Gabrielle Giffords campaign tries to have Minuteman PAC ads pulled

The Minuteman PAC is airing ads in Arizona in support of Randy Graf and in opposition to Gabrielle Giffords. A lawyer from her campaign has sent a letter to the station running the ads trying to get them pulled. He appears to only have problems with one statement from the ad:

AD: "AND GIFFORDS EVEN THINKS ILLEGAL ALIENS SHOULD GET SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS."

FACTS: Giffords' attorney's letter claims that Ms. Giffords "believes that only United States citizens should receive Social Security benefits." However, this letter then contradicts that position, saying that the candidate supports the Kennedy-McCain "immigration reform bill." Both McCain and Kennedy voted against an amendment to that bill introduced by Senator John Ensign that would have stopped illegal aliens from collecting Social Security payments based on their illegal work in the United States. (For more, see Washington Times, May 19, 2006 http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20060518-114132-2456r.htm) It is clearly fair to say, based on her support of that bill, that Ms. Giffords opposes the Ensign Amendment and therefore supports Social Security for Illegal Aliens.

This is a highly semantic area. If the phrase "illegal aliens" is taken to mean "those who are currently illegal aliens but who would be legalized", then the ad is correct. However, if Giffords wants to play games, she could claim that she doesn't want to give SS benefits to "illegal aliens", but only to "legal workers who used to be illegal aliens".

This is further complicated by both the portion of the McCain-Kennedy amnesty and the Ensign amendment, as well as the existence of the proposed Totalization Agreement, which is a separate matter.

The best course of action would be to change the ad to say something like, "she thinks millions of current illegal aliens should be legalized and get Social Security benefits for work performed when they were illegal aliens and might have been using someone else's Social Security number" (or words to that effect). I believe that statement is completely correct.

And, of course, there's the possibility that there's some loophole in one of the bills or agreements somewhere that would in fact give social security to illegal aliens while they still are illegal aliens.

Immigration · Wed, 10/18/2006 - 01:13 · Importance: 1