While the left humiliates itself by being unable to define a woman, Republicans are having their own definitional crisis: deciding who has to leave the country under “mass deportation.”
There is nothing “mass” about narrowing enforcement to the “worst of the worst.” There is nothing populist about shifting the focus exclusively to criminals. There is nothing honest about pretending that this is what voters meant when they demanded action on immigration.
What is unfolding with ICE in Minnesota is a familiar genre in American politics: Republicans try to implement a campaign promise. Then, the media panics, protests erupt, and the Republican establishment starts searching for an off-ramp.
We have seen this before.
It is the same impulse that produced the RNC’s Growth and Opportunity Project—the so-called autopsy—after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. Rather than conduct an honest assessment aligned with the populist direction the party would soon take, establishment Republicans used Romney’s defeat to sell the base two catastrophic falsehoods: first, that the immigration status quo was somehow good for America; and second, that even if it wasn’t, removing millions of illegal aliens was either impossible or politically suicidal.
In Minnesota, it looks like that error is resurfacing in real time.
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