New York’s special election shows the cost of saying the quiet part out loud about the border

Recently, I argued that there’s a political cost to “saying the quiet part out loud.” I didn’t mean a political cost to when a Republican doesn’t bother dogwhistling (though there’s that, too). I meant a political cost to when a Republican admits that problems aren’t to be solved but exploited. That reveals that they don’t care about the problem, which is a problem for people who do. That, I said, is going to be costly.

The occasion was earlier this month when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson preemptively killed an immigration reform bill that was, at the time, being negotiated in the Senate. (It’s dead now.) He had demanded action from Joe Biden on “the crisis on the border” in exchange for support for Ukraine aid. A bipartisan group of senators did as asked, but Johnson then reversed himself - at the behest of Donald Trump, who wants to run against the president on the issue. With that, it was clear that, for the Republicans, the problem was meant to be exploited, not solved. Johnson was saying, though tacitly, the quiet part out loud.

And with that, people who do care about the problem elected Tuesday a moderate Democrat in a special election in New York state, a race to fill a seat left vacant after the House expelled that putz George Santos. The winner said he cared about the problem. Voters believed him. More importantly, they didn’t believe the Republican who said she did.

Among other things, Tom Suozzi campaigned on the issue of immigration reform, with the usual mix for a Democrat of tougher “border security” combined with a pathway to citizenship for immigrants. His opponent, Republican Mazi Pilip, also did as expected. She hammered him “over an influx of asylum-seekers into New York City [and accused] Democrats and Biden of failing to secure the US southern border,” the AP said. Such attacks might have worked before, but now, after Johnson said the quiet part out loud, they rang hollow.

“Suozzi spent much of the campaign talking about the need to strengthen border policy, pointing out times when he bucked his own party on the issue while in Congress,” the AP said. “In the final stretch, Suozzi said he would support a temporary closure of the border to slow the number of arrivals, similar to comments that Biden has made.”

This is what worried US Senator Kevin Cramer. The Republican from North Dakota had advised Trump and Republicans generally to focus on the border, because swing voters like those in New York’s Third District ranked immigration and “border security” as top problems demanding government action. Cramer told Roll Call that, “I think it’s the independent voters that it resonates the most with, absolutely.”

But after Mike Johnson said the quiet part out loud, Cramer feared the cost of it. He said: “If we don’t try to do something when we have the moment to do something, all of those swing voters in swing states for whom the border is the number one priority have every right to look at us and go: ‘You blew your opportunity. We were ready to give you a shot, and you blew it.’ I don’t see that coming back as a reward to us.”

That seems to be what’s happening.

Here’s what one Suozzi supporter told the AP: “The constituents elect our officials to perform a certain job, and we’ve really had a very stagnant congressional year. Even with the migrants now, we had a bipartisan deal in Congress and suddenly it evaporated, like, why? Do we really need to wait for another president to come, or aren’t the issues that are pressing to everyone important at the moment?”

I suspect we are seeing just the beginning of the whole cost of saying the quiet part out loud. But even now, it goes beyond New York. It makes Tuesday’s impeachment of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas look emptier and more craven than it already did. House Republicans impeached him, by a one-vote margin, for doing nothing about the border while they themselves do nothing about the border.

It also reveals the cynicism behind efforts by Republican governors to bus migrants to predominantly Democratic areas, such as New York City. They said they did it to bring attention to a problem they also said they cared about, but after Johnson said the quiet part out loud, it’s clear they don’t. Instead, they’re exploiting migrants to exploit the problem, which is something that people who care about the problem, on account of migrants being bused to their regions, really don’t like.

And saying the quiet part out loud has exposed, I hope, the malice behind Trump’s real intentions. If he wanted to solve the problem, he’d have gotten out of the way while lawmakers debated the merits of the bipartisan immigration reform bill. But he doesn’t want to solve the problem, because the problem itself is the best to seize the power needed to do what he wants to do, which is dominate and control.

The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein reported over the weekend on his plan to launch a massive “deportation program [that] would begin ‘within moments’ of taking office,” he wrote. “To do it at scale would likely require 150,000-200,000 law enforcement officers, including a private army of red-state national guard he'd deploy into blue states.”

(Make no mistake: round ups and removals won’t be restricted to migrants, not for long, anyway. Steven Miller, the architect of Trump’s “deportation problem,” has hinted that anyone, even someone with a deeply unpopular opinion, like a “Hamas supporter,” might be a target. Miller, who is Jewish, appears to believe he’d be exempt. He’s wrong.)

In the end, the cost of saying the quiet part out loud may come back to New York and its swing districts. Voters there tend to be highly informed and they had been ready, as Cramer said, “to give you a shot.” They blew it, though. To flip the House, the Democrats need to keep the seats they have while flipping a handful more. You can be sure that they will remind such voters that the Republicans don’t really care.