Yuval Levin has some eminently sensible suggestions for how to improve the Gang Of Eight’s immigration bill. Levin’s suggestions include mandating the near-term adoption of E-Verify for all employees, eliminating the guest worker program and shifting future immigration toward high-skill immigrants for the sake of current low-wage American residents (to include many such residents who would be getting amnesty.)  That is an immigration program that I can enthusiastically get behind.

Levin frames his proposals as a suggestion for fixing the Gang of Six Deal. William Kristol wonders if it is at all likely that the current Congress would adopt Yuval Levin-style immigration reform. I doubt it. The Senate bill is basically amnesty, plus some gestures toward border enforcement that are and insult to the intelligence, plus increased legal low-skill/low-wage immigration, plus internal enforcement that will at best be delayed and most likely be abandoned altogether when the heat is off. The complex of interest groups and politicians who produced the Gang of Eight deal got what they wanted. They don’t want Yuval Levin-style immigration reform. John McCain doesn’t want it. Charles Schumer doesn’t want it. Barack Obama doesn’t want it. The left-wing activist groups don’t want it. The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t want it. I suspect that most of the above would prefer to stick with the status quo and hope to win immigration reform on their terms later on than support Yuval Levin-style reform now. Sufficient public pressure could push some elected officials to supporting better immigration reform, but public opinion would have to strongly favor better reform and probably make itself felt in elections.

Opponents of the Gang of Eight deal are drawing from deep wells of public opposition to increased low-skill immigration and amnesty that is not combined with effective enforcement. The problem is that the opposition to the Gang of Eight deal often just sound too negative. They often sound like Mitt Romney opposing amnesty until some indefinite time when the border is secure and that illegal immigrants will self-deport. This strategy is self-defeating in the end. It means that the best that opponents of the Gang of Eight deal can hope for is the maintenance of the broken status quo. It means that Chuck Schumer and his allies only have to win once while the best their opponents can hope for it to not lose even more than they already are.

A better option would be to contrast the Gang of Eight-style immigration reform with Yuval Levin’s far superior immigration proposals. I think it is very likely that Levin’s proposals would have substantial public appeal. Levin’s set of policies could form the basis for a humane, pro-growth, pro-working-class immigration reform program. They key is to create the political incentives for Republican office holders and candidates who want to position themselves as conservatives to adopt Yuval Levin-style immigration reform. It means establishing Yuval Levin-style immigration reform as the authentic and realistic alternative to the Gang of Eight deal. One thing e could do is hope that some brave politician or politicians would adopt Levin-style immigration reform and assemble a coalition around it. That would be great, but it would be more likely that politicians would adopt this agenda if there was already a movement in favor of such a set of policies.

My tentative suggestion is to start a petition (along with major newspaper ads) with as many conservative journalists, activists and office holders as can be found who favor Yuval Levin-style immigration reform. If we can shift opinions among conservative activists, then it becomes more likely that even the John McCains of the Republican party will go along and we might even get enough support from Democrats from competitive constituencies to actually pass a good immigration reform bill. Such a path would be slower than I would like, but it seems like the best option we have given the current balance of political forces.

Ross Douthat is on a roll lately. He points out that the recent Oregon study indicates that expanding health care coverage isn’t the most cost effective way to improve the well being of the poor and lower middle-class. I would agree, but I would put the emphasis in different places, not because Douthat is wrong, but because Republican politicians might hear him wrongly.

The Oregon study’s finding that expanding Medicaid had a statistically insignificant impact on the health of beneficiaries could be used by many Republican politicians as an excuse to ignore health care policy beyond making some gestures in the direction of repealing Obamacare. That would be a mistake because the Oregon study indicates that policies developed by conservative wonks might be the way to go, and that adopting those policies could expand the appeal of the Republicans.

The Oregon study found that expanded health insurance coverage was good for several things. It protected beneficiaries from financial shocks from catastrophic health costs and it increased their peace of mind. All of this is to say that health insurance is more valuable as insurance than as health. It is nice to see that the political culture is catching up with David Goldhill. That doesn’t mean that health insurance is not important to families and that it is not an important political issue. If you were to somehow abolish the health insurance of most middle-class American families, the response of those families would probably be a slow and quiet panic even if the health of the families stayed the same month in and month out. Republicans are only injuring themselves if they seem indifferent to public’s desire to have coverage or to people’s frustration with premium increases that eat into their disposable income.

What Republicans can do is use the findings of the Oregon study and the work of conservative wonks to address people’s health care and earnings concerns. Republicans could take on the Obamacare model of comprehensive health care prepayment as eating into people’s wages and imposing unnecessary burdens on taxpayers. Republicans could argue for moving health care financing to a model of catastrophic health insurance coverage, plus coverage for routine preventive care, plus health savings accounts to pay for non-catastrophic health care costs. James Capretta has been working on this. Republicans would be able to plausibly argue that their plans would maintain the health care security of middle-class families while reducing health care premiums and expand health insurance coverage for low-earners at lower cost to taxpayers than Obamacare. Republicans can be the party of health care security and more take home pay and lower spending. C’mon people. You can do this.

Isaac Chotiner explains that the expressed desire/hope/prediction of many liberals that the Boston bombers turn out to be white non-Muslims was based on a “reasoned reactions to a society that is still full of racism and bigotry” and that “in times of national emergency or stress, double standards—one form of that dreaded disease called political correctness—serve very useful purposes.” He writes that if the bomber had turned out to be white, then the bombing would have been treated as an isolated incident and that if the bombers were “militia-men type extremists”, then you wouldn’t have seen racial profiling and such. It is almost convincing but…

Did you notice that when liberals were talking about white terrorists, they didn’t mean just any old white terrorists?  Liberals were predicting (hoping for) “militia-men” who were “on the right” and inspired by Tax Day.  Whites, like most large groups of people, are a varied bunch. So are white terrorists. Most of the Occupy movement-inspired bombing conspirators in Cleveland were white. Kathy Boudin, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were all white.  Somehow I don’t think that Isaac Chotiner’s liberal friends were hoping that the Boston bombers were deranged fans of the Occupy movement.

If liberals really were hoping that the Boston bombing would be a one-off, then they, in all their deep commitment to tolerance, would have hoped that the bombers were left-wing extremists. Remember how, after the Gabby Gifford’s shooting, we were all told by the president to tone down our rhetoric and how a New York Times entertainer suggested that Sarah Palin had contributed to the climate that led to the shooting?  The guy who shot Giffords was just a loon whose obsessions had nothing to do with partisan politics, but that did not stop liberals in the media from suggesting that the shooter was tied to the Tea Party. That was a collective smear against millions of innocent people, but these things happen.  Now do you remember the lunatic who tried to shoot up the Family Research Council? He actually was inspired by a liberal group’s description of the Family Research Council as a “hate group.”  That wasn’t such a big deal was it? Just an isolated event. The guy only represented himself. No reason to curtail robust public debate. Certainly it wasn’t a moment for liberals to rethink the virulence of their rhetoric.

So if liberals really hope that the next terrorist event will be treated as an isolated incident, they should, in the immediate aftermath, say something like “We really hope these are left-wing terrorists who were inspired by the ability of the Weather Underground bombers to leverage their terrorist activities into employment in academia.” Because liberal journalists, activists, politicians and entertainers are saying they believe and “hope” that that it is a right-wing terrorist, aren’t hoping that the terrorism will just be treated as an isolated event. They are hoping it is a chance to smear their peaceful and democratic political opponents. They should be despised first for their approach to democratic debate, and second for their hypocrisy.