King said if Democrats are successful in passing health care reform, the dam of legislation will break and “comprehensive amnesty” will follow soon thereafter.

Congressman Steve King, R-Iowa, ranking member of the House Immigration Subcommittee, feels health care and amnesty are two of three items on President Obama’s agenda that are somewhat linked.

“Cap and trade, which I call appropriately ‘cap and tax,’ socialized medicine, and comprehensive amnesty [are the three] — and if they can move one of those three forward, they think it gives them momentum to move the second one and then the third one,” King comments.

Obama has held meetings with U.S. Sens. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., about moving immigration reform this year. The New York Times reports that Graham warned Obama that the push would stall if Democrats attempted to pass health care reform through reconciliation, a procedural move that only requires a simple majority to pass legislation.

The on-again, off-again immigration reform effort is apparently on again, with a new provision intended to regulate Americans’ access to the job market — and increase government’s access to Americans. According to The Wall Street Journal, a new plan being pushed by U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., would require that all Americans get a new biometric ID card in order to work.

A person familiar with the legislative planning said the biometric data would likely be either fingerprints or a scan of the veins in the top of the hand. It would be required of all workers, including teenagers, but would be phased in, with current workers needing to obtain the card only when they next changed jobs, the person said.The card requirement also would be phased in among employers, beginning with industries that typically rely on illegal-immigrant labor.

The current immigration verification system, E-Verify, isn’t mandatory for all employers — thankfully, since it both misidentifies a number of legal workers and, unsurprisingly, fails to identify a large number of immigrants not cleared to work in the United States. But Graham and Schumer apparently consider illegal immigration such a huge problem that they want to subject every single American and legal immigrant — and their employers — to additional expenses, hassles and government surveillance in order to keep a much smaller subset of people from office-cleaning, dish-washing and fruit-picking jobs.

The federal government wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and force employees and employers still suffering from a recession to do the same, to create and make accessible to every employer a national database of the fingerprints of all Americans from the time they are 14 years old. And they want to do it in order to keep an estimated 11.9 million unauthorized immigrants — less than 4 percent of the total population of the United States — from accessing the job market. ]]> http://iowaindependent.com/29605/immigration-reform-back-on-political-radar/feed 2 http://iowaindependent.com/28342/video-king-lists-off-enemies-to-cpac-crowd http://iowaindependent.com/28342/video-king-lists-off-enemies-to-cpac-crowd#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:35:22 +0000 Jason Hancock http://iowaindependent.com/?p=28342 U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, addressed the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., Friday morning, using the opportunity to explain to conservatives exactly who he believes they up fighting against.

So who is the enemy?

“They are liberals. They are progressives. They are Che Guevaraians. They are Castro-ites. They are socialists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Stalinists, Leninists, Marxists. They are all our enemies,” King said.

He also lists off several Democratic priorities that he believes serves as evidence that they fit the socialist title, including immigration reform (”amnesty”), health care reform (”socialized medicine”) and climate change legislation (”cap and tax”).

“I believe any one of those are transformative to America and debilitating to our liberty and our freedom,” he said. “I want them all dead. I want to kill all those bills.”

The Agriprocessors plant, which was sold through bankruptcy proceedings and now operates under new ownership as AgriStar, was the site of a massive immigration raid in May 2008. Nearly 400 workers, or roughly half of the plant’s workforce, was taken into custody by federal authorities. Within days 76 percent of those detained and charged criminally accepted plea agreements, most being sentenced to five months in federal prison prior to their deportation.

Sholom M. Rubashkin

Sholom Rubashkin, the son of Agriprocessors’ founder A. Aaron Rubashkin, was instrumental in daily plant operations, which were shared with is  brother, Tzvi “Heshy” Rubashkin, who has not faced criminal charges. Prior to the raid, Agriprocessors was one of the nation’s leading suppliers of kosher meat. After the raid, the company quickly deteriorated.

Sholom was charged with numerous financial fraud and immigration-related offenses, the government electing to first prosecute on the fraud violations. When Sholom was convicted in November of 86 counts related to those violations, the government agreed to table the additional immigration-related offenses.

Since his conviction, Sholom has been held in federal custody, pending sentencing. Members of the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community to which the Rubashkins belong, have made numerous pleas on his behalf for bail — all to no avail. The sentencing phase of Rubashkin’s case is expected to get underway next month, and Rubashkin faces a multitude of years in prison.

Yet even as the Rubashkin family prepares to perhaps close one very public criminal case, another has already begun. Milton Balkany, a brother-in-law to Sholom, was arrested this week in New York for allegedly scheming to extort a Connecticut hedge fund out of $4 million. He faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty of the allegations.

In 2003 Balkany, who is also known as “the Brooklyn Bundler” for his knack for bundling political campaign contributions, was accused of misappropriating federal grant money intended for the Hebrew school. After he entered into a deferred agreement in 2004 regarding the missing funds, the criminal charges were dropped.

The latest allegations suggest that Balkany used his religious influence with a prison inmate to deter the inmate’s cooperation with police. The information known by the inmate, according to court documents, could have been used against a Connecticut hedge fund, which Balkany supposedly extorted for $4 million in exchange for keeping the inmate quiet. Prosecutors contend that Balkany told the hedge fund’s lawyers that, if they did not pay, he would help the inmate reduce his sentence by instructing him to speak openly with government authorities.

Balkany is currently released on $250,000 bond.

Republicans seeking the party's nomination for the 2nd Congressional District are (from left) Steve Rathje, Marianette Miller-Meeks and Christopher Reed. The three faced off in a forum Saturday hosted by Linn Area Pro-Life United and the Mount Mercy College Political Science Club. Karl Cassell (far right) moderated.

All three candidates vying to be the party’s nominee and face U.S. Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Mount Vernon, in November — Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Ottumwa, Steve Rathje of Cedar Rapids and Christopher Reed of Marion — were adamant that government would be best served if it would simply get out of the way of its citizens. Short of that, each had plans for dismantling programs such as the U.S. Department of Energy, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Department of Education.

There were very few opportunities during the course of the forum for those attending to view specific ideological divides between the candidates.

All three called for more transparency and audits of the Federal Reserve, with Rathje calling the latter “the biggest joke ever perpetrated on the American people.”

All three cautioned that cap-and-trade legislation could unduly punish people in the Midwest, with Reed saying if elected he would push to rescind the bill if Democrats pass it this year.

None of the candidates believed the federal government should be involved in health care, although Miller-Meeks said the role of government should be overall transparency of the system, care for the needy and fraud prosecution.

All three also professed that they are solidly “pro-life,” with Rathje adding that he believed marriage should be “between one natural man and one natural woman” and that he “won’t accept abortion under any circumstances unless it is between the mother, and God and her doctor.”

On the subject of immigration, Miller-Meeks called for the existing legal system to be revamped so that wait times could be reduced. Rathje, while alluding to technological advances that could place a nuclear bomb in a suitcase, called for the a border fence and allowing entry to immigrants “who have something to offer.” Reed also called for stronger border security and said the U.S. Department of Labor should be allowed to set immigration caps by industry.

Throughout the forum, as they answered questions relating to agriculture, energy, health care reform, education and human rights, the candidates unabashedly listed specific issues where they felt the federal government was over-stepping its authority. When asked specifically what one or two federal programs or departments should be abolished, the candidates were quick with their answers.

Miller-Meeks: “One is the Department of Energy, which was established under [Pres. Jimmy] Carter to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. That’s been very successful, I think you all would agree. (laughter) But if you specifically want to talk about programs, then I have to mention programs which occurred during the tenure of a Republican president. As member of that party, we all take a little fault in that. That’s the Department of Homeland Security. Did we need a Department of Homeland Security? Did that … enlarge the bureaucracy? Did it make it more difficult for FEMA to engage people after natural disasters? And, then, also No Child Left Behind. All of us want accountability and standards. But we also that as parents we have a tremendous role in the education of our children. We also know that this increases the federal government’s role in the education system.”

Reed: “This is kind of like being at a buffet because there is so much to choose from or go with. One of the first ones I would talk about would be the National Education Association (the national teachers union). I don’t think that any bureaucrat in Washington has any idea what is best for students in Iowa. … I think education belongs at the state level — more specifically, it belongs at the duly-elected school board level where the parents have direct control. Nobody in this country knows better what is best for the children than the parents of those children. … I’m a big advocate of the homeschooling system, and, if it was up to the NEA, homeschools would go away. That is something, as a person going to Congress, that I would stand up say, ‘Get the NEA out of the way. Let these parents be parents.’ As far as other programs, we just need to look as a collective society and say how much more we are going to allow our government to over-reach. … We need to send people to Washington who are going to stand up and say that they are drawing the line in the sand. There’s a 10th Amendment for a reason, there’s a Constitution for a reason.”

Rathje: “Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution clearly defines what the government’s responsibilities and roles are. Period. Anything that doesn’t fall within that, as far as I’m concerned, is unconstitutional. For example, if we have a defense bill, and we are running that defense bill through Congress, and everything from soup to nuts is added onto that defense bill, as far as I’m concerned that is unconstitutional because it has nothing to do with defense. If we are doing the same thing from an educational point of view — I don’t want education having anything what so ever to do with the federal government. … I want education back in the states. I want education back in the family. I want education back in the churches. I want education back in the schools.”

The only portion of the forum where any fissure could be detected was in regard to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a policy that has effectively prevented openly gay individuals from serving in the military.

Rathje said flatly that he supports the policy. Miller-Meeks and Reed, both military veterans, took a more measured approach, with Reed telling those in the audience that gay men and women are already serving.

Miller-Meeks, who is a former Army nurse and who makes her living as an ophthalmologist, added that while serving alongside homosexuals may make some uncomfortable and that she “as a physician, is concerned about the blood supply,” the final decision should be left in the hands of those who wish to serve and military leaders — not Congress, the judiciary or the president.

The Iowa Independent has reached out to Miller-Meeks to clarify her concerns about the blood supply in regards to military service for openly gay men and women. As of publication, she could not be reached for comment.

Miller-Meeks unsuccessfully ran against Loebsack in 2008 after winning a three-person Republican primary. Both Rathje and Reed faced off in 2008 for the Republican nomination to take on Democratic U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin. Reed was victorious in the primary but lost the general election.

On Jan. 14, Tea Party Nation put out word that only five conservative media outlets would get full access to the convention. On January 30, they issued an e-mail to their internal list pushing back against “baseless accusations and criticism” from angry Tea Party activists.

National Tea Party Convention organizer Judson Phillips (Photo by David Weigel).

But on the floor of his convention, the paranoid, mysterious Judson Phillips was nowhere to be seen. The real Phillips, a jovial defense attorney, bounded in and out of sessions, across the stage of the Gaylord Opryland Hotel’s Tennessee Ballroom, and from interview to interview. Hardly 15 minutes could go by without Phillips, sporting a rumpled tan suit and day-old shave, shaking the hand of a grateful attendee or being miked for a new interview.

“I’m talking to them,” he said, pointing at a video crew from Time magazine, and asking if he could wait a few minutes to answer questions. “Then I’m talking to them.” He pointed to CNN’s set-up box in the corner of the small convention hall. “Then I have another interview in a half hour. But I will talk to you!”

As this three-day event wrapped up with an hour-long address by and Q&A with Sarah Palin — broadcast live on CNN, Fox, MSNBC and C-Span — it was clear that Phillips’s massive and controversial gamble had mostly paid off. More than 200 members of the media had descended on Nashville to write probing stories on the Tea Party Movement. In the end, said Phillips, the convention would turn a small profit — a step down from his initial hopes to make enough of a profit to launch a 527 that would back conservative candidates, but when compared to the rumors that led up to the convention, a smashing success.

“We’re going to break even, maybe a little bit into the black,” Phillips said. And just as he did from the main stage, Phillips went a little further and ribbed his critics with a joke. “I’m not planning to declare bankruptcy. I had to do that one time – it really sucks when you have to do that.”

To the delight of attendees, the National Tea Party Convention became a coming-out party for a movement that’s always had an oppositional relationship to the press. It was a small event — around half the size of the inaugural YearlyKos convention of liberal bloggers in 2006 — and The Gaylord Opryland location served to make it look even smaller. The entire weekend was contained in a ballroom and three breakout rooms adjacent to a short lobby with media check-in on one end and a raft of cameras on the other, with pundits like The Daily Beast’s John Avlon and RedState’s Erick Erickson doing quick live bits. Getting to the convention floor meant walking through one of two indoor shopping malls, one of them inside a massive dome decked out with greenery and artificial lakes. “I imagined one day I’d meet [Palin],” said conservative media pioneer Andrew Breitbart in his introduction of the former governor. “I just never knew that it would be in the middle of Tennessee, in a biosphere. Or is it an international space station? Or is it the set of Avatar?”

Inside the main hall, and inside the breakout sessions, there was one member of the media for every three Tea Partiers. During the troubled run-up to the convention, those sessions (and Palin’s speech) were scheduled to be closed to the media, and only a few cloaked-in-mystery “availabilities” would be opened up.

“I think they were the dog that caught the car,” said Erickson, who had been an early critic of the convention. “They got Palin. Who thought they were going to get Palin? They didn’t know what to do next.”

In the final stretch, as coverage of the “intra-Tea Party infighting” reached fever pitch, Phillips put Memphis TEA Party founder Mark Skoda in charge of media outreach. (”I just didn’t want to deal with it,” Phillips said.) It was Skoda, a bombastic radio host and consultant, who started keeping in touch and on top of media requests and letting the world in.

“I jumped in when all the negative press was coming,” Skoda said, “because I don’t have a lot of tolerance for people who want to be bullies. My focus was getting as much video press in here as possible, that show that we’re not a bunch of crazies, OK? So there was a necessity to look at international press. We wanted to give them access because this is truly American. Our president may not believe in American exceptionalism, but I do. And if you look at most of the U.S. press, there’s a national audience — there’s a lot of videography going on. My sense was: Nobody here is wearing crazy outfits, there’s no little pointy hats, no screaming mimis, no signs.”

Skoda’s calculation paid off. The few people in “crazy outfits” did draw cameras toward them as if they were magnetized. One was William Temple, a pastor who donned the revolutionary war garb and British accent he’d broken out at every Tea Party. During speeches, Temple would wave his hat and lead cheers of “Hip, hip, huzzah!” Outside of the main room, he was interviewed with every step he took. But Tea Partiers hardly had anything to fear from the quotable and polite man who co-starred in “Tea Party: The Documentary Film” and led the 9/12 march on Washington.

“Gone were the placards that protesters carried [at Tea Parties] last year with Mr. Obama’s face wearing a Hitler mustache or superimposed on the Joker,” wrote Kate Zernike in a New York Times piece representative of the convention coverage. Many questions to organizers were about the firey speech by former congressman Tom Tancredo that opened the convention; many questions to attendees were about Palin, and whether they’d back her if she ran for president. The controversy surrounding the convention and its speakers led to media coverage of the convention as a mainstream political event, a stop along the road to the rebuilding of the GOP. One sign of how happy Tea Partiers were to see the media there came after Anthony Reese, who’d left the organizing committee of the convention in a huff, staged a press conference with three other angry activists critical of what happened–and then asked Fox’s Carl Cameron for a photo together. Cameron obliged.

“I think the media convinced the media to cover this by playing up the early stories,” said Glenn Reynolds, the libertarian Instapundit blogger who drove to the convention from his home in Knoxville. He was conducting interviews for PajamasTV, the conservative web network that ran some of the earliest coverage of the Tea Party movement, and was allowed to livestream most of this convention. “If I wanted to give Judson Phillips more credit than he deserves, I’d claim he was actually a genius who manipulated the media into giving this more coverage. I mean, this was the front-page, headline story in the Knoxville paper yesterday!”

High ticket prices aside, the Tea Partiers who made it to Nashville made up a representative — if slightly wealthier than average — cross-section of the movement. The overwhelming number of attendees were white, and when World Net Daily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah took a moment in his Friday night speech to ask how many of them were “born between 1946 and 1961,” the vast majority of hands shot up. On Friday night, Andrew Breitbart introduced “Generation Zero,” a splashy documentary that argues that the financial crisis was deliberately engineered by radical 1960s ideologues. Footage of dancing hippies and pictures of Saul Alinksy — the radical organizer who has become a household name among Tea Parties — were intercut with conservative writers like Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, historian Victor Davis Hanson, and Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald, explaining how left-wing theorists had long wanted to bring down capitalism and replace it with a socialist society. In a breakout session on immigration policy, Tancredo explained to Tea Partiers that Democrats wanted immigration reform in order to enfranchise millions of new voters to put them in perpetual power.

“Remember when Rahm Emanuel said ‘You never let a good crisis go to waste?’” said Lisa Mei Norton, a Tea Party activist and singer who opened the convention on Thursday night. “Now, what did he mean by that?”

Norton said her beef with the media stemmed from how reporters covered things “they think are bad” out of proportion to everything else. She didn’t sing it at the conference, but she’s recorded a song about Barack Obama’s citizenship called “Where Were You Born?” Yes, she had questions about Obama’s citizenship. It was perfectly fine for reporters to write about it when Tea Partiers questioned Obama’s birth certificate. The problem, she said, came when reporters didn’t put that in context.

“Why is it?” she asked. “Is it the media leans left, and wants to only highlight things that put conservatives in a bad light, and downplay negative things that happen on the left?”

For John Ball, a political consultant working for “Ten Commandments judge” Roy Moore — now a candidate for governor of Alabama — understanding how the media covered conservatism was one of the major goals of the convention. After speaking to Moore, Ball asked for some analysis of exactly how and why the media turned conservative quotes into “extreme” gaffes.

“When we talk about the Constitution and getting back to the founders,” said Ball, “you guys are ready to say ‘Oh, the founders who owned slaves? Who wouldn’t let women vote? You want to get back to that?’ I think Tea Party people need to understand how that works.”

The threat of media bias, the way that the press could trip up inexperienced activists, was obvious enough to Amy Kremer. She had split with Tea Party Patriots — she’d been on the board — when she decided to join the Tea Party Express. Unlike Tea Party Patriots, which is run by grassroots activists, her new group is run by Republican consultants. It had been the focus of outsized media attention, more grist for the “Tea Party infighting” narrative. Kremer didn’t care. Neither, she said, did activists. “Nobody who comes to these rallies knows the difference between Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express.”

From her perspective, the coverage of the Tea Party Convention represented the media as it should work. The live network broadcast, she said, was “amazing.”

“You go the media when you have a message to get out,” said Kremer. “We’re our own media resource in this movement. But I think it’s good that they were here so the whole country could see what happened tonight.”

When the convention had ended and the cameras had packed up, Phillips was found rubbing his eyes, summoning the energy to go out with his top volunteers to celebrate. He’d had no idea that the networks had indulged him by running so much of the conference and of Palin’s speech.

“I just assumed that as soon as she sat down, they all would jump out,” said Phillips. “I knew C-Span would stay. That’s C-Span’s thing. But wow! That’s incredible!”

In an Op-Ed published on his Web site, King said his idea would “level the playing field for law-abiding American employers and employees.” His plan is to “clarify” that wages and benefits paid to undocumented immigrants are not deductible for federal income tax purposes. He would also mandate use of “E-Verify,” an Internet-based system that allows an employer, using information reported on an employee’s Form I-9, to determine the eligibility of that employee to work in the United States. He would grant employers “safe harbor” if they discovered they had inadvertently hired someone illegally.

“President Obama and liberals in Congress continue to promote amnesty while overlooking the impact that illegal workers have on American unemployment,” King said. “Immigration laws protect American citizens, including legal immigrants, from losing jobs to those who have entered our country illegally. We must enforce our immigration laws and allow a sustainable number of legal immigrants into the country each year.”

King said there are 15 million unemployed Americans and 8 million undocumented workers holding “American jobs.” That figure is “mostly true,” according to the Pulitzer Prize winning staff of Politifact. The 8 million workers number is 20 months old, coming from research done when the number of unemployed nationally stood at 5.1 percent. That figure skyrocketed to 10 percent by December 2009. The researcher who did the research cited by King said the unemployment rate for immigrants, without regard to their citizenship status, has gone up faster than that of natives.

A group of students from Marshalltown who lobbied lawmakers last week for passage of the Iowa Opportunities Workforce Act (photo courtesy of Iowa CCI).

But unlike most Iowans her age, Eva is an undocumented immigrant. Her family moved to Marshalltown from Tijuana when she was 9. She pays higher out-of-state tuition fees; she has no Social Security number or driver’s license; and she has no hope of furthering her college career unless state lawmakers pass House File 2071, otherwise known as the Iowa Opportunities Workforce Act (IOWA).

“All my life, my teachers have told me to dream big and that I could do anything I wanted to do,” said Eva, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of her immigration status and fear of deportation. “Then you get to a point where you can’t go any further because you don’t have the same things other people do.”

Eva said the equal opportunities she seeks can be found in the IOWA legislation. And at least one Republican lawmaker who could be instrumental in the bill’s success or failure said a lot of legislators agree with Eva but fear the political ramifications of supporting immigration legislation during an election year.

The bill was introduced by Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad, D-Des Moines, as a way to grant illegal immigrants resident status for purposes of paying in-state college tuition and fees. It is similar to the federal Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act), proposed by U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and U.S. Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif.

IOWA would grant resident status to those who meet certain criteria, including having attended an accredited school in Iowa for at least five years before receiving a high school diploma or equivalency diploma; being accepted for enrollment in a community college or university in Iowa; not having paid tuition to attend a public high school in the state; and signing an affidavit (if the person does not have a Social Security number) promising to pursue citizenship in the U.S.

“If I had the chance I would take the steps to become a legal U.S. citizen. That’s a no-brainer,” Eva said. “It’s frustrating to live this way. I want the bill to pass because it would change my life.”

Pushing for change

Eva joined a group of Hispanic students from Marshalltown and members of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI) recently to lobby for the bill’s passage at the statehouse. Those in favor argue that IOWA would not only help increase access to college but also improve high school graduation rates.

At Marshalltown High School, Hispanic students have a 37.3 percent dropout rate compared to 11.3 percent for white students. The nonpartisan Iowa Policy Project estimates that between 8,800 and 13,600 undocumented children under the age of 18 live in Iowa.

“This is important to a lot of immigrant students who attend schools around the state, but come graduation time have no options for their future,” said Ruth Schultz, Latino Community Organizer for CCI. “College is unaffordable because they can’t pay the higher tuition rates.”

CCI members say the state would reap the benefits of passing such a bill because on average college graduates earn nearly $1 million more in a lifetime than do high school dropouts, which means more tax dollars for the state. They also contend that undocumented students represent less than 2 percent of all high school graduates, therefore not affecting college access by others, and that other states like Illinois, Texas, Nebraska, Kansas and Wisconsin have passed similar legislation.

“I don’t see what harm can be done by giving people the chance to educate themselves,” said Veronica Guevara, an 18-year-old student at Marshalltown Community College who was part of the CCI rally at the statehouse. “People come here to better their way of life and education is a big part of that. The majority of Hispanics who work at places like Swift [& Co.] are living paycheck-to-paycheck. With a better education they can break that cycle of poverty.”

State Rep. Mike May, R-Spirit Lake, who is the ranking member of the House Education Committee, met briefly with a group of Marshalltown students during CCI’s rally and lobby event at the statehouse. He declined to comment on IOWA until he knew more about it.

“I want to see what the substance of it is and what’s being proposed,” he said. “Is it clearly just Iowa kids? Is it clear that they’ve been here a certain number of years? There are a lot of questions that I want to ask as it comes out of committee.”

The bill has passed through a House subcommittee and has been sent to the House Education Committee, where it must be approved by Feb. 12 in order to be considered by the full House.

Previous success, political payback

State Rep. Mike May, R-Spirit Lake

In 2004, a similar bill was approved by the Iowa House but defeated by the Iowa Senate. Three years later, it was re-introduced, but stalled before it made the House floor.

May said there could be political ramifications for voting for IOWA, saying some legislators who supported the bill in 2004 were not re-elected.

“On the candid side, I think a lot of people would like to do that,” May said of voting in favor of it. “On the practical side, there’s this political thing in that this was used against legislators a few years ago and some were defeated because they supported the issue. I think getting firm commitments from people might be a bit disingenuous unless they have thought about the political ramifications. It might be the right thing to do, but folks aren’t necessarily going to tell you that because they don’t know how it will be used against them.”

Guevara, who was among the group of approximately 30 Hispanic students who met with May during the CCI rally, said it appeared as though May had already decided not to support the bill, alleging that the Republican lawmaker also made some insensitive remarks to the students.

“We asked him to support the bill and he said ‘no,’” she said. “When we asked him why, he said he didn’t believe that illegal immigrants pay taxes, even though we showed him that they do, so their kids shouldn’t receive the same kind of tuition from those who do pay taxes.”

Guevara said that when one of the students told May that she was brought to Iowa illegally by her parents when she was a small child he responded, “you should blame your parents for putting you in such a position,” before suggesting that “if she didn’t like it she should go back to Mexico.”

“I’m aware that people have different opinions, but to me it felt like he had a prejudice. That his decision was based off a prejudice,” said Guevara, who for three years participated in Iowa’s Youth Congress.

May denies making such remarks, adding that other comments were taken out of context.

“That’s simply not true. I didn’t say that,” he said. “I think it’s an emotional issue and people tend to hear what they want to hear when they talk about it.”

Schultz said the students were disappointed with their meeting with May.

“We knew that Republicans were less likely to support it, but we felt it was important for the students to talk to people who disagree with them,” she said. “His comments were misinformed. The students came to present their stories and I don’t think he was in the mindset to even listen to them.”

May said the students, who he called “very mannerly” and “super young kids,” impressed him. He also said he has not made up his mind yet about the bill.

“I hate to punish kids for the sins of their parents. And it’s not a sin, that’s an exaggeration,” he said. “Would I do the same thing their parents did to help my children? Absolutely. But they also made the choice to come to our country and they certainly have the choice to leave our country. I’m not suggesting that they do that. But I did tell the students that we are a nation of law and in Iowa we follow the laws of the land.”

Eva said that the laws need to reflect the changing landscape of the land.

“They need to realize that Iowa is not the same as when they were kids,” she said. “They also need to realize that kids don’t choose to be here, they are brought here. If I was forced to go back to Mexico I wouldn’t know what to do. I don’t know anyone there. My family and friends are here. This is my home.”

Schultz, who works with immigrants, concurs.

“These students have grown up here. They’ve made friends here. They go to church here. They’ve invested in their communities,” she said. “This place is their home. And to get a good job and to flourish in their hometown they need an education and to be a citizen.”

Whether IOWA becomes law remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Eva said she is cautiously optimistic.

“I’m staying positive that it will pass,” she said. “But if it doesn’t I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“You watch,” Adam Brandon said. “This is the idea that’s going to change the election.”

Organizer Jebb Young addresses conservative activists at the FreedomWorks office in Washington, D.C. (Photo by David Weigel/Washington Independent).

In this room, Hecker, a lawyer and Tea Party activist, had an easy sell. His idea, fleshed out over four months, was to produce an election manifesto along the lines of the Contract with America launched by Republicans shortly before the 1994 elections, or the 1961 Sharon statement drafted by Young Americans for Freedom. First, Tea Party activists — and anyone else who was interested — would submit ideas at the ContractFromAmerica or Spiritof94 websites. Then they’d be whittled down to 50 ideas with an online vote. When he brought the draft contract to this meeting, it was down to 20 user-selected ideas. “I had four ideas,” Hecker chuckled. “None of them made it in here.”

The draft contract was a hit — at first. When FreedomWorks vice president of policy Max Pappas asked what people thought of the name, the dissent started to rumble.

“I just think if there’s anybody who has negative thoughts toward Gingrich or that group,” said Charlotte Fitzgerald, a Maryland activist, “this has associations with that. If you start with a clean slate, you can be more credible to independents.”

Hecker stepped up to explain himself. “My reason for ‘contract’ — maybe it’s just the attorney in me — is that I like the idea that it’s binding. With the Contract with America, a lot of it ended up not being enacted.”

Adam Brandon offered that the “Contract” name would make more sense to Washington politicians. “When I say ‘Contract from America,’ they know exactly what I’m talking about. When I say ‘American Manifesto,’ they say, What’s that?”

“‘American Manifesto’ sounds socialist,” sniffed Lynn Collins, a Delaware activist.

It was a friendly argument that didn’t go off the rails — within a few minutes, activists were voting on which in-progress Contract items they supported. That was business as usual at the Liberty Leadership Summit, an inaugural effort by FreedomWorks to bring together Tea Party activists from state to state to meet, share ideas, and craft an agenda. From Saturday through Monday, 63 activists gathered in the free-market group’s offices to strategize for the 2010 elections, participate in workshops like titles like “What You Can and Can’t Say: How to Stay Out of Jail This Year,” and break occasionally for pizza or Chinese food.

Despite the high level of the discussion — the Contract draft was marked “confidential,” and activists openly debated which incumbents they were ready to challenge in 2010 — FreedomWorks invited reporters inside to see how their movement worked. On Monday morning, the activists would sit down with reporters from The New York Times, CNN and other media outlets to explain who they were and what they were doing. After a year of liberal pundits bashing FreedomWorks as an “astroturf” group and attacking the credibility of Tea Party activists for working with it, the group’s leaders have stopped caring about MSNBC or liberal bloggers attacking them as a force behind a popular anti-government movement.

“We’re the shadowy roots!” laughed Brandon. “What I always tell people is that we’re a service center. There’s only 18 of us. Our model is that we’re going to help you and your network.”

The Liberty Leadership Summit was a perfect demonstration of how FreedomWorks amplifies and aids the work that Tea Party activists already want to do. On their way into the offices for Sunday’s meeting, activists grabbed copies of the latest Cook Political Report rankings of House and Senate races, copies of G. Edward Griffin’s seminal anti-Federal Reserve tome “The Creature from Jekyl Island,” and copies of a memo from Pappas laying out the “fiscal policy outlook” of the coming year. That memo laid out the cases against the Democratic agenda on issues ranging from energy to financial regulation, warning activists against the majority party’s proposals to answer voters’ concerns.

“Bush’s ‘Wall Street Bailout’ was the spark that lit the Tea Party grassfire,” wrote Pappas in a section on financial regulation, “and the Obama administration has so far been successful in continuing to increase the ties between Wall Street and Washington while at the same time demonizing bankers for political gain. This presents a big opportunity for the right to throw off the image of being owned by business interests when what we really support are free markets.”

Some Tea Party activists at the meeting, like Fitzgerald, blanched at the thought of their agenda matching up with the Republican agenda. There was audible grumbling when Hecker announced that Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions was on board with the Contract from America as soon as it was ready to launch — Hecker mollified that by explaining that the group was not “tied” to Gingrich. When Florida activist Robin Stublen worried that Republicans might try and beat Tea Party activists to the punch with their own Contract, Brandon told him not to worry.

“They don’t have the credibility to do that,” Brandon said.

At the same time, in the wake of Scott Brown’s upset victory in the Massachusetts special election — a victory that came after Democrats tried and failed to negatively tie Brown to Tea Parties — activists were thrilled at the prospects of taking down long-serving incumbents. Sketching out the primary and general election calender for 2010, activists speculated that the Florida seat of retiring Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., could be up for grabs, along with the Senate seats held by Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and House seats held by Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Va., and Rep. Michael Mahon, D-N.Y. Every Democratic committee chairman, they argued, should be looked at for a challenge. According to Virginia activist Lisa Miller, former Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., was talking to Tea Party activists about challenging Perriello, the man who beat him.

When all of this was boiled down, the activists came up with three goals. The first: “No tax & spend incumbent goes unchallenged.” The second: “Take over the Republican Party,” which meant scouting out “strategic opportunities to put fiscal conservatives in the House and Senate.” The third: “Fiscal conservatives will take back the House and Senate.”

If the short debate over the Contract from America did anything, it demonstrated that the Tea Party vision of “fiscal conservatism” is one that Republicans are primed to run on. Asked to vote whether the first batch of possible Contract items were in their “top ten” or “bottom ten,” the activists heavily favored items that promised more government transparency (putting every bill online for seven days before votes) and lower taxes (making the Bush tax cuts permanent and replacing the tax code with one “no longer than 4,543 words — the length of the original Constitution). The transparency item, in particular, sounded like a no-brainer.

“I thought we voted for Obama to do that!” said Everett Wilkinson, a Florida activist.

The less popular items were ones that smacked of federal government intervention in the economy. The group voted down a tight term limits rule, a “Committee on Constitutional Authority” that would rule on whether bills passed muster, and waivers from the EPA “in order to allow states flexibility in establishing environmental priorities.” That prompted activists to argue that they should simply support abolishing the EPA. After no one supported a “corporate welfare commission” to scour wasteful spending, Pennsylvania activist John Stahl suggested that the movement campaign against corporate welfare altogether. And Stahl worried that the Contract was missing a major action item.

“There are assaults underway by the Obama administration, and others, on our Constitutional right to vote,” said Stahl. He rattled off examples — the motor voter law, giving the vote to “anybody who’s on the dole,” amnesty to undocumented immigrants — and argued that it needed to become an issue or there would be “a lot of disappointed people out there.”

“That’s a good point,” said Hecker. “One of the ideas that’s not in this, that was on the site, is an ID for voting.”

By the end of the meeting, Tea Party activists had a handle on the issues they’d demand answers on when politicians got fully into gear. And they’d started to determine how the Tea Parties of 2010 would not merely repeat the ones that broke out in 2009. Arkansas activists, said organizer Jebb Young, would hold a rally on the one-year anniversary of the day Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) called protesters “un-American.” They’d meet and greet legislators when they showed up to the next session. After he described ways for Tea Party activists to show their political heft, New York activist Tom Borrelli argued that the movement needed to pick one major corporation and start a boycott of its products. The dozens of Tea Party activists scribbled down notes.

“I think the people that you see here are going to change the direction of the country this year,” said Brendan Steinhauser, FreedomWorks’ director of federal and state campaigns.

David Weigel covers the conservative movement for The Washington Independent, a Center for Independent Media site.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have a halted all deportations do to the earthquake that struck the country this week. But the immigrants have not been granted temporary protective status, which is given to illegal immigrants who cannot safely return home. The designation would allow them to live and work freely in the United States until conditions in Haiti improve and the status could be revoked.

King told ABC News that doing so would create political controvery.

“This sounds to me like open borders advocates exercising the Rahm Emanuel axiom: ‘Never let a crisis go to waste,’” Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said in an e-mail message to ABCNews. “Illegal immigrants from Haiti have no reason to fear deportation, but if they are deported, Haiti is in great need of relief workers, and many of them could be a big help to their fellow Haitians.”

The Sioux City Journal’s Bret Hayworth points out that King didn’t get Emanuel’s axiom correct.

King doesn’t quite get Emanuel’s quote from 2008 right — it is, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”