A Way Forward?

The New York Times hopes that Republican opposition to an immigration amnesty is fading, but Ross Douthat raises doubts about the electoral benefits of a Republican pivot toward amnesty:

The Republican National Committee’s extended autopsy on the G.O.P.’s 2012 defeat, which officially abjures policy recommendations but then goes on to nudge the party toward supporting comprehensive immigration reform and gay marriage, is the highest-profile distillation of what I described last week as the “donorist” view of how the Republican Party needs to change. As Ramesh Ponnuru suggests, this the party elite’s vision of domestic policy reform, reflecting the views of people who are already “more likely to favor same-sex marriage and comprehensive immigration reform on principle,” and who don’t “tend to have any major problems with the Republican economic agenda and do not believe it needs to be rethought in any serious way.” Or to put it another way: If you believe that Mitt Romney’s economic platform and “you built that” rhetoric would be the basis for a durable majority if they weren’t associated with the religious right and anti-immigration sentiment, then this is the vision of Republican reform for you.

Mickey Kaus reminds ambitious politicians that the establishment consensus on amnesty presents a political opportuninty.