[Recovering_Democrat]

IF this immigration/amnesty bill passes and the GOP supported it...I am going to have to part company with the GOP. It pains me to do so, but they have left me no choice. Gotta start a national Conservative Party.

I think we conservatives have to follow the Reagan example: change the party from within--but do not abandon her. Reagan was out in the cold for decades as a true conservative, while the Rockefeller/Nixon/Ford wing of the Republican party ran things. But Reagan eventually prevailed, and America prospered beyond anyone's expectations.

If we conservatives bolt the Republican party because of the current lack of conservatism in party leadership, we give the nation over to Democrat Liberals and Rockefeller Republicans. That would be awful.

I hope conservatives will stick it out and do the slow, long, hard work of reforming an electable party.

[Oklahoma]

I remember the “Fair Weather” Conservatives turning on Reagan during and after the Iran-Contra fiasco. Reagan wasn’t perfect but he was the best President we had seen in this country since Coolidge and some of the worst complainers were political operatives that should have known better. The alternative to Reagan was Carter and Mondale. The alternative to Bush was Gore and Kerry. No serious conservative thinker could honestly consider the idea that we would have been better off with one of those four liberal democrats as President rather than Reagan or Bush. It’s ludicrous.

Bush has always favored what could be called an open border and in truth it isn’t that different from what Reagan supported when he signed Simpson-Mazzoli in the mid 1980’s. We need to defeat the current attempt at “fast track” legalization by keeping the pressure on those Senators and Representatives that tip the balance. The ONLY hope we have of preventing it in the next administration is by electing a Republican Conservative like Thompson, Hunter, or Romney(?) that will veto any attempt at this type of “reform” in the near future.