants and not granting amnesty, but the open borders/amnesty gang can defeat even a fully-fenced frontier simply by granting legal status to tens of millions now outside our borders. So if you don’t think it’s a good idea to flood the US with poor, expensive, dysfunctional, irredentist, legal migrants either, you might want to make sure Mr. Jacob hears your view.


John Fund mentions a group of House Republicans with special reason to be nervous:

And some of the 17 Republicans who voted against the enforcement-only House bill are having second thoughts. Rep. Mark Souder, who saw his vote percentage drop about 10 points against the same hapless challenger he faced in the 2004 primary, says, "there is a pot boiling out there. We've got to secure the border first."
A refresher on what was in that House bill and which Republicans voted against it can be found in this brief summary.

For comic relief, we also get two examples of the new GOP reflex of claiming that defeats at the hands of an enraged grassroots show a need to improve the Party’s communications style:

Rep. Tom Osborne, the legendary University of Nebraska football coach, who lost a GOP primary for governor this month, says he was defeated in part because he backed a bill that made children of illegal immigrants eligible for in-state tuition rates at Nebraska colleges. "I don't think [voters] really understood" his position, he told the Associated Press.
But Rep. Cannon is not to be outdone:

Mr. Cannon's statement that "we love immigrants in Utah. And we don't make the distinction very often between legal and illegal. In fact, I think Utah was the first state in the country to legislate the ability to get a driver's license based on the matricula consular [a Mexican government ID], and of that I'm proud." Mr. Cannon says his remarks were taken out of context...