Why not hold back funds? Its not like the GOP is going DO anything effective about the situation, at least not from a citizens point of view. Gotta keep that cheap labor coming in to please those business interests...
If you think immigration is the only issue and that somehow the democrats will have a tough border policy if they get in power by all mean withhold funds.
I'd say that if there were a concerted effort to freeze funding to the GOP on behalf of their base that they would at least know that their constituency meant business. As it is now they already know that they got your vote in their back pocket.
It's simply that few politicans are going to risk a principled stand if they don't percieve the need to.
Here is an excellent analysis of 06 from The American Spectator:
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Yet no one predicts with a straight face the Democrats will be the beneficiaries of this stalled agenda (which is largely the Democrats' doing, by the way).
The conventional wisdom holds that the Democrats aren't gaining even as Republicans lose steam because the Democrats offer no new ideas.
Theirs is, in the words of President George W. Bush, "the philosophy of the stop sign. The agenda of the roadblock."
Even their fellow Democrats claim the lack of new intellectual offerings by the Democrat minority is the principal factor holding back a 1994-style upheaval in 2006.
Typical of this thinking is the recent strategy memo titled "The Democrats' Moment to Engage," by the liberal polling outfit Democracy Corps:
...the president's deep troubles have produced no rise in positive sentiment about the Democrats. Their thermometer ratings are significantly below 2004, with equal numbers offering warm and cool response to the party. The positive ratings (38 percent) are 5 points below that for the Republicans.
The Democrats can achieve major gains, however, if the party moves decisively to a new stage of engagement. They must poise [sic] sharp choices -- ones that define the Democrats, not just the Republicans and ones that, in every battle, make the Democrats the instrument for reforming and changing Washington.
This is hogwash and everyone in Washington knows it.
The moment the Democrats articulate an agenda, their already fragile coalition will atomize.
And we know from experience that as the election nears the issues debate will even out as the mainstream media's ability to influence the agenda gives way to the paid advertising of the major parties.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the reasons the Democrats are not poised to benefit from the Republicans' recent lackluster performance are structural, not ideological; founded in hard electoral facts, not fluctuating public opinion.
To put it another way, the Democrats aren't likely to make major gains in 2006 because they can't.
During the next couple of weeks I will lay out the case against a Republican collapse, for good or ill, based on an electoral structure that rewards incumbency, punishes challengers, and strongly favors the GOP.
In politics, the saying goes, everything will be different in 18 months. "Everything" here refers to the issues of the day, the things we discuss around the proverbial water cooler.
But political realities shift much more slowly, if at all.
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