Instead of a series of awkward
silences, punctuated by the vacuous desire to "create
education better," do you wonder what might have happened
if the lovely Marisa Powell had prepared for the pageant by, say,
studying a relevant
article about the gender wage gap at Politifact?

Imagine no longer. 

"What if Miss Utah Gave the Correct Answer at the Miss USA
Pageant?" is the latest from Reason TV? 

Watch above or click on the link below for video, full text,
supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV
clips.

View this article.

The New Yorker this week
has published an exhaustive—and exhausting—account
of the Senate's attempts thus far to pass comprehensive immigration
reform. The article, by Ryan Lizza, focuses on the "Gang of Eight,"
a bipartisan group of legislative negotiators whose non-negotiable
criteria for membership was that participants had to favor "a
comprehensive approach to immigration—all the major issues had to
be settled in one bill—and they had to support a pathway to
citizenship for undocumented immigrants."

Tuck away those groundrules for later.

The lead character in Lizza's story is Gang of Eight GOP leader
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who headed up Republican efforts in the
failed 2006 negotiations for bipartisan comprehensive immigration
reform (then known as "McCain-Kennedy"), but largely
handed the task over in early 2007 to the then-junior Arizona
Sen. Jon Kyl so that some other Republican would take conservative
flak while McCain tried desperately to
fundraise his presidential campaign out of oblivion. The
flak-dodging strategy did not work—McCain got hammered by the GOP
grassroots as Senate negotiations reached their crescendo, made
headlines by yelling "Fuck
you!" to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) at one pivotal moment,
and his campaign
came within an eyelash of imploding two weeks after the 2007
version of comprehensive immigration reform
failed to make it to a final vote.

Note that the previous paragraph is not The New
Yorker's gloss on events, but mine. Here's how Lizza describes
McCain's evolution on the issue: 

Beginning with his Presidential run against Barack Obama, in
2008, McCain had aligned himself with a wing of the Republican
Party he once fought, and retreated from issues he once championed,
including immigration reform.

"Retreated" is an incomplete and over-generous description of
John McCain's immigration politics in 2007, the implications of
which have direct relevance to 2013. In fact, the senator, having
narrowly averted seeing his decades-long quest for the White House
blown up on the launching pad over this single
issue, started openly campaigning against his own
bills. After having co-sponsored the DREAM Act three times
previously, for example, including earlier that year, McCain

opposed it in the fall of 2007, with his aides explaining
that "The senator has said 1,000 times since immigration reform
failed this summer that he got the message. The American people
want the border secured first." 

The Republican Party Platform when John McCain was its
presidential nominee stated bluntly that "we
oppose amnesty," and contained language such as this:

The rule of law means guaranteeing to law enforcement the tools
and coordination to deport criminal aliens without delay—and
correcting court decisions that have made deportation so difficult.
It means enforcing the law against those who overstay their visas,
rather than letting millions flout the generosity that gave them
temporary entry. It means imposing maximum penalties on those who
smuggle illegal aliens into the U.S., both for their lawbreaking
and for their cruel exploitation. It means requiring cooperation
among federal, state and local law enforcement and real
consequences, including the denial of federal funds, for
self-described sanctuary cities, which stand in open defiance of
the federal and state statutes that expressly prohibit such
sanctuary policies, and which endanger the lives of U.S. citizens.
It does not mean driver's licenses for illegal aliens, nor does it
mean that states should be allowed to flout the federal law barring
them from giving in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens, nor does
it mean that illegal aliens should receive social security
benefits, or other public benefits, except as provided by federal
law.

This is what happens when John McCain's electoral
needs outweigh his instinctive aversion to the conservative
grassroots:
brazen, insincere pandering that makes a mockery out of his
claim to talk "straight."
The low point of which may have been this May 2010
commercial, during McCain's primary campaign against
immigration restrictionist J.D. Hayworth: 

The progression from 2006 Teddy Kennedy partner on immigration
to 2010 J.D. Hayworth competitor demonstrates much about what is
unseemly in John McCain, but it also tells us plenty about the
fundamental flaws with the immigration deal he's brokering this
time around. Yes, it's gross when flip-flopping politicians pay
unconvincing tribute to "crazy
base land." But it also doesn't speak well to either the GOP
grassroots or their favorite media outlets that it has become
fairly mainstream for Republicans to advocate
double-fencing the U.S.-Mexico border and imposing a
mandatory federal database-verification system before any
American—not just foreigner, American—is allowed by the
government to be hired by any employer.

Instead of forthrightly telling their own base that the only way
to track each and every foreigner's movements at and within the
borders of the United States is to construct a police state,
Republican politicians have instead opted for a McCainite
dodge—talk the tough language of "securing the border" during
primary season, switch to
my-grandfather-was-a-hardworking-immigrant stories during
the general, and wait until the next electoral lull to head back up
the greased pole of comprehensive reform.

As Tim Cavanaugh wrote in a perceptive
April 2008 piece, there's a palpable "sense that even when
public officials do get serious about illegal immigration,
they're really winking at the audience.... Rhetoric about
immigration remains as passionate and hysterical as ever. And so
government officials respond to the hysteria, but since they know
in their hearts that the immigration crisis is a solution in search
of a problem, they do so with a vain, affected quality that reveals
the very condescension restrictionists find so infuriating."

So it is that the same John McCain who in May 2010 campaigned to
"complete the danged fence” is, three years later, saying stuff
like this: 

There are some people that, if you and I built the Berlin Wall
and had machine guns every fifty yards, then [they would say] that
border would not be secure.

On this subject, I certainly agree with John McCain (the 2013
version, anyway) more than double-fencer Michele Bachmann. But I
also wish that instead of alternating between pandering and scorn
for a conservative base that has become attached to the illusory
goal of even 90 percent border security, McCain instead tried to
forthrightly win arguments on facts, regardless of his temporal
political needs.

Meanwhile, by insisting at every step that this immigration deal
be "comprehensive"—that it include a pathway to citizenship for 11
million unauthorized immigrants AND increased border security AND
an expanded number of legal visas AND more database-enforcement of
visa overstays AND a new temporary-worker program, and so
on—negotiators have ensured that basically every possible
improvement to the country's pathologically dysfunctional
immigration system will be held hostage to a legislative
sausage-making process that grows more foul by the day.

So instead of treating the existence of 11 million-plus
unauthorized immigrants as a prohibition problem that could be
ameliorated with the relaxation of federal controls and expansion
of the legal visa regime, legislators continue to treat it as a
lawlessness problem requiring
unending billions in stepped-up enforcement. Instead of
increasing visas for postgraduate students or any other category of
desirable workers, negotiators are holding everything up so that
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) can convince enough distrustful
conservatives that the Gang of Eight will indeed do the impossible
of "securing the border."

When this latest effort fails, maybe then Washington will
finally be ready to have an honest conversation about which
discrete reforms are desirable, possible, and consistent
with the motto "Land of the Free." It will probably require a
generation of politicians who don't take their cues from John
McCain.