11A
OPINION
Sttnes
gainesvilletimes.com
Midweek Edition - September 9-10, 2020
Shannon Casas Editor in Chief | 770-718-3417 | scasas@gainesvilletimes.com
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The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
How Pence
lost his way on
immigration
Imagine that memorable scene from “The
Godfather II” with me playing Michael Corleone
and Vice President Mike Pence cast as Fredo. I
approach No. 2, hug him and whisper: “Mike, you
broke my heart.”
And for what? Ambition?
A politician is led astray by
his or her quest for a big
ger title. There is no bigger
cliche. What a waste.
At the heart of the
betrayal was a single issue:
immigration.
Of course, we’re not
talking about just any
run-of-the-mill issue.
The immigration debate
is thorny, divisive and
highly charged. There are
unlikely alliances, unpredictable obstacles and
undercurrents of racism.
What’s more, both parties lie to their constitu
ents, pretending to pursue policies that they
have no intention of pushing. Republicans talk
as if they want to deport illegal workers even if
it upends the business community that supports
them, while Democrats trick Latinos into think
ing they’d like to welcome more of them into the
citizenry even if it upsets their core constituency
of working-class white voters. The whole debate
is one big con.
Now, I think Pence conned me.
One of the things that the immigration issue
has going for it is that it reveals character, and
shows others whether you have any to reveal.
At the recent Republican National Conven
tion, the issue made its way into Pence’s speech
when he accepted the GOP nomination for vice
president.
“Joe Biden is for open borders; sanctuary cit
ies; and free lawyers and health care for illegal
immigrants,” Pence said
Good luck arguing that case, Mike. On immi
gration, Biden is a boring moderate. He doesn’t
want an open border. In fact, he has often voted
to fortify it. That includes his vote in favor of the
2006 Secure Fence Act, which authorized the
construction of 700 miles of border fencing.
Meanwhile, in his speech, Pence praised Presi
dent Donald Trump for having “secured our south
ern border and built nearly 300 miles of the wall.”
Later, when Biden served as vice president,
he sat silently by as President Obama devastated
the immigrant community in the United States by
deporting record numbers of people, separating
families, caging children, and removing refugees
without access to lawyers and other forms of due
process.
Pence’s fearmongering takes me back almost
15 years. That’s when I started writing about
Pence, who was then a third-term congressman
from Indiana. I interviewed him several times
about his stab at immigration reform.
In 2006, Pence was himself attacked by anti
immigration hardliners. Then-House Judiciary
Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner
— who authored a bill that made it a crime to
help an undocumented immigrant “remain in
the United States” — dismissed Pence as having
“all these bright ideas” that would never work.
Then-Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo. — who was
at the time one of the most overtly nativist mem
bers of Congress — accused Pence of pushing a
“mini-amnesty.”
It would be a crime to assist an illegal immi
grant to “remain in the United States... knowing
or in reckless disregard of the fact that such
person is an alien who lacks lawful authority to
reside in or remain in the United States.”
All because Pence dared to come up with a
comprehensive immigration reform bill that was
as creative as it was controversial.
At the core of the controversy was the thorny
question of what to do with the millions of illegal
immigrants in this country who prop up portions
of the U.S. economy. Rather than simply try to
deport them all, and watch most of them come
back, Pence devised a way for those people to
remain in the United States. The key was for
the undocumented to humble themselves and
acknowledge that they did something wrong
by coming here illegally or overstaying a visa.
If they did that, Pence reasoned, fair-minded
conservatives would go along with the concept of
allowing these people to stay put.
Pence recruited as an ally then-Sen. Kay
Bailey Hutchison, R-Tex., and used her input
to refine his idea. The Hutchison-Pence bill —
which dropped in July 2006 — required illegal
immigrants in the United States to briefly return
to their home country and register for work visas
with the eventual opportunity to become U.S.
citizens.
Back then, and for the next decade, whenever
I was asked who my favorite politician was,
Pence was always near the top of the list. That’s
because I admire in elected officials three things
that not many of them have: courage, character
and a willingness to fight it out with members of
one’s own tribe.
Unfortunately, that was the Old Pence. That
was the one who, as the governor of Indiana dur
ing the 2016 Republican Primary, had nothing
nice to say about Donald Trump and endorsed
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex.
The New Pence had to turn himself inside
out when he hitched his wagon to Trump, who
rewarded the Hoosier by making him his second-
in-command when he became president.
Trust me. The Old Pence would not have liked
the New Pence.
Ruben Navarrette writes for The Washington Post
Writers Group.
RUBEN
NAVARRETTE
ruben@
rubennavarrette.com
Not finding much good news
in this big bummer of a year
We are now into Septem
ber of what has so far been
a bummer of a year. My
colleague, David Carroll,
a Chattanooga TV anchor
with whom I share the edito
rial page in several papers,
calls 2020 “ the Edsel of
years.” I wish I had thought
of that line. I hate it when TV
anchors are funnier than I
am.
We have had to endure
eight months of sheltering in place,
social distancing, to mask or not to mask,
boycotts, layoffs, government bailouts
and computer-generated everything
else except burning up buildings and
tearing down statues. That has been
human-generated.
Can things go further into the dumper?
With a presidential election roughly
eight weeks away, the answer is self-
evident. Having to watch two old white
guys with bad hairdos going at each
other while political pundits ponderously
pontificate will likely drive me to binge-
watch all the back episodes of “The
Gong Show.”
So, what do we have to look forward
to? Certainly not the annual scrum
between the scholar-athletes from the
University of Georgia, the oldest state-
chartered university in the nation,
located in Athens, the Classic City of the
South, and You-Know-Where Institute of
Technology.
Absent this momentous event, I will
strive to be gracious. I promise not to
bring up all the Rhodes Scholars we have
that YKWIT doesn’t have. That seems to
upset them worse than laying 52 points
on their scholar-athletes in a
recent scrum.
Frankly, September doesn’t
hold a lot of promise. How
excited can you get over the
fact this is National Blueberry
Popsicle Month? I asked
Junior E. Lee, general man
ager of the Yarbrough World
wide Media and Pest Control
Company headquartered
in Greater Garfield, Ga., if
he had done any surveys on
public attitudes regarding National Blue
berry Popsicle Month. Given the way
things are going these days, it wouldn’t
surprise me that somebody has their
nose out of joint over blueberries or pop-
sicles, or both.
Junior was late getting back to me.
He told me he had been observing Fight
Procrastination Day and had lost. He
didn’t seem to be too upset about it.
Between us, I have been having a
bit of a problem with Junior’s attitude
recently. While he is one of the most
respected media analysts in the free
world, he is also a pest control profes
sional. That is something he likes to rag
the snoots in the national media about.
He can hang with the best of them on
stuff like the U.S. trade deficit and what
is going on in Belarus but loves to ask
them how they would get rid of clover
mites and then watch the blank looks on
their faces.
It was my fault that I had Junior E.
Lee working on an assignment on June 6
and forgot all about that being National
Pest Control Day, a salute to pest con
trol professionals around the world. He
wasn’t happy. Pest control professionals
are proud people.
Junior says pest control isn’t just a job,
it is an essential service and had I heard
anyone talk about defunding pest con
trol professionals? I admitted I had not
and told him National Pest Control Day
would be duly observed next year. He
seemed mollified and said he was head
ing over to Aunt Flossie Felmer’s house
to rummage around in her drawers, sup
posedly looking for fire ants. He seems to
be doing that a lot these days.
With that out of the way, we are back
to trying to figure out how to outlast 2020.
I don’t see much ahead that excites me.
In October, there is National Punk Day
which is sure to be big in Portland and
Seattle. And we need to keep an eye on
Leif Erickson Day. Leif was the first
European to set foot in North America.
He was from Greenland where they eat
seals and make dogs pull people around
on sleds. I guarantee you that’s going to
get his statue pulled down somewhere.
There is National Take a Hike Day in
November which will thrill those of you
who have been suggesting for years I do
just that and in December National Ding-
a-Ling Day, a salute to those who believe
everything they read on social media.
I am afraid that is about all the good
news I have as to what to expect for the
rest of 2020, boys and girls. In the mean
time, I suggest we hunker down, give
each other a virtual hug and pray there
is not another Edsel in our future.
Dick Yarbrough is a North Georgia resident
whose column publishes Wednesdays.
Contact him at P.0. Box 725373, Atlanta, GA
31139; online at dickyarbrough.com; or on
Facebook.
DICK YARBROUGH
dick@
dickyarbrough.com
"The good news is you don't have COVID. The
bad news is you have an ulcer from worrying about it."
JIM POWELL I For The Times
Public health s inextricable link to
economy complicates Ga. s future
Speaking last year to the
Gwinnett Chamber, before
COVID-19 and all that came
with it, Gov. Brian Kemp
said he wasn’t sure the state’s
economy would hold up as
well as it did for former Gov.
Nathan Deal, but he had his
fingers crossed.
“There’s just things hap
pening around the world that
are a little frustrating. You
can’t really control them,”
Kemp said in words that have
proved to be painfully prophetic.
Georgia government — not just this
governor but all his predecessors, and
the departments they oversee — oper
ates on an ethos of chin-up prosperity
that may seem a little dissonant in a time
when the economy of the world has been
shaken. Even in times of belt tighten
ing, prosperity is never farther than just
around the corner. This was the spirit
last week, when Kemp announced that
Georgia has been chosen by a business
magazine as “Top State for Doing Busi
ness” for the seventh straight year. Since
midyear 2019, he said, the state has
attracted $7.4 billion in investments in
some 350 projects.
“It’s abundantly clear that Georgia
remains the epicenter for job growth,
economic development and investment
because of strong conservative leader
ship,” Kemp said.
Whether you agree or not, it’s
also abundantly clear that Georgia’s
economy was hit hard in
the early weeks of the pan
demic, when unemployment
claims quickly soared over
a million, and has been slow
to bounce back. WalletHub
reports that Georgia ranks
50th in one measure of how
quickly states are recovering,
and 51st in another. At the
beginning of this month, the
Georgia Department of Labor
reported that it had paid out
more than $7 billion in unem
ployment claims over the previous 24
weeks, more than the state paid in the
last seven years combined.
It was the early impact of the lock-
down on the state that spurred Kemp
to press for the early reopening of the
economy. It is a little more mystifying
why late into the summer, Kemp was
still pursuing a pointless lawsuit against
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ mask
mandate.
One of the big lessons from this pan
demic has been that public health and
the economy have become inextricably
entwined. The stubborn persistence of
new coronavirus cases through the sum
mer has slowed the economic recovery,
and the biggest threat to the recovery is
the possibility of a post-Labor Day surge
in COVID-19 cases.
Beyond that loom the long-term costs
of coping with the virus, and the very
real danger that the pandemic will still
further widen the gap between that part
of the state that is racing ahead and the
part that is falling behind.
In his excellent “Trouble in God’s
Country” blog, Charlie Hayslett has dis
covered stark evidence of how the Great
Recession contributed to the decline of
rural Georgia. In 2007, the year before
the recession, there were 12 counties
in the state where there were more
people dying than being born. Last year
there were 78, more than half the coun
ties in the state. These are mostly rural
counties, but they include such towns as
Americus, Milledgeville and Rome.
What’s the birth-to-death map going to
look like next year, when the impact of
the pandemic is tallied? Kemp reported
last week that over the past year there
has been a 30% increase in jobs created
outside the Atlanta metro area, follow
ing through on one of the biggest com
mitments he made in his campaign for
governor.
There’s a lot more left to be done,
obviously. Unfortunately, in late summer
these already declining counties have
been the setting for some of the nation’s
worst COVID-19 hotspots.
If a similar lens were focused on
metro Atlanta, it would reveal a similar
cleavage, worsened by the impact of the
virus on the most vulnerable. This is one
of the most worrisome, and potentially
lasting, results of the troubles we are
going through.
Tom Baxter is a veteran Georgia journalist
who writes for The Saporta Report.
TOM BAXTER
tom@saporta
report.com
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