Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Does anyone favor enforcing current immigration laws?

Victor Davis Hanson:

There are several issues ahead, such as immigration, deficits of all sorts, and energy dependence, that have the potential to erode conservatives' appeal to the general public. There is also no guarantee that the Democratic party is going to stay politically suicidal, as if an embarrassing Barbara Boxer or an unhinged Michael Moore will always remain self-appointed symbols of the opposition.

The president's immigration proposals are probably unworkable. A conservative base bristles at the idea that perhaps as many as 20 million illegal aliens now reside in the U.S. There are no proposed enforceable mechanisms such as stiff employer fines for unlawful hiring. Closing the border is never mentioned. Yet how are we to avoid a continued illegal presence in tandem with a legal guest-worker program without stern coercive measures — as if suddenly one million aliens annually will cease coming north because they did not qualify for the program?

Rather than dealing forthrightly with the crisis of national sovereignty and respect for the legal system, the issue is demagogued by the race industry on the left and by the laissez-faire Right that wants cheap labor, leaving most Americans in the middle and increasingly frustrated. Even Hollywood millionaires are now clamoring for legal protections for their illegal-alien nannies and gardeners, though such elites would hardly countenance a similar legal laxity that would allow foreign film technicians, screenwriters, and actors to flood southern California to work in their industry for a fourth of their own pay.

The only solution — enforcement of existing laws, employer sanctions, legal and measured immigration, closed borders, a radical return to assimilationist policies in education and government, a one-time (not a rolling) amnesty for those here for a decade or more — is palatable to most Americans but ignored by both parties. Yet the Left will give no credit to the president for what turns out to be a de facto continuation of its own open-border policy; it will only ankle-bite that the motivation for Bush's apparent liberalism is not humanitarian but mercenary appeasement of the corporate Right.

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Most Americans do not trust the Democratic party's foreign policy, its commitment to a government-mandated equality of result rather than of opportunity, and its divisive identity politics that seek to cobble together angry interest groups — radical gay activists, ossified D.C. civil-rights insiders, abortion-rights advocates, and Moveon.org types who distrust the United States — in lieu of a grassroots national majority. Yet even such political self-destructiveness does not necessarily mean that the Democrats cannot regain the presidency even without a centrist candidate like Zell Miller or Joe Lieberman. In 2008, we could see another splintering of conservatives as happened in 1992 and 1996. A sober, stable Ross Perot-like national populist could well siphon off discontents — perhaps 5 to 7 percent of the conservative electorate — furious about immigration, deficits, and a sense of American financial impotence abroad.