Revolve this in your mind. The Democratic Party, that is to say, the party of homosexual rights and homosexual marriage, is hounding the

Republican Party, that is the party of family values, for extending due process to one of its own, the Hon. Foley, a homosexual Republican

congressman, once a Democrat and the founder of south central Florida's Lettuce Patch Restaurant. Parents, even vegetarian parents, will want

to steer their young as far away as possible from that cutely named restaurant.

Precisely what were the Republicans to do about the Hon. Foley? On this the Democrats are unclear once their indignant oaths fall silent.

Apparently the dull House Speaker Dennis Hastert was supposed to have been monitoring his colleagues on the Hill and leapt to action at the

first sign that one was sending dirty messages to pages -- though it is only slowly becoming known even by us readers of the vigilant

American press who those pages are, how old they were, and whether they were baiting Foley for sport.

The Democrats have several other problems. They are the party that let the Hon. Gerry Studds remain in Congress for over a decade after he

seduced a male page with booze. About the time he was caught a Republican congressman from the Midwest was accused of seducing a female page.

The Republican was not renominated. And then there is the Hon. Barney Frank, a beacon of virtue and intelligence in the House of

Representatives to this day. It was discovered some years back that a homosexual friend of his was running a house of ill-repute out of

Frank's Washington apartment. What did the Democrats do about these indiscretions?

Or for that matter, what are they going to do about the discoveries of Jeffrey Lord? Writing in Spectator.org, Lord reports on Rep. Nancy

Pelosi marching in a 2001 gay pride parade in San Francisco. Today Pelosi sounds like this: "Republican leaders admitted to knowing about Mr.

Foley's abhorrent behavior for six months to a year and failed to protect children in their trust." However, according to Lord, in that 2001

gay pride parade who was striding a mere three spots away from Pelosi but Harry Hay, founder of "The Mattachine Society," and a strong

advocate of man/boy love. Upon Hay's death in 2002 the North American Man/Boy Love Association ran on its website several of his marmoreal

declarations, one being, "Because if the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they should know from their gay kids that the

relationship with an older man is precisely what thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world."

Frankly I would have suggested that shooting hoops is important too, but silly old me.

Now I think we can all agree that sending dirty e-mails to pages whether 16, 18, or whatever their ages might be is reprehensible and if done

at taxpayers' expense still more reprehensible. I have not seen the dirty-emails but I am told that some are as dirty as Bill Clinton's phone

sex, which, come to think of it, is another sex scandal that our Democratic friends patiently indulged. Yet if an election on national

defense in time of war, homeland security, the prosecution of terrorists, and a healthy economy is to turn on the Republican leadership's

treating Foley the way the Democratic leadership treated Studds and Frank, I think we are all being a bit frivolous.

Conventional wisdom in a situation like that predicts a backlash, as indeed Gingrich did, as voters rise up in fury and chop off a whole

political class at the knees. One such backlash happened in 1994, when Gingrich engineered the Republican takeover of the House of

Representatives. But the most portentous backlash in recent political history took place in 1978 in California, when the voters, led by the

marvelously irritating Howard Jarvis and his co-sponsor Paul Gann, passed Proposition 13 to limit property taxes and tax increases. A wave of

such initiatives followed, setting the stage for the Reagan revolution on taxes.

ONLY PROBLEM IS, POLITICIANS HATE BACKLASHES. And they have done everything in their power to eliminate the possibility. State redistricting

conferences, which ostensibly promote more wins for candidates of the majority party, actually see pols of both sides horse trading as they

draw district lines to assure that no incumbent need ever lose. That's what made Gingrich's revolution so remarkable. Hardly any House seats

ever change hands. And it's world-shaking news when an incumbent Senator loses.

Recent legislation has made political insurgency even harder. The McCain-Feingold law actually put the First Amendment into play -- just

another loophole, as George Will trenchantly put it. And now Republicans have begun to play the same game by limiting contributions to 527s.

Most of all, politicians hate initiatives. They will look for any way around them. If they can't get an irksome initiative struck down by the

courts, as often happens in California and Arizona, they'll simply ignore the law, the way they do in Massachusetts. Those examples I cited

involve, interestingly, immigration-related laws: Benefits for immigrants in California, an English requirement in Arizona, and the abolition

of bilingual ed in Massachusetts.

SO GRANT ALL THIS: That elite opinion and mass opinion are completely split on immigration, that a restrictionist-enforcement approach to

immigration, both legal and illegal, enjoys the 80 percent support in the polls that Newt Gingrich cites, that people are angry, and that the

country is arguably in danger, at least culturally, from a flood of immigrants that overwhelms our ability to absorb citizens. How is the

widely predicted and seemingly inevitable backlash going to happen?

There is no national ballot initiative provision. Can enough candidates for Congress arise and run on hawkish immigration platforms to shift

the balance of power? The most likely way for the issue to come to the fore, with an immigration hawk running in a Presidential election (not

just the primaries), portends disaster, if that candidate is a Republican (Tom Tancredo). It would split the Republican vote, Perot-like, and

put a plurality Democrat in office. I can't imagine any Democrat doing it.

Military planners look first to logistics, it is said. You can only do what you can do, or, as Donald Rumsfeld put it, you go to war with the

army you have. With the political forces we have, the immigration battle may not only not be able to be won, it may not be possible even to

fight it.