Republicans must win back points after losing the shutdown blame game, Simon writes. Will GOP pass up Hispanic lifeline?

Nothing in Washington is ever about what it is about.

Health care, keeping violent weapons away from violent people and putting 11 million undocumented workers on a path to citizenship are about none of these things.


Instead, they are all about score-keeping. The Obama administration came out of the government shutdown ahead with the American people. Most people blamed the Republicans in the House for the shutdown for the simple reason that Republicans in the House were to blame for the shutdown.

( Also on POLITICO: Conservative groups press for immigration reform)

Which means the Republicans must get a few points back, if not with the nation as a whole, then at least with their own Death Wish lobby, those extreme right-wingers who are far more committed to ideology than to country.

Health care? Repeal it, defund it or make it small enough to drown in a bedpan. (“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” conservative activist Grover Norquist famously once said.)

Deadly weapons in the hands of deadly people? Conservative Republicans don’t want new laws. Gun massacres are a mental health problem, they say. Which means those many, many countries that have fewer gun deaths per capita than we do must have much saner people than we do.

( Also on POLITICO: Marco Rubio sparks immigration debate)

Immigration reform with a path to citizenship for those people who are now forced to live “in the shadows”? (A term first used, as near as I can determine, by Ronald Reagan, when he granted amnesty to 2.9 million undocumented workers in 1986.) Forget about it.

But immigration reform should be different. Sheer political expediency would, in normal times, motivate Republicans to back immigration reform as a way to attract Hispanic voters.

Recent presidential voting trends have not been good for Republicans: In 2004, George W. Bush got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. In 2008, John McCain got 31 percent. And in 2012, Mitt Romney got 27 percent.

But given that, why should Republicans back a measure that will create 11 million new voters, about three-quarters of whom can be expected to vote Democratic?

( PHOTOS: 10 wild immigration quotes)

A number of reasons, first and foremost of which is that they have little choice. As McCain said in April: “I believe if we pass this [immigration reform] legislation, it won’t gain us a single Hispanic vote, but what it will do is put us on a playing field where we can compete. Right now we can’t compete.”

Second, the immigration reform bill already passed by the Senate does not transform undocumented workers into voting citizens overnight. Instead, it places them on an arduous 13-year path that includes fees, fines, back taxes and rigorous background checks.

Thirdly, and this should be the big one, the Republican Party has a real opportunity to reach out to Hispanic voters and persuade them to vote Republican.

A study commissioned after the Republicans lost the popular vote in the presidential election of 2000 revealed that while black voters largely retain their loyalty to the Democratic Party as they move up the socio-economic ladder, Hispanic voters do not. Hispanic voters, the study found, were far more susceptible to switching to the Republican Party as they became wealthier and more suburban. Further, some Hispanics today are a better fit with the Republican Party on social issues such as gay marriage and abortion than they are with the Democrats.

( PHOTOS: Marco Rubio’s career)

At the very worst, making an attempt to woo Hispanics by passing immigration reform puts Republicans “on the playing field,” as McCain noted and, at best, Hispanics could supply Republicans with a vital element in a new, winning national coalition.

As Steve Coll writes this week in The New Yorker: “As recently as 2007, when the Bush Administration almost passed [an immigration reform] bill, it still seemed possible that a modernizing Republican Party might build a formidable political coalition of Latinos, evangelicals, disaffected Catholic Democrats, high-tech entrepreneurs, libertarians, social and educational reformers, and eclectic independents.”

So what happened? The Republican Party instead became the captive of so-called movement conservatives who placed ideological purity above coalition building.

Coll quotes Geoffrey Kabaservice, writing in “Rule and Ruin,” as saying movement conservatives have “succeeded in silencing, co-opting, repelling, or expelling nearly every competing strain of Republicanism from the party.”

Logically, Republicans in the House would want to pass immigration reform, because it would be good for the Republican Party.

It would also be good for immigrants and, more important, it would be good for the United States.

But all that has become beside the point.

Republican obstructionists in the House don’t want to pass immigration reform because they don’t want to give a victory to President Obama, who has made passage before the end of this year a major goal.

Not all Republicans are pleased with the obstructionists, however. As The New York Times recently noted “an unusual coalition of business executives, prominent conservatives and evangelical leaders” are lobbying this week for Republicans to pass immigration reform.

But there is the problem of time. The House will work just 18 days from now to the end of the year.

A humorist once said that doing nothing is very difficult because you can’t take a break from it.

That humorist never lived in Washington.

Roger Simon is POLITICO’s chief political columnist.

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