Obama's Dangerous Move

Amberchgo

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From David Gergen and CNN no less...


CNN) -- There is something deeply troubling about President Obama's decision to grant legal safe haven to unauthorized immigrants by executive order.

It isn't the underlying policy that is troubling. Just the opposite. We have known for years that we would never deport some 11 million people from our midst. Many have become hard-working, productive members of our society, and Congress, working with the White House, should long ago have provided them a safe pathway out of the shadows.

In that sense, this policy is good. One wonders indeed why the President, having decided to take the plunge, didn't go further and build a pathway to fuller benefits such as health care for those who establish a solid record of work and good behavior.
David Gergen
David Gergen

Nor is it even the questionable legality that disturbs. On many occasions during our history, presidents have tested the boundaries of their constitutional power through executive orders: Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, his Emancipation Proclamation, Franklin D. Roosevelt's creation of the Works Progress Administration, FDR's awful internment of Japanese-Americans, and Harry Truman's integration of the armed forces were all accomplished through controversial executive orders.

During the 19th century, conventional wisdom held that presidents had only as much authority as the constitution explicitly granted; Teddy Roosevelt famously flipped that proposition on its head -- unless the Constitution explicitly forbids, he argued, the president has implied authority to act, especially as commander-in-chief. Many of his successors have agreed and usually the courts have gone along with them.

Even so, President Obama's executive order on immigration seems to move us into uncharted, dangerous waters. It is one thing for a president like Lincoln or FDR to act unilaterally in national emergencies. In nearly all the big examples of the past -- like the Emancipation Proclamation -- they were also acting as commander-in-chief. As the one foremost responsible for protecting the nation's existence, a president as commander-in-chief has long been recognized as having inherent powers that stretch well beyond those of normal governance.

Not an emergency

But the challenges of immigration policy do not represent a national emergency, nor do they touch upon the military authorities of a president. Rather, they represent the chronic, abysmal failures of politicians in Washington to govern well from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. They helped create this immigration mess over a long number of years and working together, they have a public duty to solve it.
GOP governors hedge on immigration reform
Should these parents be deported?

The White House has repeatedly pointed to immigration-related executive orders issued by past presidents, notably Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, to support the legality of President Obama's order and to palliate its partisan sting.

Both the executive orders cited, however, can be distinguished from the case at hand. Reagan granted amnesty to 100,000 undocumented immigrants to close a loophole in the comprehensive immigration reform bill passed in 1986.

Bush's order, which granted amnesty to at most 1.5 million people (although the actual number who benefited is likely much smaller), also attempted to clean up a piece of legislation. As Mark Krikorian writes in National Review, the Reagan and Bush examples were presidents trying to implement congressional directives, as is constitutionally permissible, whereas the current action is the President telling Congress "I'm going to implement my own directives."

While the President's impatience is understandable and his anger at Republican intransigence is well placed, that does not justify an abandonment of traditional ways of addressing hard public problems.

Against the spirit of the Constitution

One can argue whether this executive order is legal, but it certainly violates the spirit of the founders. They intentionally focused Article One of the Constitution on the Congress and Article Two on the president. That is because the Congress is the body charged with passing laws and the president is the person charged with faithfully carrying them out.

In effect, the Congress was originally seen as the pre-eminent branch and the president more of a clerk. The president's power grew enormously in the 20th century but even so, the Constitution still envisions Congress and the president as co-equal branches of government -- or as the scholar Richard Neustadt observed, co-equal branches sharing power.

For better or worse, Americans have always expected that in addressing big, tough domestic issues, Congress and the president had to work together to find resolution.

For a president to toss aside such deep traditions of governance is a radical, imprudent step. When a president in day-to-day operations can decide which laws to enforce and which to ignore, where are the limits on his power? Where are the checks and balances so carefully constructed in the Constitution?

If a Democratic president can cancel existing laws on immigration, what is to prevent the next Republican from unilaterally canceling laws on health care?

A bad way to start with new Congress

Coming on the heels of midterm elections that were a clear call for a change of course in Washington, starting in the White House, this is also a discouraging way to open the final years of this presidency. A new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll finds that by 53-40%, Americans feel positive about the election results; by 56-33%, they want Congress to set policy for the country, not the President; by 57-40% they favor a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants but by 42-32%, they disapprove of Obama overhauling immigration through executive order. Why isn't the White House listening to the public?

In retrospect, it would have been far better if coming out of the elections, the President had said he had promised he would act through executive order before the end of the year, but in light of the election results, he would work with the new Congress for six months. If there were no legislation, he would act on his own.

That would have been a much fairer proposition, would have started out with Republicans on better footing, and would have rallied the public behind him if the GOP refused to cooperate.

Sadly, we instead have an action from the White House that will cast a dark shadow over prospects for legislative cooperation, falls short of what the immigrant population had hoped and steers us into deep, unknown waters in our governance.


http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/20/opinion/gergen-obamas-dangerous-move/index.html
 
This is what it's really all about:

Thursday, Nov 20, 2014 04:09 PM EST

Tom Coburn’s lunacy and the real meaning of the immigration fight

The GOPer's prediction of doom may sound silly, but he's speaking to what really motivates the anti-immigrant right

Elias Isquith


At around 8 o’clock on Thursday night, President Barack Obama will formally announce his intention to alter U.S. immigration policy through a series of executive orders. According to multiple reports, the president’s directives will protect as many as 4 million undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation. After failing to pass immigration reform in 2009 and 2010, when Democrats had large majorities in the Senate and the House, the executive orders will be the closest Obama gets to fulfilling a broken promise — and make up for his administration having spent much of the past six years deporting people at a brisk pace.


While Obama has once again flip-flopped on the constitutionality of using executive orders in this regard, he’s been consistent in saying that he’d prefer to achieve reform through legislation, which has a political legitimacy and permanence that executive orders lack. But because Speaker Boehner has precious little control over his own caucus, and because a critical group of nativist House Republicans sees anything short of deportation as amnesty, the comprehensive bill passed by the Senate in 2013 has not (and will not) come up for a vote. Since the proposed moves are definitely legal, this obstruction from the House has left Obama with little choice.

That’s just some of the context you need to understand what’s happening right now and to cut through the blizzard of hyperbole — Lawlessness! Caesarism! Tyranny! — being unleashed by Republicans. As Brian Beutler lays out here, those accusations are exaggerated. And I suspect some GOPers who secretly agree with Obama’s goals are screaming to the heavens to compensate. Not all of them are insincere, however, and one in particular, from Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn (a.k.a., Obama’s best bipartisan friend) is especially noteworthy for both its honesty and its hysteria. What he says is crazy, of course; but it provides a better understanding of why conservatives are so angry than all this nonsense about Obama pining for a throne.

So what did Coburn say? When asked to respond to the executive orders news, he first answered by reciting the GOP’s talking points on the issue and how it shows Obama wants to govern without congressional constraint: “The country’s going to go nuts,” he predicted, “because they’re going to see it as a move outside the authority of the president and it’s going to be a very serious situation.” These warnings were pretty vague (a “very serious situation,” after all, could mean any number of things) but Coburn’s next comment didn’t need interpreting. “You’re going to see — hopefully not — but you could see instances of anarchy … You could see violence.”

Outside of the far-right bubble, the idea that a few reversible executive orders about deportations threaten civilization itself sounds, well, insane. It’s admittedly quite possible that some unhinged racist will use Obama’s move as an pretext to externally manifest their own spiritual corrosion. Anarchy, on the other hand, isn’t something that happens on an individual level. In American politics, it’s a word that tends to be used to describe nightmare scenarios, like Libya after Gadhafi or New Orleans after Katrina — not merely one or two or three xenophobic days of rage and protests. Coburn’s language was apocalyptic, in other words, and indicative of how the most die-hard opponents of reform see themselves as locked in a struggle with existential stakes.

Coburn’s statement raised a few eyebrows, but for a couple of reasons — the GOP’s superior message discipline, the fear of sounding partisan, the reluctance to view politics through a zero-sum lens, etc. — the media has mostly bought Republicans’ framing, that this was about executive overreach. That’s a shame, because it means many Americans who aren’t part of the anti-immigrant right won’t understand its motivations, which don’t have much to do with the separation of powers but have everything to do with the “culture” and “identity” of the United States. A debate about who we are lets every American have her say; a debate about constitutionalism renders the conversation accessible mostly to the elite.

If we were to strip the euphemism and minutiae from the conversation, here’s what it would look like: Instead of engaging in academic discussions of “norms” or wasting time with tit-for-tat examples of partisan hypocrisy, we’d listen to Coburn. Not because his premonitions of disaster are serious and in themselves worthy of attention, but because they’re so clearly in-tune with the rhetoric about immigration that actually exists within the GOP base. If you talk to Tea Party people about immigration, as Harvard’s Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson did in a definitive study of the movement, you won’t hear about the imperial presidency or prosecutorial discretion. You’ll hear about liberals bringing good-for-nothing immigrants into the country so they can make them citizens, have them vote for Democrats and establish a new America where the government exists to redistribute from those who “make” to those who “take.”

Put differently, an honest estimation of the anti-reform bloc’s views here would spend a lot more time looking to Pat Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” and many other anti-immigration tracts, than James Madison. And it would devote more energy to teasing out the links between Mitt Romney, who blamed his 2012 loss on Obama’s willingness to dole out “gifts,” and Michele Bachmann, who described the president’s executive orders as an attempt to make “illiterate” immigrants the “new voters” for the Democrats in 2016. That’s where you have to look to understand immigration politics; forget about checks and balances and start listening to conservatives when they say they’re fighting to “take our country back.”
 
From David Gergen and CNN no less...


th at would have been a much fairer proposition, would have started out with Republicans on better footing, and would have rallied the public behind him if the GOP refused to cooperate.

Sadly, we instead have an action from the White House that will cast a dark shadow over prospects for legislative cooperation, falls short of what the immigrant population had hoped and steers us into deep, unknown waters in our governance.


http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/20/opinion/gergen-obamas-dangerous-move/index.html

If? Seriously?

The gop have no answers, and those I wanna think for myselfers don't require them to give any. All they have is Obama = Bad.

The fact that you people constantly fall for this is really remarkable. WTF is wrong with you?
:rolleyes::rolleyes:
 
Hopefully this action will backfire on the Democrat Party. I say do nothing now. Wait until next year, let Obama and the Democrats own the chaos and invasion that will follow.

So you'll continue the 6 years then. Got it. Sounds about right.
 
The more Obama pisses off the retard right, the more respect i have for the man.

Good for him, R's didn't budge for him since he took office. Time to shove their noses in their collective shit.:D
 
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