Residents gather during a Waco Tea Party event. (Photo Credit: Randomized Productions/Flickr)

Conservative activists and some Republican lawmakers are up in arms about what they describe as the Internal Revenue Service conducting a partisan and ideologically driven campaign against tea party groups around the country. They claim that progressive organizations are not experiencing the same level of scrutiny. However, some progressive groups say they have had similar experiences with the IRS, and at least one expert dismisses the notion that the government is engaged in an ideological witch hunt.

Tea party groups, as well as other non-profit organizations, can apply for tax-exempt status with the IRS. Under the 501(c) designation there are 28 different types of organizations that are exempt from paying some or all federal taxes. Typically, organizations like tea party groups will apply either for 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 status, depending on the organization’s activities. One of the differences between the designations is that donations to a 501(c)3 are tax deductible and donations to a 501(c)4 are not.

In an interview with the Texas Independent, Toby Walker of the Waco Tea Party said that the group applied for 501(c)4 status by filing a 1024 form with the IRS in July of 2010. About a month later the group was informed that the IRS would take 90 days to inform it of an approval, a denial, or a request for more information. “The 90 days came and went,” said Walker. “But on their web site it said that they were behind. We started calling and checking in, and they said they were backlogged.”

Then on Feb. 7 of this year, the Waco Tea Party received a letter from the IRS asking for the answers to 20 questions. “Some of the questions were acceptable,” said Walker. “We knew they were going to ask for more information, and we weren’t surprised to get the letter. What surprised us were a number of the questions that did not pertain to the 1024.”

“Red alert”

Walker specifically cited the seventeenth question as being a “red alert.” The question asks if the group has a “close relationship with any candidate for public office or political party.” The question also asks them to describe the relationship.

“I told our treasurer to find out what that means,” said Walker. “When we called the IRS they said that close relationship is subjective and to send them the names, and they will let us know. What does that mean?”

“It was so onerous to answer,” said Walker.

The letter asked for transcripts of the group’s social media activities, including posts on Facebook and Twitter. It also requested transcripts of the group’s online radio show. Walker said that the group was looking at significant costs for printing and shipping all of the documents required. “Just to do our Twitter account would be between 2,500 and 3,000 pages,” said Walker.

Walker said that she knew that “left leaning groups” that filed the same year had been approved. While she did not name the specific groups, Walker referred to a March 8 Roll Call article. The article stated that “several liberal groups contacted by Roll Call did not report similar experiences.”

The article specifically cited Protect Your Care, a 501(c)4 organization that describes its mission as providing a space to “champion the Affordable Care Act,” as an organization that did not receive any such questionnaire letter from the IRS. Roll Call also said that one other unnamed liberal 501(c)(4) organization was granted tax exempt status in May after receiving “only a modest six-part questionnaire.”

Progressives get same treatment

However, interviews conducted by the Texas Independent with three different progressive organizations call into question charges that the IRS is engaged in ideological discrimination. Each organization reported varying degrees of interactions with the IRS, and the amount of time it took each to receive final approval also varied. However, two of the organizations did receive correspondence from the IRS requesting more information, and these letters included similar questions to those received by the Waco Tea Party.

In College Station, Texas, the Brazos Progressives, a coalition of progressive groups and businesses, originally filed for 501(c)3 status and, after being denied, filed for and received 501(c)4 status. Clean Elections Texas, an organization that seeks to build support for a public funding option for candidates seeking public office in Texas, filed for 501(c)4 status and said that they avoided requests for more information by being advised on what specific information the IRS was looking for on the 1024 forms.

A staff member of a progressive organization in Texas spoke with the Texas Independent on the condition of anonymity due to the fact that their organization is undergoing a similar review as the Waco Tea Party. The staff member said that that while the organization’s application for 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 status went through “fairly smoothly,” the organization also had to answer extensive follow-up questions about its finances and mission.

“We received a questionnaire of around twenty questions,” said a staff member. “The letter was looking for a deeper understanding of our organization. There were no questions that were that surprising. I think they [the questions] were just about really drilling into why we wanted to have a tax exempt status. It made us focus on what we are working on and what kind of great good agenda, not just a partisan agenda, we are working toward.”

The staff member, who said that he has worked for multiple 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 organizations during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, said that he has perceived no difference in how non-profits applying for tax-exempt status are treated. “When the IRS asks questions, then you answer them,” said the staff member. “If you are upset with being upfront and clear about your organization, then maybe you shouldn’t be filing for a 501(c)4 status.”

A comparison of the letter from the IRS released by the Waco Tea Party and of a letter provided by the progressive Texas organization found that both are extensively detailed, asked similar questions, and were tailored to each organization. Both letters asked for copies of the organization’s board meeting minutes and for copies of each organization’s web sites. Questions also addressed specific concerns that the IRS had with each organization but, on the whole, did not appear to treat the organizations differently.

Marcus Owens, an attorney who represents non-profit organizations and has previously worked with the IRS, told the Texas Independent that the IRS is attempting to “get behind the rhetoric” of organizations that are interested in public policy.

“The IRS is asking similar questions of organizations from all over the political spectrum,” said Owens. “The real issue for the IRS when it looks at organizations that apply for 501(c)4 status is whether or not they are social welfare organizations or something else. It’s not whether or not they should be exempt or not, but which code section they should be exempt under.”

While Owens did think that some of the questions were too broad and could have been worded better, he also said that groups applying for tax exempt status have options when questioned by the IRS.

“Fundamentally the IRS has a right ask the questions,” said Owens. “However, the IRS is usually open to negotiating how much information you need to provide. What is clear is that this application process is normally not improved by public posturing. It is the task of the organization or the organization’s representatives to add to the facts and make the case to the IRS.”

Walker says that when the Waco Tea Party received the letter from the IRS, the group contacted its members, volunteers, and supporters. At no time did the group contact the IRS directly for clarification of the questions or to negotiate what information would be acceptable.

The Waco Tea Party also sought out the American Center for Law and Justice for legal advice and representation.

The ACLJ has taken up the cause of the Waco Tea Party and other tea party groups. The ACLJ describes itself as “committed to ensuring the ongoing viability of freedom and liberty in the United States and around the world.” Founded in 1990 by television evangelist Pat Robertson, the group has gained notoriety for taking up conservative causes. These have included providing a legal defense for a public bus driver who was fired for refusing to take a woman to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas.

The ACLJ posted a petition on its web site to “Stop the IRS from Silencing the Tea Party.” The petition claims that under the Obama Administration the IRS “appears to be conducting politically motivated investigations of tea party organizations nationwide.” The petition characterizes the investigations as “bullying tactics” that are “designed to silence these organizations.” The petition calls for the Speaker of the House and others to “provide IRS oversight.” Other Republican lawmakers and candidates have joined in supporting these claims, and some have called for congressional investigations.

Rep. Flores gets involved

Republican Rep. Bill Flores (TX-17), whose district includes Waco, penned a letter to House Committee on Oversight on Government Reform Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa stating that he is “concerned that the IRS is targeting tea party organizations around the country.” The letter requests that Issa’s committee open an investigation into the issue and hold congressional hearings. Republican senators also sent a letter to Commissioner of the IRS Douglas Shulman, requesting a response to similar concerns and demanding that the agency hold further “demands for information.”

The Waco Tea Party also taken to social media to make its case that it is being targetted by the IRS, characterizing it as a battle between the “IRS versus the tea party.” Posting multiple status updates and links on Facebook and Twitter, the group has made the claim that you are “either with us or against us and the constitution.” The group has also promoted the petition drive by the ALCJ, tweeting “defend the tea party from the IRS, sign the petition and call Congress.”

Another recent tweet reads: “The left is trying to silence Rush, and the IRS is trying to silence the tea party.”

Walker shares the desire for an investigation and hearings. “Yes there needs to be congressional hearings,” she said. “When a branch of the fed government is violating citizens’ rights, they need to be investigated and put into their constitutional box.”

Waco Tea Party IRS Letter//

IRS Letter to Progressive Group//

“In 2010, conservatives across America sent a message to Washington that enough was enough, that it was time to stop the spending and massive deficits,” Buck writes, setting the stage for his campaign contribution ask. “I’m going to do everything in my power this year to help put real conservatives in the Senate…

By “real conservative” Buck means a conservative of the tea party variety, which is how Buck was sold to voters in 2010.

“[Neumann] is running against an establishment Republican who actually supported ObamaCare. In fact, President Obama thanked Neumann’s opponent for his help in getting Obamacare passed! To top it all off, once Mark wins the Primary, he will face the most liberal Democrat in the country. That’s why I am writing you today. Mark is the definition of a conservative fighter…

“Control of the entire Senate could hinge on this race in Wisconsin. We need to make sure that a conservative like Mark Neumann wins this seat back and sends Harry Reid back to the minority where he belongs.”

Tea party favorite Buck defeated former Lieutenant Governor and Republican establishment candidate Jane Norton in the 2010 primary, pulling down key endorsements from tea party icons RedState blog founder Erick Erickson and South Carolina U.S. Senator Jim DeMint. Buck’s insurgent “outsider” candidacy bolstered the narrative that grassroots conservatives were remaking Republican party dynamics and setting a new agenda.

As general election voters tuned in to his far-right views and the steam began whistling out of his campaign, however, and when he lost to low-key then-recently-appointed Senator Michael Bennet by something like 1 percentage point, the message many observers took from the swing-state race was that, despite major electoral gains in 2010, tea party politics could be a long-term liability for the Republican Party.

Buck seems now to be seeking a sort of do-over by proxy in Wisconsin.

Neumann, a former congressman, is running in the Wisconsin GOP primary against Tommy Thompson, former governor of the state and former Secretary of Health and Human Services under George W. Bush. Almost a year ago, when Thompson’s name was first floated for the U.S. Senate seat, the conservative Club for Growth attacked Thompson as a supporter of “Obamacare.” The Club cited an Obama radio address that pointed to Thompson as one of the Republican lawmakers who supported the legislation.

Thompson’s actual position on the bill was more complicated. He thought the health care status quo was insupportable and that the federal legislation would either fail to pass or it would be tweaked significantly and improved after passage.

Should Neumann best Thompson in the primary, he would face Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, a progressive-politics champion of health-care reform for years before the passage of the Affordable Care Act and a candidate who has drawn much national support on the left.

[ Image: Ken Buck via Ken Buck at WikiCommons. ]

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United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (Photo: Flickr/World Economic Forum)

The Tea Party has added another item to its list of reasons to fear the United Nations: Some in the movement say the U.N. is planning to intervene in the United States’ upcoming elections.

This week, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his speech on voting rights, the Texas group True the Vote called for a protest of the event because “Holder is for NAACP Plans to involve the United Nations in US Elections.” [Their emphasis.]

True the Vote, a voter integrity initiative launched by the Houston Tea Party group King Street Patriots, held a national summit this year featuring some of the right’s most incendiary speakers, such as Andrew Breitbart, The Texas Independent reported. According to the Independent, “representatives from more than 25 states attended the two-day national summit in Houston to receive training and information about the conservative organization’s efforts to combat voter fraud.”

The Independent reported back in March that the group was a 501(c)4 nonprofit and had applied for 501(c)3 nonprofit status.

Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of King Street Patriots, said during the group’s summit that she was hoping to mobilize teams of three people to oversee each voting precinct in the country. That would add up to roughly 1 million right-wing tea party volunteers nationwide by the 2012 general election, the Independent reported.

Tea Party Manatee, based in Southwest Florida, sent out an email newsletter this week, echoing the King Street Patriots’ latest fight and warning that the U.N. is “trying to Intervene in 2012 Elections.”

According to group’s email:

• In November 2012 Foreign bureaucrats will appear at your polling station to ensure you adhere to their vision of a ‘fair’ election.
• Local polling officials who dare to enforce state clean election laws will be subject to lawsuits and arrest.
• Conservative political speech will be deemed hateful and be suppressed.
• Just enough voter fraud will be allowed to ensure a second term for Barack Hussein Obama.

This is not a fantasy – next week it will start to become reality when a delegation of leftist Obama supporters will meet with the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. And there they will lay the groundwork to ensure the United Nations takes action in time to save Barack Obama.

You see, the Democratic Left is terrified of the new clean election laws being passed across America. These laws have cleared our voter lists of the dead and the ineligible, require voter identification for everyone and insist that our military be allowed to vote.

And clean elections are the single greatest weapon we have to ensure an honest vote in 2012 and a single term for Barack Obama. And the Left can’t allow that to happen.

So they will make their case for action to the UN Human Rights Council – an international government origination so biased that even Hillary Clinton has denounced it.

Council members like Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Mexico and China will review your election laws and judge if you measure up to their idea of democracy. How can we accomplish any of our goals, like repealing health care rationing, securing the borders and balancing our budget if we can’t even control our own elections?

That’s why we need to send a clear message to the UN – stay out of America’s elections and abandon Barack Obama to the judgment of the American people. I need you to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to send that very message to the United Nations – by any means necessary.

It’s difficult to trace the exact origin of this particular hysteria, but one of the earliest mentions of the NAACP’s plan to involve the U.N. came in a report by Fox News.

According to Fox:

The NAACP is calling on the United Nations to intervene as it claims state governments are colluding to “block the vote” for minority communities ahead of the 2012 election — a charge those governments vehemently deny.

The nation’s biggest civil rights organization this week released a report that claimed a raft of new voting laws at the state level would disenfranchise minority voters. The report said 14 states passed 25 measures “designed to restrict or limit the ballot access of voters of color.”

…

Supporters of the laws describe them as common-sense measures meant to ensure the integrity of elections. In Tennessee, which is implementing a new photo ID law, elections coordinator Mark Goins dismissed the criticism and questioned why the NAACP would flag the United Nations over its concerns, calling that effort “a bit extreme.”

“I don’t know what the benefit of going to the U.N. would be,” he said. “I can’t imagine any authority whatsoever that they would have here in Tennessee.”

But the NAACP described the new measures as part of a “concerted” effort to drive down minority turnout and is planning a multi-stage campaign to attract international attention.

To start, the group is planning a “Stand 4 Freedom” rally this Saturday across from the U.N. headquarters. Supporters are being asked to sign an online pledge which, among other demands, calls on the United Nations to “investigate and condemn voter suppression tactics in the United States.”

Copies of the latest report are being sent to the United Nations, as well as attorneys general across the country and the Department of Justice. According to one newspaper report, the NAACP will follow up in March when it sends a delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, to present its case before the U.N. Human Rights Council — a group known more for its sustained criticism of Israel than its attention to voting rights.

An NAACP spokesman says the organization is just doing its duty as one of the 3,500 groups that “has consulting status” with the U.N. The group simply works with the international organization to make sure the United States is “living up to its commitment” to an initiative to eliminate discrimination, the spokesperson says.

He also says that the U.N. does not have the power to actually intervene in state matters, and can only interview people and create reports through the Human Rights Council.

“We are just working to make sure the U.S. remains a beacon of democracy,” the NAACP spokesperson says.

The NAACP will be giving a presentation in Geneva to the Human Rights Council in March 2012 as part of its consulting status.

Gingrich, however, is the latest in a revolving list of candidates who have floated to the top of the party’s primary contest as an alternative to effective frontrunner Mitt Romney. PPP recently reported Gingrich leading Romney among Colorado Republicans 37-18, partly due to the fact that Gingrich is drawing the lion’s share of Herman Cain supporters left in the lurch when their man dropped out of the race in the wake of horrifically managed spiraling sex scandals.

That Newt is leading here is an obvious problem for the state GOP. Unaffiliated voters make up roughly a third of the Colorado electorate and Obama is polling way out in front of Gingrich in that demographic. PPP surveyed roughly 800 voters this week in Colorado and found Obama leading among independents by a 56 to 32 point spread.

PPP reported a plus/minus 3.5 percent margin of error in the week’s survey. Director Tom Jensen seemed to be having fun writing up the polling results.

Our new Colorado poll is more evidence that the Newt surge could be disastrous for GOP hopes of beating Barack Obama next year….

As weak as Obama is in Colorado, if the Republicans nominate Newt Gingrich it doesn’t look like it matters. Obama leads Gingrich 50-42 in the state, including a whooping 56-32 advantage with independents. Gingrich is a reviled figure with only 32 percent of voters seeing him favorably to 55 percent with a negative opinion, including a 25/59 spread with independents…

The GOP’s move toward supporting Gingrich is seriously endangering its chances of winning in the fall.

Jensen writes that Romney is running roughly neck and neck with Obama and that, if Republican primary voters can hold their noses and vote to nominate him as their general election candidate, Colorado could “go back into the swing state category.”

“Or it could be another easy Obama win as it was in 2008.”

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Brewer, acting in response to Tea Party agitation and on behalf of Republican lawmakers dissatisfied with the redistricting plan drawn up by the commission, removed Matthis, claiming she had demonstrated “substantial neglect of duty, gross misconduct in office or inability to discharge the duties of office.”

Twenty-one Senate Republicans backed Brewer to provide the two-thirds senate vote she needed to remake the five-member commission, which was created by voters to take the highly partisan, once-a-decade work of redistricting out of the hands of lawmakers. The commission consists of two Democrats, two Republicans and one independent. Matthis is the independent. According to the Arizona Republic, Brewer had targeted the two Democrats as well but could not secure the votes to remove them.

Similar wrangling in states over redistricting and voting laws has been a top political story this year.

After the midterm elections of 2010 swept Republican majorities into state houses across the country, decades of legislation meant to expand the franchise by flattening barriers to participation in elections ground to a halt. Laws raising hurdles to voter registration and ballot casting cropped up in states across the country, pushed by Republicans arguing the need to protect against voter fraud. The roughly 20 laws passed in state capitols this year would make it more difficult for more than 5 million eligible citizens to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

In Colorado, the election of 2010 delivered a split legislature, with Democrats running the Senate and Republicans running the House. To almost no one’s surprise, legislative redistricting efforts broke down among partisan bickering during last spring’s session. Republicans are now appealing a congressional redistricting map presented by a court. A judge also recently turned back as unacceptable state district reapportionment maps.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a longtime Republican partisan campaign finance and election law attorney who won office last year, has made national news by seeking the power to throw suspected undocumented citizens off the voter rolls and for attempting to prevent county clerks from mailing ballots to legally registered inactive voters.

He cited the need to combat fraud in both cases without ever presenting credible evidence that there was any fraud occurring in the state.

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“Barack Obama has been one of the protest mobs’ biggest cheeleaders,” writes Campaign chief and right-wing politics public relations consultant Joe Wierzbicki in a release announcing a new campaign ad.

Wierzbicki points readers to poll data from Quinnipiac suggesting Americans now view the Occupy movement unfavorably.

The new poll finds that support for the violent Occupy Wall Street mobs has fallen further, and since Barack Obama has been one of the protest mobs’ biggest cheerleaders, it spells trouble for him as well….

The mainstream media hasn’t spent much time highlighting this vulnerability for Obama, but that is where you come in.  We urgently need your help to raise the money to launch our new TV ad campaign that shows how Democrat leaders shamelessly have championed the Occupy Wall Street mobs that have cost taxpayers millions of dollars and created considerable damage in cities across America.

Look at this picture below and see what the scene was like this week in Oakland, California.  Are we going to let these mobs and their Democrat champions do this to America, or are we going to fight back?

The language in the ads and the release is exaggerated and the facts are cherry-picked. The larger narrative strategy of the campaign also comes with some risk.

Voters may not love recent more-aggressive Occupy tactics, but they still sympathize to a significant degree with the main message of the movement, which centers on the need to address the inarguable fact of expanding inequality in the country tied to the finance industry and corporate America and the way the two dominate Washington DC.

Although it’s true recent polls report dipping popularity for the Occupy movement, they also report greater sympathy for the movement than for the Tea Party and much greater sympathy for the movement than for Wall Street and large corporations.

Wierzbicki, however, isn’t looking to provide that kind of context. He’s a longtime pitchman for Republican Party-associated firm Russo Marsh & Rogers. He helped sell George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq and wrote the memo that led conservative establishment figures to backdoor-finance the national Tea Party bus tour during the 2010 campaign season.

Wierzbicki’s 2011 Campaign to Defeat Obama PAC shares a Willows, California, PO Box address with his Our Country Deserves Better PAC and with TeaPartyExpress.org. All three organizations reportedly share the same treasurer as well, a Kelly Lawler, who was a former staff member at the National Republican Campaign Committee.

Still, as political analysts of all stripes will tell anyone who will listen, broader contexts can matter not at all in the world of campaign strategy, which is partly tied to the fact that the public doesn’t always overly concern itself with the work histories of the partisans behind most political media campaigns.

As the “OWS as Democratic Party-backed public menace” ads hit the airwaves, a blogger for the Economist underlines exactly why bad-acting Occupiers might pose a major political problem for Democrats.

“As long as the Occupy movement remains without acknowledged leaders who can credibly distance it from the worst behaviour of its least reasonable affiliates, the movement will increasingly come to be defined by its most egregious episodes.”

The blogger points to CBS coverage from clashes in Oakland.

“You see the problem? Who watches CBS News? Older people. Older people who don’t cotton to this sort of shenanigans and who vote in droves.”

The Massachusetts Republican Party recently launched a nearly identical campaign targeting Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren as the “matriarch of mayhem.”

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“The Occupy Wall Street, much of the calls have been coming for more government spending and more government involvement in people’s lives,” Bachmann said in a video posted by the Bay Citizen.”The Tea Party movement, in high contrast, is calling for less government and less spending.”

Bachmann defined the Occupy movement’s approach as ”government-directed solutions based on temporary gimmicks,” while she said the tea party pushes “permanent solutions driven from the private sector,” according to the Oakland Tribune.

She also said there’s a difference in the cleanliness of the two movements: “The Tea Party picks up its trash after it has a demonstration.”

“I haven’t been here a long time and I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about how the place works,” Bennet said, pacing at the podium, his voice rising, his hands at times folded in front of him modeling a posture of frustrated restraint. “I implore the senator from Kentucky to reconsider his objection [to continued debate]… Finally, after two and a half years, there’s a bipartisan piece of legislation in front of the committee and we’re told that meeting for two hours is too long…

“You know why people are fed up this place? It’s because they don’t think the debate we’re having is about them. They think the debate we’re having is about us. And they’re right about that.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act would remove the yearly progress reports mandated by the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act. It would also lift penalties imposed on schools that fail to meet annual standards set by No Child Left Behind, focusing accountability on only the lowest performing schools.

Indeed, the bill seeks in general to lower federal involvement in education, a proposal normally likely to draw the support of small-government lawmakers like Paul.

“The teachers all across this state want us to lift this burden from them, in my view the biggest federal overreach ever in domestic policy,” Bennet said. “That’s what this bill does, not for ideological reasons, but to respond to the voices of our teachers, respond to the voices of our superintendents.

“[The bill] responds to the voices of our parents who are sick and tired of the almost comical but to them painful measures of annual progress, the idea that we’re going to label all of our schools failing by 2014 because we have a completely made up accountability system in Washington DC. This bill does away with that!”

The remarks came during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee markup session, a session where committee members amend and rewrite legislation. Bennet was superintendent of the Denver public school system before being appointed to the senate in 2009 and he seems to prize his work for the HELP committee and his work on this bill in particular.

Senator Paul, who won his seat in the Tea Party wave election last November, expressed frustration that he didn’t have time enough to fully consider the roughly 800-page bill. He derided the process as unrealistic and said the public had been locked out of the debate.

Committee Chairman Tom Harkin from Iowa pointed out in response that the committee held ten public hearings on the legislation in 2010 and that the bill had been in the works for years. As a HELP committee member, Paul could have taken time since assuming office to familiarize himself with the legislation, he said.

Bennet told Paul that while they were dithering over politicized chamber rules, teachers were at work in Colorado, at 11:15 pm, preparing for classes.

“When people see the political games that are being played here, when they see people who are unwilling to work together and they are killing themselves to deliver for our kids, I’m not sure there’s anything more backhanded we could do.”

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Paul said he does not want to remove all 11 million undocumented immigrants, but insisted “we must have secure borders and we must not reward people for breaking the law.”

“I don’t think people should come here and esaily become citizens who can vote and receive social benefits,” Paul said, but he added there must be a program to allow “people who want to work to come.”

Paul said there should an assimilation program, but borders remain important and that citizenship for U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants should not automatic.

Asked if the tea party is an anti-immigrant party Paul said, “I can’t tell you a thing about it because it is sort of all over the place.”

Diario Las Americas, a Miami-based Spanish-language news outlet, wrote late last week that George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism and Ronald Reagan’s “pragmatism” in immigration have been “buried by the new Republican militancy,” due to tea party pressure. The outlet says Republicans are “risking a defeat in 2012″ over the issue.

Las Americas also said that Republican presidential debates have become a competition for who is the strongest or the weakest candidate on illegal immigration. Immigration enforcement activists have said GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry’s distant second-place in the recent Florida straw poll was due to his “weak” statements on immigration.

According to Las Americas, the Republican presidential candidate will need “at least 40 percent of the Hispanic vote to win the general elections.”

GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, who has steadily become a central figure in today’s Republican Party, spoke in August at the Ronald Reagan Library. His message: Americans want the nation to be free and prosperous, but also compassionate.

New York Daily News columnist Albor Ruiz wrote Sunday that “Rubio supports mandatory E-Verify, has adopted the vacuous GOP mantra ‘border security first,’ and despite past support for a Florida in-state tuition bill, now opposes the federal DREAM Act.”

“But no matter how far right he goes, Rubio will never be American enough for some crazies in the birthers movement,” Ruiz wrote.

He added:

The GOP’s Great Latino Hope could turn out not to be such a good idea after all.

A poll conducted by Latino Decisions on the eve of last November’s election found 78% of Cuban-Americans would vote for Rubio, but only 40% of non-Cuban Latinos would do the same. And this was during his moderate phase.