My letter to President Bush

Mr. President:

As a lifelong conservative and someone who voted for you twice, and as someone who has spent countless hours defending many of your policies, I am writing to express my utter disgust with your handling of the border situation and this impending legislation. People have been complaining about this problem since long before you came to office, yet even after 9/11, your Administration has done precious little to address this problem, which in my opinion is affecting this country as much or more than terrorism and radical Islam.

Now that this nightmarish legislation is being discussed, something which I, and millions of others believe will not help the problem, you have taken to calling us names and questioning our motives for disagreeing with you. This is invariably a sign of someone "defending the indefensible". The fact of the matter is that I, and I imagine the vast majority of Americans, believe the best we can hope for is that this so-called reform won't make the problem worse than it already is, and we can point to many examples of legislation with a similar track record. How can we trust your Administration to abide by the loophole-filled measures in this elephantine piece of legislative detritus when you have not showed much interest in enforcing the laws that are currently being broken by tens of millions? Why should we believe you will enforce the complicated bureaucratic laws, when you won't enforce the simple, concrete ones?

I honestly regret having voted for you in 2004, knowing what I know now. It is a sad day when I wished I had, as the Republican/Democrat political monopoly likes to call it, "thrown away my vote" on a third party candidate and in effect voted for Senator Kerry. I honestly believed that you always had (and still do have) the country's best interests in mind when you invaded Iraq, and in other aspects of your foreign policy, despite my misgivings about how the war has gone since then. I honestly believed you always had the country's best interests in mind for everything, but on the issue of immigration, I feel that not only are you not interested in supporting the Rule of Law, you are expressing utter contempt for the will of the people, as well as the Rule of Law. I don't believe you aren't even pretending you are on our side any more. I believe that you are placing the wants of businesses and other monied interests against the simple, unequivocal desires of the very people who worked hardest to get you elected. We know most of our Senators and Congressmen are beholden to special interests, and care most about their own careers instead of the people they represent. We would hope that at least our President would be above that.

While I continue to support this great country, our military and all freedom-loving Americans, and I support you as its elected President, even if I don't support your policies, I no longer believe you are representing, or even trying to represent, me. If you were, you would push first for clear, simple legislation that enforces existing laws, with real, concrete benchmarks. If you had done that, we would believe that you and Congress are being forthright about trying to solve _our_ problems, rather than your own political ones. That your political opponents won't agree to something simple and straightforward shows that they are also not being forthright. I'd long ago given up the idea that Congress, especially the Senate, cares about me as a hard-working, law-abiding, but not rich citizen. It saddens me to consider that you and your Administration no longer care either.

Our government, despite passing obscene amounts of legislation in the past few decades, has accomplished little but to erode the Rule of Law, waste trillions of our (not its) dollars, and undermine the trust of everyone but the most rabid, knee-jerk partisans, and I believe, Mr. President, that you are guilty of all these things as well. I want to trust and respect you, because I believe in your heart you are a very moral man, but many of your actions, especially in the past couple years have sent a much different message.

Please reconsider your position on the immigration legislation. I would have thought this could be a home run opportunity for you, since the Right Thing to do is both simple and obvious. You have expressed the idea that your re-election gave you political capital to engage in real reform, despite the obvious political costs that any meaningful, effective reform would entail, but I feel that this capital has been wholly squandered. The price has been paid, but nothing has been reformed.

Please reconsider your support of this legislation.