Miranda's plight: a GOP operative fights on.

• Author: Sinderbrand, Rebecca
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

Manuel Miranda is a charming, avuncular GOP operative in his mid-forties who is known in Republican circles as "Manny." In 2004, he enjoyed fifteen minutes of more widespread fame. Miranda, who at the time was the judicial nominations counsel to then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the Senate Judiciary Committee, had downloaded memos detailing the Democratic judicial nomination strategy from an internal committee server and leaked them to conservative groups and the Wall Street Journal. When Miranda's role was discovered, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch called the act "simply unacceptable." In the uproar that followed--dubbed "Memogate" by the Washington press--Miranda was driven from his job in disgrace. The Hill later declared that he "had one foot in the political graveyard."

In some circles, however, Miranda's conduct wasn't exactly a death sentence. In February 2006, David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, spoke of Memogate when he presented Miranda with the organization's Reagan Award, saying, "[Democrats] no doubt thought that it would all end with that, that Manny Miranda would slink off into the darkness and never be heard from again ... But it turns out that he's more than just a principled conservative: he's a man who doesn't know the meaning of surrender." Miranda's reputation for ruthless tactics and political skill, not to mention his formidable network of conservative contacts, ensured that his calls would still be returned. In the days after the Republican defeat in the midterm election last November, Miranda again picked up the phone. He had a big idea.

Miranda had observed the Republican meltdown over immigration from afar during the midterm campaign, and thought he'd figured out a way to get the party out of its bind. His answer was to forge a grand coalition on the issue by bringing religious conservatives--who had withheld their considerable clout from the debate in 2006--into the fold.

That's not such a simple proposition. According to a Pew poll last year, close to two-thirds of evangelicals believe illegal immigrants represent a threat to American culture. On the other hand, a sizable minority of evangelicals believe their faith compels them to help immigrants in need. So Miranda, the deeply observant Catholic son of Cuban immigrants, came up with a compromise: a one-off amnesty for the undocumented relatives of U.S. citizens, in exchange for a permanent change to the Fourteenth Amendment that...