Sanders’ campaign strategy: attacking the messenger, not the message

In the past several months, I have witnessed something unfortunate in the campaign for the Democratic nomination: attacking the messenger, not the message. In particular, I have seen the Sanders campaign attack surrogates for Secretary Clinton when we have raised uncomfortable facts about Senator Sanders’ record with regard to immigration. While Senator Sanders has come a long way in caring about immigration and our community, he was not someone I considered an ally or even particularly interested when it came to immigrants or our immigration laws when I served with him in the House.

My position is that if you are going to claim to be the most progressive candidate, you should be willing to own up to the fact that you were not always so good on the whole range of immigration issues. But when such facts are raised this year on the campaign trail by Clinton surrogates – including myself – they are often met with ad hominin attacks on the messengers, not by addressing the actual issue.

In February, I wrote an op-ed about Senator Sanders’ troubling voting record on immigration and two House votes in particular. The first was a bill in September 2006 that he supported that called for indefinite detention of certain immigrants, expanded the use of “expedited removal” for immigrants so they could be deported without due-process, limited judicial review of deportation proceedings, and granted the Secretary of Homeland Security unlimited discretion to detain anyone in unlimited six-month intervals. It was an election year and then-Representative Sanders was running for the Senate and he voted for this measure.

It happened. He voted for it over the opposition of every legal and immigration groups’ objections and a clear understanding that it would have dire human rights implications. I reread action alerts from MALDEF, LULAC, the Asian American Justice Center, the American Bar Association, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees – among others and they make it clear this was not just another run-of-the-mill red-meat bill, but a fundamental shift in due process and legal rights, especially for vulnerable refugees. About indefinite immigration detention, the ACLU says it is “profoundly unfair. Prolonged detention forces many immigrants fighting the government’s efforts to remove them to choose between being locked up indefinitely and giving up their meritorious immigration cases.”

The current co-Chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), a surrogate for Senator Sanders, voted against the measure, as did I. Both Rep. Grijalva and I worked hard to defeat the bill, building support among other Democrats, because we both care deeply about our country and the rule of law and oppose campaign-year bills from Republicans who want to show how tough they are by not letting U.S. laws and due-process stand in the way of deporting people. But when I made the point recently in an op-ed that Rep. Grijalva and I were inarguably on the correct side – and the progressive side – of that vote, I was attacked by Sanders and surrogates for being “ disingenuous.”

Similarly, in 2006, Rep. Sanders voted for an amendment to an appropriations bill preventing any funds from going “to provide a foreign government with information relating to the activities of an organized group as defined by DHS-OIG-4,” which is a complicated way of saying that the Republicans had convinced themselves that the U.S. Border Patrol was informing the Mexican Government how to tell would-be immigrants to avoid the Minutemen – the volunteer border vigilantes who were enjoying their 15-minutes of fame at the time. The sponsor of the amendment, Georgia’s Jack Kingston, said during debate:

“There are 7,000 volunteers in the Minutemen organization and I am sure, like any group of 7,000 people, you could find a bad apple or two…. What my amendment does is simply says (sic) that the U.S. Government cannot tip off the Mexican officials as to where these folks are.”

Plain, simple, and utterly ridiculous. Demanding that funds not be used in a way that – in fact – they are already not being used in order to score some election year points with conspiracy theorists is unfortunately an old play in the Republican legislative playbook. It was a campaign stunt, but Rep. Sanders voted for it. LULAC, NCLR, The American Jewish Committee, the Presbyterian Church and the United Methodist Church all lobbied against this measure, and most Democrats voted against it.

These two votes should remind us of important lessons related to proposals coming from the Republican side. Heavy-handed, tough-sounding, enforcement-only approaches to immigration control never worked. They were designed to make Republicans look strong and make anyone who voted against them look weak or insincere in opposing illegal immigration. But they were never successful as policy and hardly ever successful as political stunts, despite their persistence today. Supporting the Minutemen then was not an effective means of controlling immigration.

Since then, Democrats – and for a time, many Republicans –rallied behind a smarter approach that combines enforcement with legal avenues of immigration and legalization mechanisms for people to apply to remain here to work and raise families. Sen. Ted Kennedy and I led this approach on the Democratic side, and again, Senator Sanders was a late adopter of voting to support comprehensive immigration reform legislation to get our immigration system back on a legal footing.

In 2007, one comprehensive proposal was working its way through the Senate and was driven by President Bush and Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona. It was on the verge of full-debate, but failed to gain cloture because most Republicans and a handful of Democrats failed to support the procedural vote. Senator Sanders was proud he voted against the measure and defends that vote to this day.

He even went on the Lou Dobbs Show on CNN, then the most important anti-immigration media outlet in the country, to declare his support for protecting American workers from legal immigration with the banner headline “Fighting Amnesty: Middle Class Wage Distress” blaring across the screen. When Dobbs suggested that “socio-ethnocentric interest groups who really have very little regard for the traditions of this country, the values of this country…” were behind the fight for so-called “amnesty,” Sanders expressed optimism that the special interests in Washington could be defeated by the American people.

Our lion on immigration, Ted Kennedy, and fellow Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy supported the measure. A contingent of House Democrats walked over to the Senate to beg waffling Senators to allow the debate to move forward. With control of the House, Democrats were teed up to pass a much better bill than the bill crafted in large measure by Sen. Kyl and President Bush. The leading pro-immigrant and pro-reform House Democrats – John Conyers, Zoe Lofgren, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Howard Berman, myself and others – were committed to protecting the rights, wages, and safety of working men and women, be they immigrant or native. Pass a bill and we will fix it in the House was our mantra. But Senator Sanders voted with the faction led by Senator Jeff Sessions to kill the measure. Other Senators, including President Obama, Secretary Clinton, Senator Durbin, and Senator Menendez voted to let the measure live on to fight for improvements in the House, but the measure – and immigration reform for almost a decade, died that day in June 2007.

It would have prevented millions of deportations. And since people could not come with visas in an efficient and functioning legal system, they continued to come with smugglers, subjected to exploitation, abuse, assault and extortion. Employers continued to abuse working people – men and women born here and born elsewhere – because our immigration system allows employers access to a grey market of lax enforcement. What could have been a turning point for immigrants, worker protections for all working people, and labor rights fizzled, atransformative moment in American politics and Ted Kennedy’s final battle faded because most Republicans and enough Democrats chose to kill reform.

Democrats and Republicans should have known better and a decade later we are still fighting to get Republican opponents of legal immigration and legal status to allow the majority to rule. Labor, business, progressives, libertarians, moderates, conservatives, evangelicals, Catholics, Muslims, Jews – almost all immigrants or the descendants of migrants throughout society – are pretty much united now. By a three-to-one margin, legal immigration combined with a way to earn legal status and sensible enforcement are the consensus position in America, and one shared by all of the Democratic candidates. But we should not gloss over where we have come from in the last decade or so. A number of us have fought hard – inside and outside of Washington – to forge a united front amongst Democrats and key allies in support of immigration as an important component in American society and our economic success.

We have to be together in November to defeat those who want to eliminate legal immigration, subject immigrants to religious and ideological tests, and deport the members of millions of American families, so we should not revise or deny our party’s stormy history on immigration matters. Nor should we attack the people who simply ask that we acknowledge where we came from, what we have had to overcome, and where we are headed on immigration matters in the Democratic Party and in the nation as a whole. In November, we will need civil rights icons like John Lewis and Dolores Huerta supporting the party’s nominee and an honest, positive campaign that strives to honor the truth would not tolerate any further personal attacks on surrogates in the 2016 Democratic race.

As one Sanders surrogate, actress Rosario Dawson, put it recently, “Present your facts, track records and plans, move forward honestly and openly, debate, call out discrepancies, explain and educate, then let the American people decide....” Those of us supporting Secretary Clinton expect neither more nor less.

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