GOP legislators seek to boost electoral prospects by doubling down on fear and prejudice

North Carolina Republicans have clearly been struggling of late. Between the national surge of energy and support that the rise of the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket has provided to Democrats and many independents, and the steady drumbeat of foul-ups and bad news that continues to surround their gubernatorial nominee, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the GOP is in obvious need of a political pick-me-up – something to stop the bleeding and help rouse the conservative base.

And so it is that the state legislature returned to Raleigh this week to take up a pair of red meat topics that neatly complement the fear-based messaging around which Republicans have based so many of their national and state electoral campaigns this year: school vouchers and deporting immigrants.

When last we heard about these two subjects on Jones Street, it appeared, thankfully, that perhaps a small measure of common sense and caution had crept into the Republican caucuses in the state Senate and House. At least that was one optimistic explanation for the decision of GOP leaders to depart the Legislative Building in late June without having given final approval to a promised massive expansion of private school voucher funding or a long-debated proposal to force local sheriffs to aid federal officials in deporting immigrants.

There were even whispers on the street that, after years of profligate voucher spending, some Republican lawmakers – particularly those in rural areas, where national reporting indicates that vouchers have been endangering the health and viability of already struggling public schools – may have been interested in rethinking the state’s headlong voucher plunge.

Something similar seemed as if it might be at work with the previously vetoed immigration enforcement legislation, where some of the state’s sheriffs have raised practical and constitutional objections about being required to hold individuals arrested for minor offenses so that they can be turned over to federal Immigration Control and Enforcement officers for deportation.

As, however, is so often the case in politics – especially in the modern Republican Party, where top-down messaging discipline from the Trump campaign remains the name of the game (think, for instance, of Senator Thom Tillis’s repeated and embarrassing flipflops) – when the debate is between sound public policy and perceived political expedience, it’s the latter that almost invariably prevails.

Hence, this week’s legislative session to approve the voucher and immigration measures. Some Republicans may harbor doubts about the wisdom of each proposal (see below), but at this point – eight weeks out from Election Day – those are the kinds of concerns that tend to get pushed to the back burner.

And there’s no doubt that both issues do a fine job of playing to the baser instincts of many conservative voters.

For years, it’s been conservative orthodoxy – particularly on the religious right — that racially and economically diverse and integrated public education is a failure and that allowing families to “escape” to private schools (which, of course, tend to be much less diverse) is the “solution.”

And, of course, when it comes to immigration policy, racially tinged xenophobic fear has become almost a faith on the modern American right. Ever since Donald Trump burst upon the political scene with is baseless allegations about President Barack Obama’s citizenship nearly a decade ago, no issue has figured more prominently and consistently in conservative rhetoric.

How better to double down on both of these themes at a fraught moment in a close election than to grab some headlines about expanding “opportunity scholarships” deporting “illegals”? (The opportunity to provide Robinson with a few moments publicly presiding over the Senate – a duty he’s rarely fulfilled over the last four years – is an added bonus.)

Never mind that neither of these approaches has produced or will produce an iota of genuine societal progress.

As has been repeatedly documented, the chief impacts of spending billions of dollars to subsidize the cost of private school tuition for well-off families already sending their children to private schools will be to a) drive up the costs of private school tuition, and b) contribute further to the ongoing starvation of threadbare public schools. Indeed, with their almost complete lack of accountability and long record of exclusion and discrimination, voucher schools have shown zero evidence of having lifted overall educational achievement.

Meanwhile, the end results of forcing sheriffs to hold immigrants accused of minor offenses for ICE deportation will be to: a) further discourage immigrant community cooperation with law enforcement, b) disrupt vulnerable families – many of which have resided in the U.S. for many years, and c) perpetuate the absurd myth that mass deportation offers some kind of a genuine solution to the nation’s immigration woes.

Unfortunately, these hard truths matter little when the overriding objective is to stoke the fears of older white voters and promote the destructive idea that the nation can somehow turn back the clock to a supposedly simpler time.

Headlines – not real solutions — are the objective this week. The destructive real-world impacts of the new voucher and immigration laws will be matters for another day.