Newt "Newters" Chertoff's Amnesty Reality

As a privileged recipient of Newt Gingrich’s Winning the Future/American Solutions email newsletters (by privileged I mean free subscription!), I eagerly check my email to peruse Newt’s latest endeavors or to preview where he will be speaking and on what topic each week. This Friday, Newt will speak to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, and his email newsletter contained a preview of his speech. Newt’s emails are long and informative, but I wanted to highlight for Capital Cloak readers one section of his upcoming speech since it will address a topic I have written extensively about over the past two weeks: the proposed McCain-Kennedy-Bush illegal immigration amnesty bill.

Newt’s speech on Friday will be critical of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who, as Capital Cloak previously reported, told USA Today editors that deportations are “not going to happen” and that the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill “bows to reality.” I wrote extensively about the implications and repercussions such an attitude by an important national security official could have, and Newt intends to publicly criticize Chertoff along similar lines. Here is an excerpt from Newt’s speech to be delivered Friday:

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff encapsulated this inability to get the job done when he recently said that the disastrous new immigration bill "bows to reality." In other words: It's too hard, so why not concede defeat and give up securing the border and enforcing the law.

But we hire leaders to change reality to fit our values, not to change our values to fit their failures.

I don't know what "reality" Secretary Chertoff lives in, but the reality of the vast majority of the American people is one of growing distrust of their leaders and growing disgust with the ways things are being done in Washington.

We value limited, effective government, but the reality we get is the failed response to Hurricane Katrina.

We value lower taxes and living within our means, but the reality we get is out-of-control spending on congressional pet projects.

We value enforcing our laws, but our reality is a Senate-sanctioned order to keep local police in the dark about the legal status of those they arrest.

…And our reality is the discovery of three terrorists in New Jersey who had been in the U.S. illegally for 23 years and charged 75 times by the police without being identified as having no legal right to be in the United States in the first place.

Newt has a gift for crystallizing conservative voter sentiment on immigration into one sentence, as evidenced by the phrase, “we hire leaders to change reality to fit our values, not to change our values to fit their failures.” Based on Chertoff’s statements and dogged support of the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill, it appears he has no intention of even attempting to enforce the currently existing immigration laws, let alone a host of new ones proposed in the bill. The point I made in my previous post on Chertoff’s immigration surrender is not lost on Newt, who likewise concludes that Americans do not want leaders who “bow to reality” before they have actually tried to aggressively enforce existing laws, nor do they want leaders who tell voters that enforcement of laws demanded by voters is “not going to happen.” American voters have a tendency to replace such men with someone who will make it happen.

Recent posts on immigration/amnesty:
McCain Fears Riots if Illegals Deported
Should National Security “Bow to Reality?”
France Doing Job Americans Won’t Do

Technorati: Newt Gingrich American Enterprise Institute Michael Chertoff Immigration Reform Illegal Immigration Amnesty McCain-Kennedy American Solutions