The Obama administration’s policy on Egypt has now gotten to where it perhaps should have been a week ago — pushing for Mubarak to go and for talks to commence on reforming the constitution to create a “real democracy.” The New York Times reports:

The Obama administration is discussing with Egyptian officials a proposal for President Hosni Mubarak to resign immediately and turn over power to a transitional government headed by Vice President Omar Suleiman with the support of the Egyptian military, administration officials and Arab diplomats said Thursday.

Once the government initiated violence against the protesters, the Mubarak regime made it impossible for the US and others to remain neutral in their public pronouncements. This was also entirely predictable — the only way to really put down a protest movement as robust as this is through a significant crackdown. American leverage no doubt constrained Mubarak’s ability to usher a more formal crackdown, ala Iran’s on the Green Movement. So instead, in a fairly desperate act, Mubarak tried to mask the crackdown as organic counter-revolutionary protests. That didn’t fool anyone, and as Middle East expert Marc Lynch wrote yesterday:

By unleashing violence and refusing the demand for an immediate, meaningful transition, Mubarak has now violated two clear red lines laid down by the President. There must be consequences. It’s time to meet escalation with escalation and lay out, in private and public, that the Egyptian military now faces a clear and painful choice: push Mubarak out now and begin a meaningful transition, or else face international isolation and a major rupture with the United States.

Indeed, a bipartisan working group of outside experts came to that conclusion as well, in a statement released yesterday:

If the government continues to employ such violence, the United States should immediately freeze all military assistance to Egypt.

Clearly, Mubarak’s departure has become non-negotiable for the protesters. Some have questioned the protesters staying power, but all evidence points to the contrary. We are now in the second week of the protests and they have seemingly gotten stronger. Impressively, the massive rallies today came on the heels of intense violence, which one could expect would serve to deter further protesters. Many protesters now believe that there is no turning back — that either Mubarak goes, or they themselves will end up in prison. There is therefore every reason to believe that as long as Mubarak stays, this will go on.

While Mubarak may stubbornly attempt to hang on, there is also little doubt that the rest of his regime is very nervous about his departure. Unlike Mubarak, who can leave the country and retire in a nice villa, most of the regime will be left behind and fear a loss of institutional privilege and potentially outright persecution.

This is where the US can seem to play a role in trying to calm these fears by urging and facilitating negotiations that lead to a classic “pacted transition” to democracy that gives the regime a clear role in shaping the new constitutional structure. The existing regime could demand, for instance, immunity from prosecution for past acts in government (this was critical in Argentina for example, where the outgoing military junta was worried it would be prosecuted later for the thousands of “disappeared” persons). They could insist on constitutional provisions that prevent any possible Islamification of the state (akin to the framework in Turkey), and finally, they would have a say in shaping the make up of the new political system.

But the problem now is that to get to this stage, Mubarak simply has to go.

Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) has announced that he is planning to introduce a national version of Arizona’s immigration law, SB-1070. According to Royce, his legislation would give state-level cops and local law enforcement nationwide the authority to enforce federal immigration laws. In an interview with Fox News this morning, Royce laid out his plans:

FOX NEWS: Number one, you want to give local police — including state troopers at the state level — the authority to enforce immigration laws. Which is identical to Arizona, right?

ROYCE: It’s a force multiplier. We’re basically giving them the option, if you’re in local law enforcement to assist. [...] We need a force multiplier for the border patrol. [...]

FOX NEWS: Even with a Republican majority in the House can this pass, do you have enough support for this?

ROYCE: We have enough support for this in the House to pass this legislation, but then we’ll be up against the Senate. And in the Senate it’s going to depend upon how much pressure certain senators feel from the American public.

Watch it:

It’s worth noting that if the language of Royce’s bill mirrors his description of it, it’s still not exactly a duplication of Arizona’s law. SB-1070 doesn’t give police officers the option to enforce federal immigration laws, it requires them to.

However, Royce’s proposal is troubling for other reasons. In 1996 the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) determined that, under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), local police officers can only enforce the Act’s criminal provisions (entering the country illegally) and do not have the authority to arrest immigrants for simply being illegally present in the country. However, in 2005, a controversial legal opinion issued by Jay S. Bybee of the OLC was released that deemed the OLC’s 1996 opinion “mistaken.” “We further assume that States have conferred on state police the necessary state-law authority to to make arrest for violation of the federal immigration laws,” wrote Bybee. The 1996 decision — which some argue was actually written by SB-1070 architect Kris Kobach, who was employed by Bybee at the time — has been slammed on various accounts as based on a selective and misconstrued reading of case law.

Congress has the power to regulate immigration, so Royce’s bill could essentially make the OLC decision the law of the land. In arguing against Bybee’s memo, the Migration Policy Center cited several of the decision’s potential negative effects, including, “the potential damage to police-community relations; the diversion of resources from the prevention and punishment of crimes that may be of greater concern to the residents of particular cities and states; the potential for conscious or unconscious racial profiling; the costs to law enforcement of being compelled to release wrongfully arrested individuals; and the distraction of attention from security-related reforms of the INS at a time when that agency is facing radical restructuring.” Since a congressional action would carry even more weight, these effects would likely be amplified.

Ultimately, it’s extremely unlikely Royce’ bill will get past the Senate and even less likely that the current president will sign off on it. But it will continue to distract Congress from working on legislative solutions to the nation’s broken immigration system.

Voicing the fear of political Islam currently gripping much of the American commentariat, Charles Krauthammer writes that the U.S.’s “paramount moral and strategic interest in Egypt is real democracy in which power does not devolve to those who believe in one man, one vote, one time”:

That would be Egypt’s fate should the Muslim Brotherhood prevail. That was the fate of Gaza, now under the brutal thumb of Hamas, a Palestinian wing (see Article 2 of Hamas’s founding covenant) of the Muslim Brotherhood.

We are told by sage Western analysts not to worry about the Brotherhood because it probably commands only about 30 percent of the vote. This is reassurance? In a country where the secular democratic opposition is weak and fractured after decades of persecution, any Islamist party commanding a third of the vote rules the country.

I agree that U.S. has an interest in helping the Egyptians create a “real democracy,” which is more than just elections but a working, durable set of institutions and procedures. It seems obvious, however, that stating at the outset of such a process that one of our goals is to prevent a particular disfavored group from winning political power is a great way not to achieve that.

While it’s true that Hamas considers itself the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood (this is how it defined itself in the 1970′s when Israel quietly supported it, in an attempt to draw support away from the secular nationalist Fatah) it’s lazy at this point to simply conflate the two movements, as their separate experiences and evolution over the last three decades have diverged significantly. (Conor Friedersdorf took a deeper look at this yesterday.)

As for whether Gaza today provides a good example of what Egypt would look like under the Muslim Brotherhood, I suppose if the U.S. immediately responded to a Brotherhood electoral victory by refusing to deal with the new government, then supported a failed coup attempt, and then placed the entire country under a blockade while periodically invading and bombing it, then yes, Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood might come to look like Gaza under Hamas.

I think a better example of how the Muslim Brotherhood might govern, as I noted previously, can be found in Iraq, where Sunni and Shia Islamist parties dominate. The new Iraq still has enormous problems, but as far as I can tell, its various Islamist governors and parliamentarians clamoring for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate isn’t one.

In a new Foreign Affairs piece analyzing the evolution of the Brotherhood, Emory University’s Carrie Rosefsky Wickham writes:

Those who emphasize the risk of “Islamic tyranny” aptly note that the Muslim Brotherhood originated as an anti-system group dedicated to the establishment of sharia rule; committed acts of violence against its opponents in the pre-1952 era; and continues to use anti-Western, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic rhetoric. But portraying the Brotherhood as eager and able to seize power and impose its version of sharia on an unwilling citizenry is a caricature that exaggerates certain features of the Brotherhood while ignoring others, and underestimates the extent to which the group has changed over time.

Wickham concludes, “The Brotherhood has demonstrated that it is capable of evolving over time, and the best way to strengthen its democratic commitments is to include it in the political process, making sure there are checks and balances in place to ensure that no group can monopolize state power and that all citizens are guaranteed certain freedoms under the law”:

In the foreign policy domain, the Brotherhood rails against “U.S. and Zionist domination,” demands the recognition of Palestinian rights, and may one day seek to revise the terms of Egypt’s relationship with Israel through constitutional channels. The Brotherhood will likely never be as supportive of U.S. and Israeli interests in the region as Mubarak was. Yet here too, the best way for the United States to minimize the risk associated with the likely increase in its power is to encourage and reward judiciousness and pragmatism. With a track record of nearly 30 years of responsible behavior (if not rhetoric) and a strong base of support, the Muslim Brotherhood has earned a place at the table in the post-Mubarak era. No democratic transition can succeed without it.

We obviously shouldn’t be sanguine about what the Muslim Brotherhood represent. These are not liberals in disguise. They hold a lot of views that I, and I think many Egyptians, find abhorrent. But so does Mike Huckabee. The important thing is having processes in place that encourage moderation and coalition-building, thereby preventing extreme religious conservatives from implementing their crazier ideas. But the bottom line is that a truly democratic Egypt, if and when it arrives, will make choices and include actors that the U.S. doesn’t like. We should start getting used to that idea.