Massachusetts GOP Chair Amy Carnevale is one of the more appealing figures the party has produced in recent years, well-spoken and presentable. Judging from the slander she endures from the bottom-of-the-barrel local right-wingers who ran the party off a cliff before her, she must be doing something right.
So when we sat down to talk with her last week, it wasn’t surprising to hear Carnevale offer reasonable partisan rhetoric on the issues of the day.
The party’s chronic anemia when it comes to candidate recruitment, with obscure no-hopers challenging Sen. Elizabeth Warren and none at all contesting most of the congressional seats? “Presidential years are tough,” understates Carnevale. “We do have limited resources. So we’ll be focusing on a lot of the legislative seats where we have openings.”
The insane-clown-posse social-issue messaging of the Trump campaign, with the candidate offering encouragement to the far-right Sharia law crowd that wants to end same sex marriage, ban abortion and curtail access to contraceptives? (How long before he’s re-enacting the scene from Woody Allen’s “Bananas” where the Fidel Castro lookalike decrees that “all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour…[and] underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.”) Those rights are “well-established here, and I frankly don’t see that changing,” says Carnevale, with a Herculean effort to avoid eye-rolling.
But there is one issue where her suitable-for-work Republicanism takes a sharper turn — the deluge of legal migrants fleeing homeland nightmares who are availing themselves of the state’s generous right-to-shelter law.
“We take no issue with the individual migrants,” she says. But “we do see over a billion dollars being spent towards migrants right now.” And Carnevale also sees political opportunity there. “The migrant situation and affordability in Massachusetts are really interrelated. Those are the top two issues and you’ll continue to see the state party focused on both.”
Beacon Hill Republicans have successfully generated embarrassing headlines (Newsweek: “MASSACHUSETTS KILLS PLAN TO PRIORITIZE HOMELESS VETERANS OVER MIGRANTS”), and unsuccessfully pushed for “residency requirements” migrants must meet before being eligible for shelter, which those without local family or friends would presumably comply with by sleeping in the streets.
The GOP establishment leavens these policies with soothing disclaimers about the human beings behind the headlines: “We don’t fault them for wanting to better their lives,” says Carnevale. Most of the red meat rhetoric is left for the right’s troll brigades, with their time-tested spin about anchor babies, leeches and crimigrants. The edgiest Carnevale gets is to declare we can’t keep on “rolling out the red carpet.” You know — like the carpet migrant families wish was there to cushion their super-fun nights spent sleeping on the cold, hard floors in the Logan Airport terminals.
Conservatives like former Baker-era Education Secretary Jim Peyser may claim that “the solution is not to deny emergency shelter but to seek additional federal assistance and to more rapidly integrate new arrivals into the Massachusetts economy through an accelerated process for getting work permits,” the same stance the Healey administration is taking. But hey, that’s RINO talk, rhetoric for political losers.
Turning the ugly, counterproductive politics of immigration into a fiscal issue is smart policy for the Republicans. Massachusetts is relatively generous with benefits for the needy, but the generosity of economically stressed voters only goes so far.
We’re 121 years removed from the inscription of the Emma Lazarus poem, “The New Colossus” on the State of Liberty. “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” it reads. Time for an update to reflect our modern-day politics: we can’t keep rolling out the red carpet.