“It Isn’t About The Substance At All”: Why Republicans Are So Mad About Obama’s Immigration Order
President Obama is going to detail some executive actions he plans to take on immigration in a speech tonight, and you may have noticed that the debate over this move is almost completely void of discussion of the particulars. Instead, we’re discussing whether Obama is exceeding his powers. That’s an important question to address, but it also frees Republicans (for the moment anyway) of having to visibly argue for things like deporting the parents of kids who are already allowed to stay in the United States.
One thing you’ll notice as you watch coverage of the issue is that Republicans are seriously pissed off at Obama. And not in the faux outrage, pretend umbrage way—they are genuinely, sincerely angry. And while there may be a few here or there whose blood boils at the thought of an undocumented immigrant parent not living in constant terror of immigration authorities, for the vast majority it isn’t about the substance at all. So what is it about? Here’s my attempt at explaining it.
Obama is not showing sufficient deference to their midterm election win. Republicans just won an election, and like any party that wins an election, they feel that the American people validated all of their positions and everything they’d like to do, and rejected those of Democrats. There are reasonable arguments to be made against this belief. For instance, you could point out that since turnout in this election was an abysmal 36 percent and Republicans got a little over 50 percent of the votes for the House, they actually got a thumbs-up from only 19 percent of the electorate, which isn’t exactly “the American people.” Or you could note that if you add up the votes received by all 100 senators in the new GOP majority, the Democrats actually got 5 million more votes. These things may be true, but they don’t reduce the Republicans’ sincere belief that they have the people behind them. Whether they actually expected Obama to put aside his entire agenda because of the election, the fact that he shows no interest in doing so is obviously maddening to them.
Obama is backing them into a political corner. Republicans would frankly prefer not to have to talk about immigration at all, outside election-year pitches to primary voters about broken borders. Their fundamental dilemma is that on the local level, most of them have constituencies that are deeply hostile to immigrants and opposed to comprehensive reform, yet on the national level, the party must make inroads with Hispanic voters to have hopes of winning the White House. A big confrontation over immigration puts their crazy nativists like Steve King on the news and serves to convince those Hispanic voters that the GOP has nothing but contempt for them and people like them. Those crazy people are convinced that a big part of the motivation for Obama’s move is to create new Democratic voters (which it wouldn’t do), while the more sensible ones worry that it will make their task of winning Hispanic votes even harder (which it will do).
This move also seizes the agenda from them, in a way that divides Republicans against themselves. As Lisa Mascaro and Michael Memoli reported in an excellent article in today’s L.A. Times, “Republican leaders who had hoped to focus on corporate tax reform, fast-track trade pacts, repealing the president’s healthcare law and loosening environmental restrictions on coal are instead being dragged into an immigration skirmish that they’ve tried studiously to avoid for most of the last year.”
The only real way for them to stop him is to shut down the government, and they’re also probably mad that he has forced them into that internal and external debate. Not only are they now arguing amongst themselves about it (again), it means they have to put up with a lot of “Are you going to shut down the government?” questions from reporters, which have as their subtext, “Are you going to prove all over again what a bunch of reckless maniacs you are?” Their attempts to argue that if there’s a shutdown it will be Obama’s fault and not theirs will inevitably be rejected by both the press and the public, leading to even more resentment, since they feel as though they’ll be blamed for something that is his fault.
Aggressive Obama is bad Obama. Let’s face it, many if not most Republicans have never considered Barack Obama a legitimate president. This applies not just to Republican voters—49 percent of whom believed that ACORN stole the 2012 election for him, which would have been particularly difficult for the organization to accomplish given that it ceased to exist in 2010—but to its elected officials as well. Although it has calmed down of late, let’s not forget just how many years Obama spent trying to persuade people that he is, in fact, an American, including producing his birth certificate. Republicans have in the past viewed any Democratic president as having suspect legitimacy, but it’s been worse with Obama than prior presidents.
For that reason, Republicans have found even the most mundane exercise of his presidential power to be deeply disturbing. His bold move of hiring people to work on the White House staff was met with horrified cries that he had created “czars” who were wielding despotic and unaccountable power. When he set rules for federal contractors, as every president does, they were aghast. These kinds of things didn’t bother them when Republican presidents did them not only because they agreed with the substance of whatever those presidents were doing, but also because they regarded those presidents’ power as legitimately held. Over time, the narrative of Obama’s “lawlessness” took hold on the right, and ended up being applied to almost any executive branch action they didn’t like. In this case, he actually is approaching the limits of his authority, which makes it all the worse.
Obama is making them feel impotent. This is where all the other pieces come together. Being in the opposition party can be frustrating, because your role is fundamentally not to do things, but to try to stop the president from doing things. That’s an important task, but it isn’t quite as satisfying as remaking the country to suit your vision. Republicans’ greatest fear about this is that Obama will go ahead and do what he wants and they won’t be able to stop him, even though they worked so hard to gain full control of Congress after six long years. They won the election, his approval ratings are low, they firmly believe they’re right, and yet this president they loathe so much is about to just walk all over them anyway. No wonder they’re mad.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 20, 2014
“When Government Succeeds”: Surrounded By Examples Of Government Success, Which Republicans Don’t Want You To Notice
The great American Ebola freakout of 2014 seems to be over. The disease is still ravaging Africa, and as with any epidemic, there’s always a risk of a renewed outbreak. But there haven’t been any new U.S. cases for a while, and popular anxiety is fading fast.
Before we move on, however, let’s try to learn something from the panic.
When the freakout was at its peak, Ebola wasn’t just a disease — it was a political metaphor. It was, specifically, held up by America’s right wing as a symbol of government failure. The usual suspects claimed that the Obama administration was falling down on the job, but more than that, they insisted that conventional policy was incapable of dealing with the situation. Leading Republicans suggested ignoring everything we know about disease control and resorting to extreme measures like travel bans, while mocking claims that health officials knew what they were doing.
Guess what: Those officials actually did know what they were doing. The real lesson of the Ebola story is that sometimes public policy is succeeding even while partisans are screaming about failure. And it’s not the only recent story along those lines.
Here’s another: Remember Solyndra? It was a renewable-energy firm that borrowed money using Department of Energy guarantees, then went bust, costing the Treasury $528 million. And conservatives have pounded on that loss relentlessly, turning it into a symbol of what they claim is rampant crony capitalism and a huge waste of taxpayer money.
Defenders of the energy program tried in vain to point out that anyone who makes a lot of investments, whether it’s the government or a private venture capitalist, is going to see some of those investments go bad. For example, Warren Buffett is an investing legend, with good reason — but even he has had his share of lemons, like the $873 million loss he announced earlier this year on his investment in a Texas energy company. Yes, that’s half again as big as the federal loss on Solyndra.
The question is not whether the Department of Energy has made some bad loans — if it hasn’t, it’s not taking enough risks. It’s whether it has a pattern of bad loans. And the answer, it turns out, is no. Last week the department revealed that the program that included Solyndra is, in fact, on track to return profits of $5 billion or more.
Then there’s health reform. As usual, much of the national dialogue over the Affordable Care Act is being dominated by fake scandals drummed up by the enemies of reform. But if you look at the actual results so far, they’re remarkably good. The number of Americans without health insurance has dropped sharply, with around 10 million of the previously uninsured now covered; the program’s costs remain below expectations, with average premium rises for next year well below historical rates of increase; and a new Gallup survey finds that the newly insured are very satisfied with their coverage. By any normal standards, this is a dramatic example of policy success, verging on policy triumph.
One last item: Remember all the mockery of Obama administration assertions that budget deficits, which soared during the financial crisis, would come down as the economy recovered? Surely the exploding costs of Obamacare, combined with a stimulus program that would become a perpetual boondoggle, would lead to vast amounts of red ink, right? Well, no — the deficit has indeed come down rapidly, and as a share of G.D.P. it’s back down to pre-crisis levels.
The moral of these stories is not that the government is always right and always succeeds. Of course there are bad decisions and bad programs. But modern American political discourse is dominated by cheap cynicism about public policy, a free-floating contempt for any and all efforts to improve our lives. And this cheap cynicism is completely unjustified. It’s true that government-hating politicians can sometimes turn their predictions of failure into self-fulfilling prophecies, but when leaders want to make government work, they can.
And let’s be clear: The government policies we’re talking about here are hugely important. We need serious public health policy, not fear-mongering, to contain infectious disease. We need government action to promote renewable energy and fight climate change. Government programs are the only realistic answer for tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise be denied essential health care.
Conservatives want you to believe that while the goals of public programs on health, energy and more may be laudable, experience shows that such programs are doomed to failure. Don’t believe them. Yes, sometimes government officials, being human, get things wrong. But we’re actually surrounded by examples of government success, which they don’t want you to notice.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 16, 2014
“Television Media Played Into Republicans’ Hands”: TV News Does A Complete 180 On Ebola Coverage After Midterms
Network news coverage of the Ebola virus abruptly and dramatically fell off following the midterm elections earlier this month, according to a new study by Media Matters.
After reviewing transcripts from Oct. 7 to Nov. 17 in the 5-11 p.m. time slot, Media Matters discovered that evening broadcast and cable news programs aired close to 1,000 segments on Ebola in the four weeks leading up to the elections, and only 49 segments in the two weeks that followed.
“In early October, the GOP developed a plan to make the federal government’s response to Ebola a central part of its midterm elections strategy,” the study reads. “Television media played into Republicans’ hands, helping to foment panic about the disease.”
CNN showed the most significant decrease in Ebola coverage following the midterms, airing 335 segments in the weeks leading up to Election Day and just 10 in the period after. Fox News’ coverage fell from 281 segments to 10, and MSNBC recorded a disparity of 222 segments to 13.
Broadcast networks showed a pronounced dip in their Ebola coverage as well.
“CBS’ 54 segments dropped to six, NBC’s 44 segments dropped to five, and ABC’s 39 segments dropped to four,” according to the study.
But even before the compilation of this data — before the correlation between Ebola and the midterm elections became so clear — the media faced harsh criticism for the fervor and panic with which it reported on a virus that had only infected, at most, a handful of U.S. citizens.
In October, Fox News’ Shepard Smith scolded his colleagues in the press for their “irresponsible” and “hysterical” handling of the story.
USA Today columnist Rem Rieder, notes Media Matters, called the “breathless, alarmist reports” on Ebola “the antithesis of what responsible journalists should be doing,” in a piece published a week prior to the midterms.
And despite all the reports and panels, and the hours upon hours of segments leading up to Election Day, the coverage was still rife with misinformation and largely incomplete. News outlets obsessively scrutinized the handling of few isolated cases of Ebola within the U.S. while all but ignoring the thousands dying from the disease at the source of the outbreak.
“If poor media coverage can create an atmosphere of anxiety and misinformation, then the right kind of coverage can lead to a more active and productive public response,” Jason Linkins wrote for The Huffington Post in October. “To achieve this, the media needs to recognize that the true center of gravity in the Ebola story is the crisis in West Africa.”
By: Jackson Connor, The Huffington Post Blog, November 19, 2014
“Protest 101, A Chance To Change The World Again”: Some Thoughts As We Wait To See Whether Ferguson Burns
Last week, I spent a day at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where some students and I talked about protest. Des Moines is six hours up the road from Ferguson, Missouri, the St. Louis suburb where Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, was shot to death by a police officer in August, prompting weeks of often violent clashes between protesters, rioters and heavily militarized police.
Some of the kids have ties in that area, so they were waiting — even more tensely than the rest of us — to see if a grand jury would indict the officer and whether the failure to do so would mean renewed violence. These were serious-minded young people concerned about the state of their nation and they were wondering what they could do to effect change.
I’ve had similar talks on college campuses going back before most of us ever heard of Ferguson. I’ve lost count of how many students have told me: “I want to change things, but I don’t know how. What can I do?”
It amazes me that half a century ago people their age fought for civil rights, women’s rights and an end to a useless war in Southeast Asia using no technology more sophisticated than mimeograph machines and rotary dial telephones, while kids with iPads and social media accounts feel helpless to make themselves heard. I’ve walked away from many encounters with students feeling that they were earnest, well intentioned — and utterly clueless about their power to better the world.
Nor am I alone in that. I often hear older people, those who marched, leafleted and shouted for justice in the ’60s, complain that Kids These Days are too complacent. They lament what they would do if they were just young enough. Rep. John Lewis, the hero of the voting rights campaign in Selma, often puts it like this: “Young people today are too quiet.”
But here’s an idea: Instead of just criticizing them, why don’t their elders teach them? Meaning not just icons of the struggle for human rights like Gloria Steinem, Diane Nash and Tom Hayden, but lesser-known footsoldiers whose names never made the history books. Why don’t they put together college campus lectures, church basement meetings, podcasts?
Call it Protest 101, a seminar in how to organize effectively for change. It would be a gift to the next generation, one the elder generation is uniquely positioned to give.
I vacillate on what John Lewis said. Sometimes it seems to me that young people are, indeed, entirely too quiet, too narcotized by gadgets, games and irrelevancies to notice the world is going to heck around them. Other times, it seems that they simply don’t know what to do about it, that they have been made to feel too helpless and small to make a difference.
But as the Occupy movement a few years ago demonstrated and Ferguson reiterates, there is a new ferment among young people — and people not so young — as they see civil rights gains whittled away, as they see elections rigged like a casino slot machine by monied interests, as they see unarmed black boys gunned down without consequence, as they see robber barons too big to fail game the economy and get away scot-free while the full weight of American jurisprudence and media indignation drops like a brick on poor people and immigrants.
What a waste if that energy goes only into the breaking of windows. What a loss if that moral authority is burned up in fire.
This nascent, inchoate movement knows how to get attention, but has no idea what to do after that. It is undisciplined and unformed and does not know how to articulate an agenda for change. I submit that that’s where their elders come in.
The ’60s generation once changed the world. Here’s a chance to change it again.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, November 17, 2014
“At The End Of The Day, History Speaks For Itself”: On Immigration, Obama Is On The Right Side Of History
With the President’s recent return from his diplomatic trip in Asia, and the year about to end, Barack Obama is getting ready to sign what many call “one of his biggest political decisions of his presidency.”
In Washington, there are rumors that as early as this week, the President could be taking executive action in regards to immigration.
And even before the President makes a final decision on the matter, Republicans have been attacking the President on his decision to temporarily reform the country’s immigration system, accusing him of abusing his presidential powers and calling the executive orders “unconstitutional.”
Further, some Republicans within the party have said that they would be willing to put the government’s budget for 2015 at risk, and some have even alluded to a possibility of shutting down the government, if the president decides to act on immigration.
This would be a grave and dangerous error, since such actions would put our country’s economy at risk, as well as the credit of the United States.
Lately, Republicans have been using the constitutional argument, day after day, in hopes that the American people will listen.
However, what Republicans fail to mention, is that many former-presidents, many of them Republican, have used executive actions as a method to temporarily reform our country’s immigration system.
In 1987, President Reagan used the power of executive action to alleviate the country’s immigration standards to approximately 200,000 Nicaraguans in exile who were looking to flee their country’s communist regime at the time.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed an executive order alleviating our immigration system for Chinese students who were studying in the United States and potentially ran the risk of being persecuted back in their country of birth.
And if that wasn’t enough, in 2001, President George W. Bush signed an executive order, granting an immigration extension to approximately 150,000 Salvadorians, after their country was hit with an earthquake.
Even though it’s likely that Obama’s executive orders will benefit a much bigger number than the ones previously mentioned, the argument that an executive order on immigration is unconstitutional, is clearly false, no matter the amount of people who will benefit.
At the end of the day, history speaks for itself; the Executive Branch of the United States carries the power of reforming certain parts of our immigration system, as long as such changes aren’t permanent.
If Republicans are so desperate to stop President Obama from using his constitutional powers to solve a problem where Congress has failed to act, they have the power to do so. Its actually very simple: Do your job and pass Immigration Reform.
Time and time again, Republicans have failed to understand that when they attack the President on immigration, it’s not Obama they are attacking, but the Latino Community instead.
So when 2016 comes around and presidential candidates from both sides of the aisle are trying to persuade the “Latino Vote,” don’t be surprised that Republicans will not only loose it, but they’ll be loosing any chance they had of taking The White House as well.
By: Jose Aristimuno, Founder, Latino Giant; The Huffington Post Blog, November 18, 2014
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