Just to preface her post, a good point by DrewM:

How many ppl saying "cut Marco slack. Don't write him off in 16" would FREAK out if he became pro-choice & helped Dems loosen abortion laws?

— Drew McCoy (@_Drew_McCoy_) June 28, 2013

We all have our “red line” issues, as Drew says. Offhand, I can’t think of a single person I know privately or on Twitter who supports (or is indifferent to) the Gang of Eight bill and who also traditionally has treated border security as a “red line.” Everyone wants better border security and everybody thinks it’s important for immigrants to follow the rule of law, but when push comes to shove, some people are okay with bending on this in the name of other political goals and others are not. If you believe the polls about background checks and gun control, we might very well win a few extra votes by caving on that too. Want to do that? We might also win some votes by declaring our support for abortion in the first trimester. Okay to do that? We all have our “red lines.”

Here’s Palin drawing a “red line” of her own for people angry about the big amnesty pander. Whole post is at the link, but this is the key bit:

Great job, GOP establishment. You’ve just abandoned the Reagan Democrats with this amnesty bill, and we needed them to “enlarge that tent” of which you so often speak. It’s depressing to consider that the House of Representatives is threatening to pass some version of this nonsensical bill in the coming weeks.

Once again, I’ll point out the obvious to you: it was the loss of working class voters in swing states that cost us the 2012 election, not the Hispanic vote. Legal immigrants respect the rule of law and can see how self-centered a politician must be to fill this amnesty bill with favors, earmarks, and crony capitalists’ pork, and call it good. You disrespect Hispanics with your assumption that they desire ignoring the rule of law.

Folks like me are barely hanging on to our enlistment papers in any political party – and it’s precisely because flip-flopping political actions like amnesty force us to ask how much more bull from both the elephants in the Republican Party and the jackasses in the Democrat Party we have to swallow before these political machines totally abandon the average commonsense hardworking American. Now we turn to watch the House. If they bless this new “bi-partisan” hyper-partisan devastating plan for amnesty, we’ll know that both private political parties have finally turned their backs on us. It will then be time to show our parties’ hierarchies what we think of being members of either one of these out-of-touch, arrogant, and dysfunctional political machines.

I don’t know how disrespected Hispanics feel by the immigration reform push; according to Pew, 90 percent think illegals should have a way to stay legally in the U.S. and 59 percent think they should be allowed to apply for legal status even before border improvements have been made. Her broader point, though, about the party’s crushing failure to engage effectively with the working- and middle-class is spot on. That’s what I was getting at in the McCain post: This amnesty charade is simply the GOP’s way of dressing a gaping economic wound that cuts across racial demographics by putting an identity-politics band-aid on it, as if legalizing more cheap labor to make things even harder on working-class Americans doesn’t make the problem worse. The real reason to despair and start thinking third-party isn’t the amnesty bill itself, it’s the fact that this is what the party feels compelled to resort to now in lieu of building a better economic agenda. If they can’t figure out how to talk to people who aren’t entrepreneurs about pocketbook issues, then why keep donating to them and organizing for them? They’ve flunked politics 101. We’re pumping a dry well here.