Washington to voters: drop dead; voters to Washington: you work for us

Talk radio proves its value

By Wes Vernon

You struck a blow for citizen activism this last week. As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day, we can take comfort in the fact that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" is going full tilt. We rule if we are focused.

Your outrage that the United States Senate appeared hell-bent on passing a bad immigration bill caused you to react exactly the way the framers intended when they crafted that document that gave birth to this nation.

The end result was a spectacular 53 to 46 vote whose effect was to kill the amnesty bill. President Bush and Senators Ted Kennedy, John McCain, and Harry Reid not only could not muster the 60 votes needed to shut off debate, they even failed to achieve a 51 vote majority needed to pass it.

Grassroots America can congratulate itself. No doubt the losing senators thought that there was something wrong with your lobbying tactics. And they complained loudly about it, like what's the matter with these plebeians — no fundraisers, no pork, no junkets to the fleshpots of the earth — these rubes don't know how to lobby, nothing but outraged e-mails and phone calls jamming the capitol switchboard. How dare they!

The role of talk radio

Senator George Voinovich (R-Ohio) cried out that he was not going to be "intimidated" by the grassroots. Citizens expressing their views is intimidation?

Talk radio played a role in keeping the citizens informed. That's precisely why some Stalinist-minded lawmakers on Capitol Hill want to use the awesome power of the federal government to knock conservative talk show hosts off the air. Shades of Hugo Chavez, the Marxist who used his Stalinist-style power to pull the plug on a TV station that dared to criticize his regime.

But on the same day the immigration bill went down in the Senate, we the people scored a second great victory in Congress last Thursday, this one on the House side where lawmakers passed a measure saying "Hands off Talk Radio." More on that upcoming, but first, a look at talk radio's role in the immigration debate.

Look who's talking

Senator Trent Lott (R-Miss) complained that the amnesty bill which he supported was being trashed by talk radio hosts who didn't know what they were talking about.

Oh, really? Well, get a load of this on the Sean Hannity Show, Wednesday, June 27:

Ohio Senator Voinovich — I voted for it. They made a motion to table it. It's [Senator] Kay Bailey Hutchison that says these people within two years have gotta go back home and then reapply and get back in the country, they can't just sit here for ten years or whatever it is and then get behind the line and end up getting a green card. There's a lot of amendments that are pretty good amendments that would make this bill....

Sean Hannity: Didn't that amendment get shot down. I know for example that...

Voinovich: No, it passed today.

Hannity: But the other one that — Kay Bailey Hutchison also had an amendment that was tabled 53 to 45 earlier today that would require all adult immigrants to return home temporarily in order to qualify for permanent lawful status. So —

Voinovich: I thought the —

Hannity: I have the AP story right here. Let me read it to you.

Voinovich: OK, so it failed. I thought her amendment....

Hannity [reading]: The Senate on Wednesday killed a Republican proposal to require all adult illegal immigrants to return home temporarily in order to qualify for permanent lawful status.

Voinovich: Oh, I thought it passed because the — uh — frankly I voted for it and I thought it passed because it was a motion to table her amendment and most of us I thought voted no on the tabling, but the fact of the matter is that — What was the vote on it?

Hannity: The vote was 53 to 45 to...

Voinovich: All right, so that's another — then we'll have more amendments.

Question: Why does Hannity — among the talkshow hosts who (according to Senator Lott) don't know what's in the bill — know more about the bill than Senator Voinovich who was voting on it?

But that fits a pattern

At one point, a Virginia constituent phoned Republican Senator John Warner's office and inquired how he planned to vote on the measure — to which the Warner staff person replied that she was "not authorized to release that information." Responded the irate constituent, "Whom does his majesty think he's working for?" (Click — from the senator's staff.)

Note: In the end, Senators Warner and Voinovich both voted with the majority against shutting off debate — the key vote that prompted Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid to pull the bill. The Nevadan sputtered that talk radio "had a field day — these masters of simplicity."

That's the old "simple solutions to complex problems" ploy. When the establishment tries to ram something down the throats of the homefolks, the philistines are derided as simpletons.

Yes, the talk show hosts were "simply" reporting on the bill, and keeping track of its fate in the Senate and informing their listeners who in turn contacted their senators and said, "You're giving away my country. Stop it." Yes, it was that "simple."

The House: Thumbs up for talk radio.

On that very same day, the House voted overwhelmingly to prevent any reinstatement of the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican and former radio talk show host himself, sponsored an amendment to an appropriations bill prohibiting any money to be spent by the FCC to reinstate the doctrine.

He managed to corral 309 votes in the House for his amendment. That's amazing in Nancy Pelosi's House.

That was 309 in favor of free speech vs. 115 votes for Stalinism. The House Democrat leadership voted in lockstep for the Stalinist point of view. But Pence had 113 Democrats on the side of freedom, plus every single one of the Republicans.

Because the amendment was attached to an appropriations bill, then (assuming if it remains after the Senate deals with it) it is effective only until the end of Fiscal Year 2008. That would be October 1st of next year — interestingly, just one month before the presidential election.

However, Congressman Pence is also introducing a stand-alone bill that would have the same effect. So the fight is not over yet.

The question is Why?

But the effort to kill talk radio — the one and only media outlet where conservatives dominate — is but one part of the power play on the immigration bill. And that leads us to the question of why the political class had this maniacal rush to enact the amnesty legislation — crafted in secret by a small bipartisan group of senators, with no public hearings by any Senate committee.

The open borders coalition hates talk radio in large part because of its role in blocking the badly flawed bill.

The Democrat angle — cheap votes

It strains credulity to imagine that the new illegal poor and uneducated arrivals to our country would be attracted to the party of small government and personal responsibility — the dominant philosophy of the GOP. Illegals will demand their "rights," and as their population grows and they ultimately gain amnesty-granted citizenship, the conservative movement in the U.S. will become irrelevant and the Republican Party — what there is left of it — will turn left and play the "me too" game that helped relegate it to minority status in the Roosevelt-Truman era.

This column submits that is exactly what Senator Kennedy and his political portside colleagues have in mind. The result would likely be an unstoppable rush toward statist government running virtually everything. At some point, our Constitution will be openly called into question. Billionaire socialist George Soros wants to hold a second constitutional convention circa 2020.

The Republican angle — cheap labor

Having outlined Democrat reasons for favoring the open borders lobby, we turn now to the Republican reasons. And for that, we cite Pat Buchanan in his brilliant tome State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and conquest of America.

"Should the Bush White House build a security fence on the Mexican border and impose sanctions on employers who hire illegals, the U.S. chamber of Commerce and Business roundtable could snap their check books shut and the GOP would react like some trust fund baby whose father just phoned from Hobe Sound to tell him his ATM card had been canceled."

Once again, the stupid party blunders head first into the evil party's trap. The Senate's Democrat leadership understands that every Republican who votes for this misbegotten threat to our security will suffer the consequences in the next election. Put dollar signs in front of these guys' noses, and they do their Pavlov's dog act.

To sum it up

The American people have shown they rule when they pay attention. Without talk radio, the amnesty bill probably would have passed, with a soothing liberal mainstream media assuring us that it was OK and that if we raised a peep of protest, we were "bigots."

That old guilt trip doesn't wash anymore. And the people, with the help of talk radio need not fall for it.

© Wes Vernon