I wrote earlier today how Republicans are acting like they haven’t learned their lesson from the ‘06 election. Well, that apparently includes John McCain:

John McCain the presidential candidate suddenly sounded like the John McCain of 2005 on Monday, touting two pet issues that have generated considerable heartache among grassroots conservatives: the “Gang of 14” compromise and comprehensive immigration reform.

McCain brought up the “Gang of 14” saga unprompted at a town hall here, in advance of a major speech on judicial appointments he is set to deliver tomorrow in Winston-Salem.

“I know what bipartisanship is,” McCain said. “I am going to talk tomorrow again about our Gang of 14: seven Republicans, seven Democrats that got together rather than blow up the Senate, and we confirmed so many federal judges.”

(snip)

The Arizona senator also seemed to move past his usual “secure the borders first” mantra in favor of calling for, as he put it, “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Last summer, McCain and Sen. Edward Kennedy led the charge on an immigration reform package that aroused the ire of conservatives and ultimately threatened to undermine McCain’s then-frontrunning presidential bid. (McCain also supported immigration reform bills in 2005 and 2006.)

“Unless we enact comprehensive immigration reform I don’t think you can take it piecemeal,” he explained Monday, answering a question about providing visas for skilled workers.

“In other words,” he said, “because as soon you and I start to talk about the highly skilled workers, our agricultural interest people are going to say, ‘Look we need ag workers, too.’ And then somebody’s going say, ‘We need the DREAM Act,’ and then somebody’s going to say, ‘We’ve got to enforce our border.’”

Throughout the Republican primary battle last fall, McCain faced relentless questions about his support for the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, the 2007 bill that would have allowed illegal immigrants to remain in the United States if they faced certain penalties. Opponents labeled it “amnesty.”

Since clinching the nomination, McCain has largely avoided speaking about wide-ranging immigration reform, arguing primarily that the government needs to focus on securing the border with Mexico before taking on other measures.

On Monday, he lobbied for a broader approach that includes a temporary guest worker program and tamper-proof ID cards.

“We get in this kind of a circular firing squad on immigration reform in the Congress of the United States,” McCain said, “and the lesson I learned from it is we’ve got to have comprehensive immigration reform.”

As I’ve said before (too many times to count), no matter who wins in November, this country is going to move to the left. Regardless of whether it’s McCain, Clinton, or Obama, this idea of giving illegal immigrants amnesty is going to become a reality. And with the border unsecured, and unlikely (under any of these three) to ever be secured, it’s only going to kick the can down the road another twenty years.

Think about it. If illegal immigrants break into the country and then get amnesty, what message does that send to others who are thinking about doing it? It says “come on in and then wait us out, we’ll give you amnesty, too.” We learned this lesson — or SHOULD have, rather — from our experience with the amnesty in the 1980s. We were told that the border would be secured, those here illegally would be given amnesty, and the problem would never come up again. Well, here it is, twenty years later, and we’re at the same place we started at. And the politicians, as usual, are proposing the exact same solution they gave us back then.

Like I’ve said, if you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’re bound to repeat them. McCain obviously has not learned from his past mistakes, and he’s going to do his damndest to repeat them. It’d be a totally different story (to me, at least) if the border was totally secured by now and we knew for a fact that this wasn’t going to be a problem later on. Then I’d have zero problem with an amnesty. Throw them a friggin’ parade, for all I care. But with the border being as open as it is, it’s only going to send the message, loud and clear, that you can come here illegally and be rewarded for doing so. It says don’t bother filling out the paperwork or going through the proper route to come here, just walk across the border, we’ll take care of it later. Meanwhile, enjoy your stay here in the United States, where we talk about the rule of law, but don’t much care to enforce it, lest someone call us uncaring or something like that.

Not to mention the national security risk an open border poses. With terrorists trying everything they can to strike at us, can anyone sit there and honestly say that bin Laden or his pals haven’t thought about smuggling a nuke or a biological/chemical weapon into the country via Mexico? Of COURSE they have. That they haven’t managed to do it is nothing short of a miracle, and probably has more to do with the war and its subsequent damage to their organization than their incompetence. Remember, these people pulled off a coordinated hijacking that took the lives of 3000 men and women and caused billions of dollars in damage. They certainly can, if given the breathing room, mount an attack across an undefended border. McCain, for all his talk about the war and national security, can’t seem to grasp this reality.

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