“The White Whale”: Empowering Captain Ahab To Shut Down The Federal Government
Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but yesterday, as part of his 180 degree turn on the topic, Sen. Marco Rubio was said to be “hinting” that Republicans might just, oh, shut down the government or something if Barack Obama took major executive action to expand (or even maintain) DACA. Today Rubio’s new ally on immigration policy, Steve King of Iowa, was more explicit, per a report from the Des Moines Register‘s Kathie Obradovich:
Congressman Steve King said today the threat of another government shutdown could be Republicans’ leverage to pass border security and immigration legislation this fall.
Congress must act before the end of September to either approve a budget or continue spending at current levels to avoid a government shutdown. House Speaker John Boehner has said he expects action on a short-term continuing resolution next month.
King, R-Kiron, said “all bets are off” on a continuing resolution if President Barack Obama follows through with reported plans to deal with immigration issues without Congress.
“If the president wields his pen and commits that unconstitutional act to legalize millions, I think that becomes something that is nearly political nuclear …,” King said. “I think the public would be mobilized and galvanized and that changes the dynamic of any continuing resolution and how we might deal with that….”
Even if Obama does not act unilaterally on immigration reform, King says he believes the continuing resolution is still a bargaining chip for GOP priorities. “When we hear some of our leaders say there will be no government shutdown, that’s the political equivalent of saying there will be no boots on the ground,” he said.
Now the congressional leadership probably won’t like this kind of talk. But like Rubio himself, they’ve pretty much delegated immigration policy to Steve King. So they can’t really complain if Captain Ahab thinks every conceivable issue in Washington is subordinate to bringing down the white whale.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 27, 2014
“Wounded Innocence?”: Why Rick Perry May Be Out Of Luck
Governor Rick Perry of Texas and President Barack Obama, strangest of bedfellows, are making similar discoveries about the scope of prosecutorial discretion. In short, it’s very broad.
Perry’s education on the subject is an unhappy one. Late Friday, the Texas Governor, who has about five months left in his term, was indicted on two counts: abuse of official capacity and coercion of a public servant. What those charges mean, though, is hard to say. The indictment itself is just two pages and, to put it charitably, unelaborated.
The case has its origins in Perry’s long-running feud with Rosemary Lehmberg, a district attorney in Travis County, which includes Austin and represents an island of blue in the deep-red sea of Texas. Last year, Lehmberg was charged with drunken driving. She promptly pleaded guilty, which, in light of the YouTube videos of her sobriety test and her booking at the police station, was no surprise.
Lehmberg served several days in jail but declined to resign, so Perry decided to make the most of her difficulties. He said that, unless she resigned, he would use his power as Governor to veto $7.5 million in state money for her Public Integrity Unit, which had been hard at work prosecuting Texas pols, many of them Republicans. He could not, he said, support “continued state funding for an office with statewide jurisdiction at a time when the person charged with ultimate responsibility of that unit has lost the public’s confidence.”
What Perry did was obvious. The Governor was using his leverage to jam a political adversary—not exactly novel behavior in Texas, or most other states. But Democrats succeeded in winning the appointment of a special prosecutor, Michael McCrum, to investigate Perry’s behavior, and on Friday McCrum brought the hammer down. The threat to veto the money for the D.A. amounted to, according to the prosecutor, two different kinds of felonies: a “misuse” of government property, and a corrupt attempt to influence a public official in “a specific exercise of his official power or a specific performance of his official duty” or “to violate the public servants known legal duty.” (In the charmingly archaic view of Texas statutes, every public official is a “him.”)
Perry’s indictment has been widely panned, including by many liberals, as an attempt to criminalize hardball politics. (Vetoing things is, generally, part of a governor’s job.) Perry himself is all wounded innocence. “I intend to fight against those who would erode our state’s constitution and laws purely for political purposes, and I intend to win,” he said at a news conference. (It would be easier to feel sorry for Perry if he expressed similar concern about, say, the constitutional rights of those who were executed on his watch and with his support.)
So Perry may have a point, but he also has a problem. Prosecutors have wide, almost unlimited, latitude to decide which cases to bring. The reason is obvious: there is simply no way that the government could prosecute every violation of law it sees. Think about tax evasion, marijuana use, speeding, jay-walking—we’d live in a police state if the government went after every one of these cases. (Indeed, virtually all plea bargaining, which is an ubiquitous practice, amounts to an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.) As a result, courts give prosecutors virtual carte blanche to bring some cases and ignore others. But, once they do bring them, courts respond to the argument that “everyone does it” more or less the same way that your mother did. It’s no excuse. So if Perry’s behavior fits within the technical definition of the two statutes under which he’s charged, which it well might, he’s probably out of luck.
The President is relying on the same concept of discretion to push immigration reform, even though Congress has refused to pass a law to do so. The legislative branch writes the laws, which define the classes of people who are subject to deportation. But it is the executive branch that decides which actual individuals it will pursue and deport. Over the past several years, the Obama Administration has used its discretion to allow more immigrants to stay. During the 2012 campaign, the President announced his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which amounted to a kind of administrative DREAM Act. It limited the number of deportations of people who had been children when they were brought illegally to this country, provided they meet certain other conditions. The legality of DACA has not been successfully challenged.
Prosecutorial discretion is not unlimited. The executive branch can refrain from prosecuting certain individuals, but it cannot, in theory, offer immunity to entire classes of law-breakers. Nor can a prosecutor only charge people of a certain race, or, for that matter, political party. But it’s hard to know who would have standing to challenge a failure to bring a criminal case or a deportation. The rules of standing are usually limited to individuals who have suffered a specific harm, and there’s no harm in not being prosecuted. (The New Republic has a useful primer on the subject. )
That sort of limitation on prosecutorial discretion is unlikely to help Rick Perry. His complaint is that the prosecutor is bringing one case too many, not too few. That claim, almost invariably, is a loser. So, it turns out, may be the soon-to-be-former governor.
By: Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, August 19, 2014
“Abandon Ship, Abandon Ship!”: Rand Paul Runs From Immigration Talk With Steve King, But Rest Of GOP Is Not So Lucky
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) got into a tense exchange with two DREAMers on Monday, causing Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to physically distance himself from the anti-immigration hardliner. Other Republicans should be thinking about following Paul’s lead.
The confrontation took place at a fundraiser in Okoboji, Iowa, on Monday. Two members of the Dream Action Coalition, Erika Andiola and Cesar Vargas, approached the lawmakers and introduced themselves as beneficiaries of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Last week, King led the Republican House majority’s push to end the program, which grants temporary deportation relief and work permits for some young immigrants.
After Andiola offered King an opportunity to rip up her DACA card, things quickly got heated. She referenced King’s infamous comment that for every DREAMer who’s a valedictorian, “there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” and the congressman responded by grabbing her wrist.
“Stop a minute,” King said sharply. “You’re very good at English. You know what I’m saying.”
Where was Senator Paul throughout this testy exchange? As soon as Andiola said the words “I’m actually a DREAMer, myself,” Paul put down his hamburger mid-chew, got up, and bolted from the table.
The rest of the Republican Party should be so lucky.
There’s little mystery behind Paul’s decision to abandon ship. The freshman senator will almost certainly run for president in 2016, framing himself as a new kind of Republican who’s not afraid to sell conservatism to skeptical audiences. Improving the GOP’s relationship with Latinos is central to that message, and appearing on camera with King while he grips a DREAMer’s wrist and badgers her about her English skills would be supremely unhelpful.
But whether they like it or not, Republicans are now tied to King’s hardline positions on immigration. That’s what they get for House leadership’s decision to adopt King’s approach to addressing the border crisis after their first attempt flopped in embarrassing fashion.
The result was an immigration bill that would do little to alleviate the crisis at the border, but would dramatically expedite the deportation process and completely gut the current protections for immigrants who were illegally brought to the country as children. Or as King gleefully put it, “The changes brought into this [bill] are ones I’ve developed and advocated for over the past two years…It’s like I ordered it off the menu.”
Perhaps Republicans should think twice about taking orders from a man who has compared immigrants to dogs, livestock and the Visigoths who sacked Rome, among other outbursts.
It’s not as though Latino voters haven’t noticed the GOP’s decision to abandon its plan to become “inclusive and welcoming” in favor of cementing itself as the party of “Deport ‘em all,” as Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) put it after last week’s vote. According to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, Latinos view the GOP unfavorably by an overwhelming 65 to 29 percent margin (by contrast, they view Democrats favorably, 61 to 33 percent). While Latino voters’ disgust with Republicans may not make much of a tangible difference in the 2014 midterms, which will be decided in solidly red states, you can bet that the GOP will regret running to the right of Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” plan once the 2016 presidential election rolls around.
But really, the GOP should consider itself lucky if King only drives its immigration policy. After all, he has other plans that could be even more politically damaging to the party.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, August 5, 2014
“Dumb And Dumber”: House Republicans Vote To Deport As Many Kids As Possible
Dumb and dumber. That’s the best way to describe two bills passed by House Republicans on Friday night. They passed a supplemental funding bill allocating about $700 million for the crisis on the border. It includes changes to current law that will make it easier to send child migrants back to Central America. They also voted to wind down the Obama administration’s Deferred Action program for young immigrants. So forget about comprehensive reform: House Republicans have settled on the “Let’s deport as many kids as possible” approach.
These two bills do not represent a coherent response to our border crisis. They reflect House Speaker John Boehner’s failed leadership as well as the triumph of immigration extremists. While these bills will have zero policy impact, the GOP will likely feel their political impact for years to come — and not in a good way.
To understand why these bills passed, let’s back up for a moment. Recall that Speaker Boehner originally wanted to vote on a border crisis bill on Thursday. But he couldn’t round up enough votes, and the bill was pulled. This was a major embarrassment for the Speaker. Amazingly, Boehner then suggested that President Obama should take executive action on immigration. “There are numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action,” he said in a statement, “to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries.”
Huh? Right now the House is suing the president for taking executive action. For the Speaker to suggest that President Obama act on his own on immigration is inconsistent and hypocritical (Does that mean he will support the president’s expected executive action on immigration?).
As it turned out, in order to get the votes for a border bill Boehner allowed a vote on a bill that would end the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program. Introduced by the Obama administration in 2012, DACA grants relief from deportation to undocumented immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children. About half a million of these young people, also known as Dreamers, have so far qualified for its protection.
In case you’re wondering, DACA has nothing to do with the crisis on the border. Although some Republicans have surmised that it caused the ongoing influx of child migrants, there is no evidence to support this claim.
Now Boehner can say that House Republicans did something on immigration before they left for the August recess. Yet this is a hollow victory, because these bills are going nowhere. The Senate would never approve them and even if they did, the president has pledged to veto them.
The anti-DACA vote, however, will have real consequences for the Republican Party. Consider that recent polling from Latino Decisions showed that 75 percent of Latino voters said that any move to dismantle DACA would make them less favorably inclined towards the GOP. Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist, tweeted that the anti-DACA vote “antagonizes Latinos, energizes Democratic base, and emboldens the GOP ‘No’ caucus.” She is right — and the GOP will be paying the price for years to come. Two hundred sixteen House members, many of whom harbor national ambitions, are now on record as opposing a policy supported by overwhelming majorities of Latino voters.
Obviously, a majority of House Republicans supported these measures — or they wouldn’t have passed. “The changes brought into this (the border bills) are ones I’ve developed and advocated for over the past two years. It’s like I ordered it off the menu,” Rep. Steve King (R- Iowa) told CQ Roll Call. The fact that the GOP position on immigration is now in sync with King, a man who once compared Dreamers to drug mules, should be alarming to Republicans concerned about their long-term viability as a national party. As disappointing as President Obama has been on immigration, these mean-spirited votes make it clearer than ever which party values Hispanic voters.
Friday’s House votes were a sad spectacle. On immigration, the GOP has taken another hard lurch to the right, and Latino voters will not soon forget it.
By: Raul A. Reyes, The Huffington Post Blog, August 4, 2014
“Abandoning The Pretense Of Seriousness”: GOP Motivations Have Nothing To Do With Governing
The new House Republican leadership team, facing its first real test yesterday, failed miserably. They backed a bill that ostensibly addresses the humanitarian crisis at the U.S./Mexico border, but the bill died before it even reached the floor. Rank-and-file Republican lawmakers had rejected their own party’s bill.
But instead of leaving town for Congress’ five-week break, GOP lawmakers met this morning to work something out, and by all appearances, Speaker John Boehner and his team effectively told right-wing members, “Tell us what you want and we’ll say yes.” The result is a new bill, set to pass this afternoon.
House Republicans are taking a second shot at passing a border funding package Friday after party leaders failed to whip enough support among conservatives and were forced to pull legislation Thursday. The new version of the bill will add $35 million to offer states that dispatch National Guard service members to the border, adding up to $694 million in emergency funding relief to cope with the flood of unaccompanied minors streaming into the United States.
Unwilling to leave Washington without first passing a border package, lawmakers aim to vote on the revised legislation Friday along with a separate vote on legislation to undercut laws protecting young undocumented immigrants.
To appreciate what the House GOP has come up with, note that Reps. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), two of the fiercest opponents of the bill that died yesterday, think this new proposal is awesome.
[Update: King told Roll Call, “The changes brought into this are ones I’ve developed and advocated for over the past two years. It’s like I ordered it off the menu.”]
The agreement conservative Republicans reached with very conservative Republicans can charitably be described as a bad joke. This legislation wouldn’t address the humanitarian crisis in any meaningful way, and really doesn’t even try.
The Washington Post’s report conceded the legislation “would do little to immediately solve the crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border but would allow [Republican lawmakers] to go home and tell voters that they did what they could.”
In other words, the post-policy House majority is putting on a little show this afternoon. Even marginally informed observers will recognize this as pointless theater, but GOP members won’t care because the point of the exercise will be to create a talking point – one that no fair-minded person will believe anyway.
Some of the details are still elusive, but reports suggest that the right was satisfied when Republican leaders agreed to advance provisions that not only support deportations of Dream Act kids, but also blocks current Dreamers who are already benefiting from the Obama administration’s DACA policy from renewing their participation in the program.
As a practical matter, this makes the bill more of a far-right fantasy than an actual plan. The motivations behind it have nothing to do with governing. Indeed, the very idea is laughable under the circumstances – it’s not as if the Speaker’s office has been in communication with Senate Democrats and the White House, looking for some common ground on a proposal that could become law.
Rather, Boehner, bruised and embarrassed, gave up. The goal this morning was to craft a new plan that makes far-right extremists happy. And that’s precisely what they’ve done.
Of course, the charade would be easier to pull off it weren’t quite so transparent. Republicans will spend the next five weeks saying, “See? We did our jobs!” it will be painfully obvious that their claims are as misleading as they are demonstrably ridiculous. For GOP lawmakers to have done their jobs, they would have had to agree to a serious proposal that related in some meaningful way to the task at hand.
That is clearly not what’s happened.
As for the road ahead, Sahil Kapur reports, “The plan is to have two votes: the first one is on the supplemental and tougher border language to swiftly send home children coming from Central American countries. If that passes, there’ll be a second vote on the bill to end the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and stop the president from granting legal status to anyone in the U.S. illegally.”
If Republicans get on planes this evening feeling good about themselves and their accomplishments, they’re not paying close enough attention. They’ve become the Cruz/Bachmann/King Party – which is exactly the opposite of what party leaders had in mind at the start of this Congress.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 1, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 