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What You Got? Schadenfreude!
By Jeff Fecke | June 1, 2007
Pity the Republican National Committee. They’re having trouble raising money, what with the implosion of their party and all. And so they’ve done what Republicans do: fire the peons:
The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors’ rebellion over President Bush’s immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, The Washington Times has learned.
Faced with an estimated 40 percent falloff in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee’s chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, fired staff members told The Times.
Several of the solicitors fired at the May 24 meeting reported declining contributions and a donor backlash against the immigration proposals now being pushed by Mr. Bush and Senate Republicans.
I’ve no doubt that the xenophobic right is upset about Bush’s immigration proposal, but I’m also quite sure that this has a little bit to do with the general malaise that has descended upon the right.
When questioned about the matter, the GOP did the other things it does: it lied:
A spokeswoman for the committee denied any drop-off in fundraising.
“Any assertion that overall donations have gone down is patently false,” RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt wrote by e-mail yesterday in response to questions sent by The Times. “We continue to out-raise our Democrat counterpart by a substantive amount (nearly double).”
Is that true? Sadly, no!
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee collected $4.6 million in April, more than double the NRSC’s $2.1 million in April contributions. What’s more, the Republican group spent about $60,000 more than it had received in donations, while using only $260,000 to pay its debt.
Overall, the NRSC’s total receipts of $9.1 million trails its Democratic counterpart’s total of $18.3 million since January.
D’oh! Well, at least the GOP can always make contradictory claims that make no sense:
Miss Schmitt said terminating the phone solicitation staff “was not an easy decision. The first and primary motivating factor was the state of the phone bank technology, which was outdated and difficult to maintain. The RNC was advised that we would soon need an entire new system to remain viable.”
She also said that “the changing ways in which people choose to contribute” meant that the RNC’s in-house phone bank “was simply no longer cost effective, although unfortunate.”
Because in the year 2007, it’s really hard to build a call center.
No, this is just another marker in the sad, slow decline of the GOP. It won’t be the last.
Topics: GOP Inanity | 4 Comments »
June 1st, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Don’t pop the champagne corks quite yet. The RNC statement is technically true. The RNC raised $7.4 million in April, compared to the DNC’s $4 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/cq/2007/05/22/cq_2770.html
The RSCC & NRCC are getting hammered money-wise by their Democratic counterparts, but the RNC itself is still pretty flush.
June 1st, 2007 at 12:33 pm
[...] Stupid: I’ve no doubt that the xenophobic right is upset about Bush’s immigration proposal… [...]
June 1st, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Aside from the controversy over the legalization provisions, this bill contains additional provisions that economically threaten many middle class American workers.
This bill would drastically increase the number of H-1B visas issued to foreign professional workers.
As a Human Resources representative, I see first hand how the H-1B visa and employment based green card programs actually work together to drive U.S. citizens in a wide variety of white collar industries from their jobs and even from their careers. To begin with, there is virtually nothing in the law that prevents employers from hiring H-1Bers for open positions even if qualified Americans are available and willing to do the work. Americans are routinely laid off and replaced with lower paid H-1Bers also. In these cases, Americans have practically no legal recourse available under current law.
H-1B is also a dual intent visa, which means an employer may sponsor an H-1Ber for an employment based green card for legal permanent resident status. When a company seeks to sponsor a foreign worker for an EB green card, they are required by law to demonstrate a good faith effort to recruit Americans first. This process is called labor certification. But employers routinely game the labor certification process for green card sponsorship to defraud even well qualified citizen job applicants in favor of low wage foreigners. They use fake job ads and/or bad faith interviews of American citizens to convince the federal government that they tried to find American workers first. These practices are common in non-tech industries as well as high tech industries, but HR people are told to keep quiet about it or lose their jobs.
I would be in favor of a program that issues a small number of self-sponsoring green cards for truly innovative or entrepreneurial foreign nationals on a competitive basis. But very few of the H-1Bers or green card applicants that I have seen in 10+ years even come close to being truly innovative or entrepreneurial. Most are just practitioners with skills that are actually quite common among the domestic workforce. The only thing special about these foreigners is that they will work for substantially less than Americans in order to have a chance to become legal permanent residents. Thus they are used by management to sweeten corporate balance sheets.
The prevailing wage regulations are supposed to insure that foreign nationals are paid the same as their American counterparts in the same job functions, but these regulations are so riddled with loopholes that they are a bad joke.
Since my work allows me to have access to salary records, I can tell you that the labor cost savings for H-1Bers and green card applicants is substantially greater than the costs of filing the applications with the government.
Citizens in all white collar professions should demand that both the H-1B and employment based green card programs be abolished in their current form.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:55 pm
That comment spam would be really impressive if it was at all on-topic.
Come back and discuss in your own words, rather than in talking points that were handed to you.