Campos: Cheeky immigration bill ads

Published April 18, 2006 at midnight

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Sinverguenza is a Spanish word which has no good English equivalent. The literal translation, "a person utterly without shame," captures very little of the word's emotional resonance. The term is about the most severe insult one can hurl, and yet it often carries at least a hint of a certain perverse admiration for the sheer audacity of the behavior that demands such a description.

I suppose the closest English equivalent would be the 18th century word "rogue," with its implication that such a person is both a perfect scoundrel and a kind of entrepreneur of shamelessness. Like the sinverguenza, the rogue plunges forward when other men are restrained by some combination of moral scruples, fear and the capacity to blush.

It's thus with a certain perverse admiration that I note that the Republican National Committee is spearheading an advertising campaign of such epic dishonesty that its chairman, Ken Mehlman, has for now secured the title "Chief Sinverguenza of the GOP," despite the current ferocious competition for that honor.

The Spanish-language radio spots, which are slated to begin running in markets with large Hispanic populations this week, criticize Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid for "playing politics" with immigration reform (last week, a proposed Senate immigration bill died when Majority Leader Bill Frist refused to allow Reid to bring forward various amendments to the measure).

This in itself wouldn't be newsworthy; but what pushes the ads from the world of ordinary political mudslinging into the realm of Orwellian doublethink is their claim that "Reid's Democrat allies voted to treat millions of hard-working immigrants as felons, while Republican leaders work for legislation that will protect our borders and honor our immigrants."

This claim, it should be unnecessary to point out, is a precise inversion of the truth. At the urging of President Bush's Department of Justice, the House Republican leadership introduced a bill that would transform undocumented immigrants into felons. Currently, being in the United States without proper documentation isn't a crime. People who are here illegally can, of course, be deported, but their undocumented status doesn't make them criminals.

The House bill aims to change that, and it passed on a largely party-line vote, with Republican members voting yes, and Democrats voting no. So how did Mehlman and his RNC propaganda machine transform this history into the claim that, unlike Republicans, "Democrats voted to treat millions of hard-working immigrants as felons"?

Here's how: A proposed amendment to the bill would have reduced the penalty for being in the country illegally to a misdemeanor. Democrats voted against this too. According to the RNC, this vote means the Democrats were in favor of retaining the felony provisions. That argument fails what lawyers call "the red-face test" -- in other words, it's an argument a lawyer couldn't make without blushing (which, when you consider the sorts of arguments lawyers make every day, is saying something).

What's most interesting about these ads, besides their utter shamelessness, is the whiff of desperation they give off. It's not every day that the RNC is willing to greenlight a national advertising campaign based on a simple, unambiguous lie. Leaving aside the ethics of the thing, such a campaign runs a high risk of backfiring, given that there's a point at which even the most cowed reporter is willing to write, "The RNC claims black is white, but as of press time black was still black."

One can only assume the RNC's internal polls indicate the GOP's immigrant-bashing has been such a complete political and public-relations disaster that it's worth taking the risk of claiming black is white.

Perhaps this fall we'll see Spanish-language ads blaming "Democrat warmongers" for dragging the nation into Iraq.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. Reach him at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

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