-Obama accused of creating ‘constitutional crisis’
-Schlafly: Obama’s amnesty plan ‘suicide for America’
-Obama Declares an Amnesty War
Nov 16, 2014 By JONATHAN J. COOPER and NICHOLAS RICCARDI
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The fate of a little-noticed ballot measure in strongly Democratic Oregon serves as a warning to President Barack Obama and his party about the political perils of immigration policy.
Even as Oregon voters were legalizing recreational marijuana and expanding Democratic majorities in state government, they decided by a margin of 66-34 to cancel a new state law that would have provided driver’s licenses to people who are in the United States illegally.
Obama is considering acting on his own, as early as this week, to possibly shield from deportation up to 5 million immigrants now living illegally in the country. Some Republicans in Congress are threatening a government shutdown if the president follows through.
“The Oregon measure tells you these measures are not easy or simple,” said Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute. “The political cost may be significant, even in blue states.”
The state law had seemed to be popular. It easily passed last year with bipartisan support in the Democratic-controlled Legislature and was signed Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber, who was re-elected Nov. 4.
Opponents barely gathered enough signatures to put the repeal question on the ballot. Immigrant rights groups outspent their opponents 10-1.
Still, the measure failed in every county but the state’s most liberal one, Multnomah, home to Portland. Even there it trailed significantly behind other Democratic candidates and causes.
“It was really the epitome of a grassroots effort,” said Cynthia Kendoll, one of the activists who led the campaign against licenses. “There’s such a disconnect between what people really want and what’s happening.”
Obama made his postelection pledge on immigration despite the drubbing that Democrats took across the country. He said he had to act because Congress has deadlocked on immigration for years.
A bipartisan Senate bill to provide citizenship to many of the 11 million people in the U.S. illegally died in the Republican-controlled House, and with the GOP now holding a majority in the Senate, many believe it is unlikely any broad immigration measure could make it to Obama before the end of his term.
Allowing immigrants in the U.S. illegally to remain in the country generally polls well. Even 57 percent of the conservative-leaning national electorate that voted Nov. 4 favors legalization, according to exit polling for the Associated Press and other news organizations.
Immigration has been seen as a winning issue for Democrats because Hispanic and Asian populations account for an increasing share of the electorate, especially in presidential years.
Eleven other states have granted driver’s licenses to people in the U.S. illegally, and 17 allow them to pay in-state tuition at public universities.
But Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., which advocates more restrictions on immigration, says voters often are befuddled by complex immigration proposals and polling questions, overstating the actual support for an immigration overhaul.
The Oregon vote, he said, is proof of that.
“Whenever the public gets that sort of clear-cut, black-and-white issue for tougher controls — even in Oregon, when they’re legalizing dope — they support them,” Krikorian said. “It really highlights how this issue is not a Republican-liberal issue like, say, taxes and abortion, but an up-down issue, elites versus the public.”
Greg Olson, a lifelong Portland resident and conservative, was pleasantly surprised the driver’s license law was repealed by such a large margin in his liberal state. “Licensing for driving I think is a privilege for a legal citizen,” Olson said.
Oregon immigrant rights groups argue that the issue wasn’t as clear as opponents are suggesting after the fact. The state has a relatively small immigrant community — only 12 percent of the population is Hispanic and 3 percent Asian, below the national average for both ethnic groups.
Because relatively little money was spent on the campaign, voters did not know why they should preserve the licenses, said Andrea Miller, director of the Oregon immigrant-rights group Causa.
“This was a very nuanced, very complex measure,” Miller said. “Just because someone voted no doesn’t mean they don’t accept the immigrant community. It doesn’t mean that they don’t want immigration reform. It means they don’t want that particular solution for Oregon.”
Marshall Fitz of the Center for American Progress in Washington, which has argued that Obama should act, acknowledged that the first response of many voters may be unfavorable to immigrant rights groups’ cause.
“Is there an instinct toward security, hunkering down and against welcoming the other?” Fitz said. “That’s part of human nature. But that doesn’t mean instincts can’t be overcome by reason.”
_
Online:
Oregon election results: http://oregonvotes.gov/results/2014G/1415319963.html
http://news.yahoo.com/oregon-immigration-vote-warning-obama-132923803.html
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Obama accused of creating ‘constitutional crisis’
CIS chief: Unilateral amnesty would violate ‘separation of powers’
November 16,2014 By Paul Bremmer
If President Obama goes ahead with his plan to unilaterally implement immigration reform, it will violate one of the foundations of the U.S. Constitution, according to an immigration-policy expert.
“In effect, he is making law, which is a fundamental violation of the separation of powers. He’s supposed to enforce the law; Congress is supposed to make the law,” said Steven Camarota. “He is, by design, creating a constitutional crisis.”
Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, believes the constitutional conflict is the most troublesome aspect of Obama’s planned executive amnesty. However, a unilateral amnesty would damage the United States in other ways as well, he said.
Take, for example, the plight of America’s less-educated, low-skilled population. The labor market is unkind to them as it is. According to Camarota, only about half of all young people with a high-school diploma or less have a job. And for those who do, their real wages have been declining for decades.
Now the president is planning to grant work permits to millions of illegal aliens, many of whom are unskilled.
“So it would be very good if we could enforce the law and send some fraction of illegal immigrants home, because that’s who they compete with – the least educated Americans,” Camarota said.
Some people may say Obama’s amnesty will not make much difference, because many illegal aliens are already working in low-skilled jobs. Plenty of employers, especially in agriculture, hire laborers without inquiring about their legal status.
But that’s not the case in all low-skilled professions, according to Camarota. He pointed to the low-level security guard profession, which is a low-paying job for low-skilled workers.
“That’s a job where they generally vet the applicant, so that illegal immigrants right now can’t take them,” Camarota said. “Once Obama moves ahead with his amnesty and work permits, now all those people, hundreds of thousands of security guards in the United States, will face direct competition with illegal immigrants.”
Some believe the move would add to the offenses that could be cited in an impeachment trial against Obama. New York Times bestselling authors Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott wrote “Impeachable Offenses” to make the case. The authors show how Obama fundamentally has abused the powers of his presidency and has done serious, sustained and impeachable injury to the nations.
Camarota said the president’s new executive amnesty will also likely wreak fiscal havoc. Because so many of the newly authorized immigrants will be poor, they will qualify for a whole host of welfare benefits. Camarota singled out the earned income tax credit as perhaps the biggest additional expense to American taxpayers. He estimated that half of the amnestied immigrants will qualify for the EITC.
“Technically, illegal aliens aren’t able to get it, though some still do,” he said. “But now that they’ll have Social Security numbers, they’ll be able, given their low income, reflecting their generally lower education levels, will be able to apply for that benefit, and that’s going to cost taxpayers millions of dollars.”
The president’s plan may imperil public safety as well. Camarota said Obama is planning to gut Secure Communities, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that identifies convicted criminals who are in the U.S. illegally and initiates deportation proceedings against them. Only extremist immigration advocates object to the program, according to Camarota.
“It’s just common sense,” he said. “Anyone who objects to that program simply doesn’t believe in the rule of law, doesn’t believe in our borders.”
Camarota said immigration activists don’t like Secure Communities because some illegal aliens who get caught up in the program haven’t committed terribly serious crimes.
“From the point of view of immigration activists, if you’re drunken driving, or if you bounce checks and have identity theft, you shouldn’t have to go back to your home country,” he said. “Of course, if you haven’t done those things, then you should never go back, because our laws don’t matter to them.”
And yet, Obama is planning to scale back the number of criminal alien deportations, according to the research director.
Finally, Camarota said an executive amnesty is likely to encourage even more illegal aliens to come to the U.S. He blamed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Obama’s 2012 executive memorandum that deferred deportations for illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, for causing this year’s massive surge in unaccompanied minors from Central America. He thinks another executive amnesty would lead to yet another border surge.
“This new amnesty is likely, over time, to stimulate even more illegal immigration as new people come and hope that they will qualify either for this amnesty or the next one, because we’ve already shown with this kind of amnesty that we’re not very serious about enforcing our laws,” Camarota said. “Why not come to America illegally if that’s something you want to do?”
http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/obama-accused-of-creating-constitutional-crisis/
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Schlafly: Obama’s amnesty plan ‘suicide for America’
President is ‘trying to transform our country into something like 3rd-world countries’
Nov 16, 2014 By Paul Bremmer
Phyllis Schlafly has been involved in, worked on, and an observer of elections since 1946, and she believes they have meaning.
Barack Obama agreed at one point, saying after his first election that elections have “consequences.”
But now, even though voters uniformly across the nation rejected the Obama administration agenda, he is promising to overhaul the nation’s immigration system by executive order if Congress doesn’t give him what he wants.
And that, Schlafly says, is national suicide.
Fox News reported Thursday that Obama is planning to announce a 10-part plan for changing the nation’s immigration procedures as early as next Friday.
The plan apparently includes a deportation reprieve, known as “deferred action,” for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, as well as for the parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. Those provisions could give nearly 5 million illegal immigrants who are already in the U.S. the right to stay and work, according to Fox News.
Never one to sugarcoat the dangers, Schlafly said she sees problems.
“If he goes ahead with his plans, I think it’s suicide for America, because he would be bringing in people who will vote Democratic. That’s his plan,” Schlafly said. “And bringing people the American people do not want, and he’s already bringing in all kinds of diseases.”
Schlafly doesn’t think the United States would survive in its current form under a massive grant of amnesty. She even agreed the collapse may happen by 2025, as conservative author Patrick Buchanan suggested in the title of his 2011 book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”
“[Obama] is trying to fundamentally transform our country into something like the Third-World countries, because he thinks it’s just really unfair that we’re better, richer, freer and more prosperous, and he’d like to bring us down to the level of other countries,” Schlafly said.
The longtime conservative activist said she expects another border surge, like the one this past summer, once word of Obama’s “deferred action” plan spreads throughout Central America. She also thinks amnesty by executive action rises to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor.
“I think it’s worth impeachment, but I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Schlafly said.
She explained, “The Constitution gives the power over immigration, coming into this country, to Congress, not to the president.”
Schlafly has a simple solution for how congressional Republicans can stop Obama from carrying out his plan.
“I think they should cut off all the money, wherever he’s getting money to handle it,” she said. “Any way they can cut off his money would be a proper response.”
In a Monday op-ed in Politico, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., called on his fellow senators and congressmen to do just that.
“It cannot be implemented if Congress simply includes routine language on any government funding bill prohibiting the expenditure of funds for this unlawful purpose,” Sessions wrote.
Schlafly has been a national leader in the conservative movement since publication of her 1964 bestseller, “A Choice Not An Echo,” and many credit her for the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Now, after having spent much of the last 50 years speaking out against forces she believes are tearing the American social fabric apart, she’s becoming a leader in the battle against illegal immigration.
Even at the age of 90, she’s still not done; her latest book “Who Killed the American Family?” was released in early September 2014 by WND Books.
In it, she finds the American family under attack from a range of forces, including feminists, judges, lawmakers, psychologists, universities, the media and illegal immigration.
She sees Obama and other Democratic Party leaders as complicit in the importation of people who don’t share the American value of self-reliance.
“The Democrats know perfectly well that the people coming in are people who are not accustomed to our ideas of self-government and limited government, and they expect government to take care of them, and that’s what we’re doing,” Schlafly said in an interview.
Schlafly said she favors tighter border security, tougher sanctions against employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants and increased deportations of illegal aliens already in the country. She also doesn’t buy the notion that the U.S. needs to import foreigners to fill certain high-skilled jobs.
“Every time I hear this expression that we need to bring in these foreigners who are ‘the best and the brightest,’ I get mad,” she said. “I have four sons who have degrees in electrical engineering and two grandchildren who do, and I think they’re the best and the brightest. And the idea that people we can bring in from other countries are better is just nonsense.”
Nor does Schlafly believe the U.S. should import foreigners to take lower-skilled jobs.
“We’ve got plenty of people who need entry-level jobs, and … even legal immigration is very unfair to our poor people in this country who are American citizens,” she said.
http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/obamas-amnesty-plan-called-suicide-for-america/
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Obama Declares an Amnesty War
November 16, 2014 By Alan Caruba
The same mindset that could conspire to foist ObamaCare on Americans by deception is at work to do the same thing with an unconstitutional, unilateral announcement of amnesty for millions of illegal—oops, “undocumented”—aliens living in America.
What is amazing about this is that it was announced the day after the midterm election when Obama and the Democratic Party had suffered a huge rejection. I suppose when you believe, as Obama apparently does, that he is right when everyone else is telling him he’s wrong, moving ahead on amnesty now rather than waiting to work on legislation with the new Congress makes sense to him.
Only it does not make sense. Causing a constitutional crisis never makes sense.
At this point I think it is useless to try to get inside Obama’s mind regarding his actions. It’s like trying to understand the logic of a six-year-old. He does what he wants to do simply because he wants to do it. He ignores reality if it disagrees with his opinion about anything.
We all have two more years of this arrogance.
The voters have spoken and rather dramatically. As we get closer to Obama’s executive order it’s good to see that Republican leaders are sounding more combative.
What exactly can or will the presumptive Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, do? What will John Boehner, House Majority Leader, do? They have, in fact, relatively few options. They dare not and do not want to shut down the government. They will not impeach Obama. They can, we’re told, defund aspects of an amnesty executive order. Ultimately, they are likely to fall back on a law suit against the White House based on the constitutional division of powers.
The midterrm elections showed us that the lies the Democrats told failed.
The effort to paint the Republican Party as obstructionists failed. The real obstructionist was and is Harry Reid who blocked more than three hundred bi-partisan and Republican pieces of House legislation from being debated or voted upon in the Senate. Neither he, nor any other Majority Leader should have that much power. The Senate needs its role for debate restored.
The claim that the Republican Party was waging “a war on women” or was racist was absurd. The midterms saw any number of Republican women elected to office and African-American GOP candidates made history when they won. It’s no longer the Party of “old white men”, but a largely white component of all ages voted heavily in the midterms for those younger, diverse winners.
The Republican Party could not be in a stronger, better position than currently. Rarely mentioned is that what put them there is the Tea Party movement; a number of Congressional members elected by the movement are driving the response to Obama’s amnesty idiocy.
Constitutional crisis
Six members, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and David Vitter (R-Louisiana) made it clear to Sen. Reid that “This will create a constitutional crisis that demands action by Congress to restore the separation of powers.” The only thing Republican Senators are amenable to at this point is strengthening border security. They will not put forth any immigration legislation until after they take power in the Senate in January.
So, naturally, Obama wants them to do something now.
Only an idiot would say, as he did, that he “heard” what the voters said and then add he also heard what those “who did not vote” had to say. The only thing that matters in an election is who got elected and why. Hearing what voters who stayed home had to say is delusional.
Voters were so angered by the sheer incompetence of Obama and Sen. Harry Reid’s gridlock in Congress that they voted in a whole batch of new Senators and House members. Those they chose were predominantly conservative Republicans and that tells you a lot about the next two years until Obama is gone.
Obama has never liked Congress. He seems to resent having to share governing power with it. He about to launch an amnesty war as a way of acting out his resentment.
At this point, the Republicans in Congress know who they are dealing with and are in no mood for a compromise, nor expect one. Remember, though, it is the Republicans who are the grownups and what we are likely to see in the months ahead will be a number of reform measures and amnesty will be among them. Obama will be blocked on any number of other efforts that will harm the nation and the world.
After we celebrate New Year’s day the presidential campaigns will begin in earnest. The first straw vote in Ames, Iowa will take place in nine months!
Let Barack Obama have his amnesty war.
There is no lamer duck than the President. Whenever he speaks these days all you can hear is quack, quack, quack.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/67594
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Related previous post on this blog
http://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/pro-amnesty-mx-billionaire-carlos-slim-nyt-on-exec-amnesty-sooner-bigger-the-better-burden-on-states-more-invited/
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