WASHINGTON (AP) — Two fresh faces in the Republican Party — House Speaker Paul Ryan and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley — are offering messages of diversity and openness to immigrants that could answer the GOP establishment's increasingly desperate search for an antidote to the loud pronouncements of presidential front-runner Donald Trump.
Delivering the GOP rebuttal to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday night, Haley, a daughter of Indian immigrants, called for welcoming legal immigrants to the country as long as they're properly vetted, and for resisting the temptation "to follow the siren call of the angriest voices."
The great Jack Kemp used to say about politicians that "voters don't care what you know until they know that you care." Republicans say they care about the poor and minorities, but do they, really?
We have a test case in front of us right now over whether the congressional leadership will renew the Washington D.C. school voucher program. The program's budget is only $25 million, or less than 0.1 percent of federal education spending. The scholarship program was created in 2004 and was the handiwork of John Boehner and President George W. Bush. The results have been uniformly positive for these families.
