Like many conservatives and American workers, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said that the Republican establishment’s embrace of amnesty for llegal immigrants is the one issue that is making her think about renouncing her ties to the GOP.
Palin has always spoken for American workers who are pro-free markets and against the permanent political class. And amnesty, as Dave Brat said after he ousted House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) last week, is the biggest issue that divides the bipartisan Wall Street elites from Main Street.
Palin, echoing the voice of blue-collar workers who sit at home when establishment “Wall Street” Republicans are nominated, said the amnesty “issue is just about driving me to renounce my Republican ties because, see, even leaders on the RIGHT side of the aisle haven’t exerted all Constitutional power to stop the madness.”
“A few have tried, but until they’re sent reinforcements, then atrocities like the child abuse and exploitation you’re now getting wind of will only get worse,” she said in a recent Facebook note.
She has also said that Congress lacked the guts to impeach “tyrant” Obama over his lawlessness on immigration and accused the Obama administration of exploiting illegal immigrants and putting their lives in danger to shamelessly push their political agenda. She has often said that amnesty legislation would “decimate” Main Street and lower the standard of living for American workers of all ethnicities and backgrounds, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office also determined.
Palin has always been the North Star for exurban voter and blue-collar American workers of all backgrounds, especially conservatives who call themselves “independent” or “unaffiliated” because of their disdain for the GOP establishment.
In fact, Palin took on the GOP establishment and the permanent political class in Alaska — and crushed them. Since she has been on the national stage, Palin has relentlessly battled both establishments in the permanent political class, most significantly in Indianola, Iowa in 2011 in a landmark speech in which she said:
Yeah, the permanent political class – they’re doing just fine. Ever notice how so many of them arrive in Washington, D.C. of modest means and then miraculously throughout the years they end up becoming very, very wealthy? Well, it’s because they derive power and their wealth from their access to our money – to taxpayer dollars. They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.
So, do you want to know why the permanent political class doesn’t really want to cut any spending? Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done? It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed – a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.
It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen this kind of crony capitalism before. It’s is the same good old boy politics-as-usual that I fought and we defeated in my home state. I took on a corrupt and compromised political class and their backroom dealings with Big Oil. And I can tell you from experience that sudden and relentless reform never sits well with entrenched interests and power-brokers. So, please you must vet a candidate’s record. You must know their ability to successfully reform and actually fix problems that they’re going to claim that they inherited.
Real reform never sits well with the entrenched special interests, and that’s why the true voices of reform are so quickly demonized. Look what they say about you. You are concerned civilized citizens and look what they say about you. And just look what happened during the debt-ceiling debate. We’d been given warning after warning that our credit rating would be downgraded if politicians didn’t get serious about tackling the debt and deficit problem. But instead of making the real cuts that are necessary, they used Enron-like accounting gimmicks, and they promised that if they were just allowed to spend trillions more today, they’d cut billions ten years from now. By some magical thinking, they figured they could run up trillion dollar deficits year after year, yet still somehow avoid the unforgiving mathematics that led to the downgrade. Well, they got a rude awakening from the rest of the world, and that’s that even America isn’t “too big to fail.”
When we finally did get slapped with that inevitable downgraded, the politicians and the pundits turned around and blamed us – independent commonsense conservatives. We got blamed! They called us un-American and terrorists and suicide bombers and…hobbits…couldn’t understand that one.