THE REPUBLICAN CONSCIENCE:

[T]he Kochs are ramping up support for a DACA fix. And they aren't the only ones. Politico reports that former Exelon chairman John Rowe, a Republican mega-donor who has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to GOP candidates, "is threatening to choke off campaign resources" to congressmen who refuse to sign the discharge petition. "There's a whole bunch of Republicans like me," Rowe said he told Representative Steve Scalise, the House majority whip, "who simply aren't going to keep giving money if you don't get an immigration bill done."

Extending permanent legal status to Dreamers may be anathema to seal-the-border restrictionists, but for most voters it is a no-brainer. A strong majority of voters, including most Republicans, has consistently told pollsters that DACA enrollees and Dreamers should be granted a path to citizenship, not threatened with deportation. Outside the fever swamps, there could hardly be a more mainstream position.

Nor, in historical terms, could there be a more Republican one.

For most of its existence, the Party of Lincoln was the party of immigration. The GOP platform of 1864 ringingly declared that "foreign immigration . . . should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy." Nearly a century later, when Richard Nixon first ran for president, his party called for opening the nation's gates even wider. Citing "Republican conscience and Republican policy," the 1960 platform urged that "the annual number of immigrants we accept be at least doubled."

Pursuing the GOP nomination in 1980, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush spoke with compassion and warmth about immigrants -- even those here illegally. "Rather than talking about putting up a fence," Reagan suggested, "why don't we . . . open the border both ways?" As president, Reagan championed a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants; he always envisioned America, he would say in his farewell address, as a land whose "doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here."

Admittedly, there has always been a nativist strain in American culture, and more than a few Republicans plainly share Trump's immigration sourness. But they don't reflect the Republican conservative tradition. It is Rowe and the Koch brothers who are being faithful to the GOP heritage, and the anti-DACA bitter-enders who are betraying it.

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