Freedom Line Blog

The right to vote is one of the most sacred rights we have as Americans. It is critical to our representative form of government and must not be taken for granted.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Setting aside the horrendously bad policy outcomes embedded in the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill, some elite Republicans still support the measure because they think voting in favor of mass legalization will help the GOP win over enough Hispanic voters to reclaim the White House in 2016.

Alas, it just isn’t so.

Using an innovative electoral calculator created by polling expert Nate Silver, Byron York shows that Mitt Romney “would have had to win 73 percent of the Hispanic vote to prevail in 2012.”

For comparison, Barack Obama won 71 percent.

In 2004, George W. Bush, to date the Republican presidential candidate with the highest ever Hispanic vote share, netted only 44 percent.

It’s simply not reasonable to argue, as some Republican supporters of the Gang’s bill do, that a vote for this proposal will make enough of a difference in Hispanic vote preference to change any upcoming election.

Instead, what’s far more likely is that Republican support will give the legislation the veneer of bipartisanship while paving the way for an 11 million person increase in Democratic voters.

Last month, we highlighted the obscene self-serving nature of big government’s growth.  In “Why We’re Boiling Over:  Federal Salaries Now Twice That of Private Sector,” we detailed how federal workers earn double their private sector counterparts, and how incomes fell throughout America last year except in cities with higher concentrations of federal jobs.

Now, a Wall Street Journal study entitled “Washington Firms Soak Up Stimulus” reports that President Obama’s failed $814 billion “stimulus” package has awarded nearly $2,000 dollars per every Washington, D.C. resident.  That’s three times the national average of $695.95 per person across the rest of the country.  It’s not by coincidence, then, that D.C.’s unemployment rate of 6.3% is over three percentage points lower than the nation’s overall 9.6% rate.

Why is the nation’s fed-up electorate boiling over?  The federal “stimulus” trough provides yet another reason.