Via RCP, let me stress up front that this guy, Daniel McCarthy, isn’t some sort of Bill-Weld-style centrist running to the incumbent’s left in the primary. He’s full MAGA. He and the host, Garret Lewis, sneer at Paul Ryan and “Martha” for their repugnant RINO-ism. I’ll support Trump on the border in whatever he wants to do, McCarthy stresses, even standing for days on end on the Senate floor in a filibuster if it’ll help somehow. He’s all for the border wall too. America First.

…but once we get done with the wall, he adds at 41:00 or so of the clip below, maybe we should think about inviting Mexicans to seek annexation by the United States.

Yeah.

“There is a process to become states for the United States,” McCarthy said Tuesday morning on an Arizona radio station. “Clearly 30 million Mexican illegal immigrants want to be United States citizens, probably half the country wants to be United States citizens.”

And so, the aspiring lawmaker from a border state would like the citizens of Mexico to turn their attention to Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution. It stipulates that “new states may be admitted by the Congress into this union.”

“I want to speak above the Mexican government. Okay? When you’re talking to the Mexican citizens, ‘Rise up in your communities and petition to become states for the United States.’ That’s how that process works,” he said, before adding that “by the way, it’s not that challenging.”…

“Listen, you think anybody wants to live like that?” the wannabe senator told the show’s host.

“He’s obviously joking,” you’re thinking. “He’s mocking the left’s attitude on immigration that we can and should absorb entire national populations with no unwelcome economic or cultural consequences.”

My dude, he is not joking.

The campaign of Arizona Republican Daniel McCarthy tells RCP he is serious and that annexing Mexico is in line with an America First immigration policy.https://t.co/y35YJKYwsk

— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) September 18, 2019

The idea, I guess, is that annexation is a constitutional process and therefore allowing Mexicans to petition Congress for annexation would be a way to steer them towards *legal* immigration — of a sort. We dislike illegal immigration from Mexico, don’t we? We’re forever telling them to get in line, right?

Well, what if 10 million or so got in line all at once, all on the same immigration “application”?

Maybe the idea is that if we convert parts of Mexico into U.S. states then the locals won’t want to travel north anymore. They’ll already be Americans! They can stay put. But of course, that’s not why Mexicans cross the border. They do it chiefly for economic opportunity; so long as most of that opportunity continues to reside north of the Rio Grande, they’ll want to reside north of the Rio Grande too.

So … what is he thinking? Ask the average MAGA fan why he opposes amnesty for illegals and he’ll tell you that handing citizenship to millions of Mexicans would end up as a massive net electoral benefit to Democrats. Now here comes McCarthy with a bold new twist on that claim: Let’s just hand electoral votes to entire Mexican provinces by converting them into U.S. states. No need to worry about Texas gradually turning blue anymore. We can simply gift-wrap a few dozen EVs for the Dems via annexation and let newly-minted Americans from former Mexico offset Texas’s electoral power that way.

Oh, and as a cherry on top, McCarthy stresses that the border wall should be built before any discussions about “Mexit” take place.

Why the hell would you want to spend money walling off a border that won’t be a border anymore if annexation happens?

I need a drink. I’ll say this for the guy, though: There are all sorts of ideas that were anathema to the right just a few years ago that are now perfectly orthodox, mainly because Trump happens to back them. Look no further than the conundrum facing the country on how to handle Iran and its attack on Saudi Arabia. Five years ago, having the White House hold itself open to Tehran for talks after the regime bombed Saudi oil facilities would be seen by Republicans as one of the cuckiest displays of weakness in American history. Today, under the MAGA-in-chief, it’s seen as cool-headed diplomatic prudence at a dangerous moment. There’s probably some convoluted populist argument for why annexing Mexico is perfectly sensible too. And if there isn’t yet, there will be.