Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan’s piece on GOP donors who support immigration reform calls such donors “political pragmatists” and claims that the donors are “trying to move the party forward — and more toward the ideological center.” Douthat contrasts the article with others on GOP donors:
It’s absurdly credulous about how the rich and powerful inside the G.O.P. tent are supporting comprehensive immigration reform for purely selfless reasons, because it’s the only way to save the party from the yahoos, and displays little of the “follow the money” skepticism that you would normally expect from the press when there’s a united corporate front on one side of a given debate.
This isn’t to say that what I’ve termed the “donorist” perspective on the Republican Party’s situation is actually purely cynical, or deserves to be covered that way. The pro-business, pro-immigration socially liberal perspective of the party’s elite donors is as sincerely held as any other perspective in our politics. But as is so often the case with people who spend heavily on elections, whether they’re Wall Street conservatives or Hollywood liberals, that worldview does happen to coincide pretty neatly with the economic interests of the people who hold it. And the fact that many journalists are more sympathetic to immigration reform than they are to other causes back by the Kochs and Adelsons of the world is not a good reason to write about the immigration debate as though those interests don’t exist.
Jane Mayer, on the other hand, follows the money when looking at how the Koch brothers have worked to prevent congressional action on climate change:
Climate-change policy directly affects Koch Industries’s bottom line. Koch Industries, according to Environmental Protection Agency statistics cited in the study, is a major source of carbon-dioxide emissions, the kind of pollution that most scientists believe causes global warming. In 2011, according to the E.P.A.’s greenhouse-gas-reporting database, the company, which has oil refineries in three states, emitted over twenty-four million tons of carbon dioxide, as much as is typically emitted by five million cars.
The Dish 