Washington Republicans may be waking up

From The Washington Times:

House conservatives yesterday issued a dire warning to President Bush and Republican leadership that they will pay a devastating political price if they proceed with a guest-worker program or anything resembling amnesty for illegal aliens before securing the borders and enforcing existing immigration laws.

"They will remember in November," Rep. J.D. Hayworth, Arizona Republican, said of voters nationwide. "And many of those who have stood with our Republican majority in the last decade are not only angry, many of them plan to be absent from the polls" this year when the entire House and one-third of the Senate is up for re-election.

Mr. Hayworth and more than a dozen other House Republicans pointed to polls that show overwhelming support for their strict-enforcement stance and advised Mr. Bush and GOP leaders in both chambers to "listen to the common sense of the American people."

One Republican, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, fired a warning shot specifically at Sen. John McCain. The Arizona Republican widely expected to be a 2008 presidential hopeful at that moment was holding a press conference across the Capitol with, among others, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.

"Those elected officials who are insisting on a guest-worker program and diluting the efforts of border security and internal enforcement are telling the American people exactly whose side they are on," Mr. Rohrabacher said. "The American people now have that opportunity to make that determination, and they will. Senator McCain and others will find out about that, when they find their own career is short term."

At least someone has the sense to see the truth and the guts to tell it. The question is this, are there enough people out there in flyover country willing to let their votes depend on this one issue to make a real difference this November? I think that there may just be.

The question after that is, are there enough politicians who are aware of that fact? I’m not so sure of that. If Republicans suffer major loses this November it will not be Iraq or their profligate spending or any “scandal” that Democrats have attempted to manufacture. Republican loses will be the direct result of a sell out on the immigration issue.