Every time Hillary Clinton opens her mouth, it seems, it’s to flip on one of her previous political positions.
This week, in her first televised interview since announcing her presidential candidacy, Clinton took the opportunity to denounce the entire GOP field — Jeb Bush and Donald Trump, in particular — on immigration.
“They don’t want to provide a path to citizenship,” she complained. “They range across a spectrum of being either grudgingly welcome or hostile towards immigrants.”
Of course, that’s a radical distortion of the Republicans’ views. With few exceptions, her GOP rivals make a strong distinction between legal and illegal immigration.
But the slur isn’t new for Clinton. Back in May, she suggested that when Republicans “talk about ‘legal status,’ that is code for second-class citizenship.”
But the big problem is that Hillary was singing a far different tune as recently as 2003 — sounding for all the world like Sen. Ted Cruz, probably the toughest immigration hawk among the GOP candidates.
“I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants,” the then-New York senator said on the John Gambling show, adding: “We’ve got to do more at our borders. And people have to stop employing illegal immigrants.”
Then she challenged anyone who felt differently to “come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand in the street corners in Brooklyn or The Bronx — you’re going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.”
Jobs, she plainly implied, that should be filled by everyday, legal Americans.
Of course, that was before Hillary began “evolving” on issues from same-sex marriage to being tough on crime to a nuclear deal for Iran.
The question isn’t whether she believed what she said before, or even whether she believes what she’s saying now. It’s whether she really believes anything at all.