“Little Boys Playing With Fire”: House GOP Just Making Stuff Up To Hide Its Own Impotence
In an interview on Fox News over the weekend, incoming House Majority Whip Steven Scalise of Lousiana was asked repeatedly by Chris Wallace about the prospect of impeaching President Barack Obama. The exchange was illuminating, both for the lack of illumination that Scalise was willing to offer, and for his sheer mendacity.
After Wallace pressed him on the impeachment issue, here’s how Scalise responded:
SCALISE: You know, this might be the first White House in history that’s trying to start the narrative of impeaching their own president. Ultimately, what we want to do is see the president follow his own laws. But the president took an oath to faithfully execute the laws of this land and he’s not. In fact, the Supreme Court unanimously more than 12 times, unanimously said the president overreached and actually did things he doesn’t have the legal authority to do.
WALLACE: Again, on executive action to defer more deportations, what will the House do?
SCALISE: We’ve made it clear. We’re going to put options on the table to allow — to allow the House to take legal action against the president when he overreaches his authority. Others have already done that. Cases are going to the Supreme Court. Like I said, more than a dozen times the Supreme Court unanimously — I’m not talking about a 5-4 decision — 9-0, unanimously said the president overreached.
So, we’re going to continue to be a check and a balance against this administration.
WALLACE: But impeachment is off the table?
SCALISE: Well, the White House wants to talk about impeachment, and, ironically, they’re going out and trying to fundraise off that, too.
WALLACE: I’m asking you, sir.
SCALISE: Look, the White House will do anything they can to change the topic away from the president’s failed agenda — people paying higher costs for food, for health care, for gas at the pump. The president isn’t solving those problems. So, he wants to try to change the subject.
Some points to consider:
1) By my count, Wallace asked the impeachment question four times. Scalise evaded it four times. Yes, politicians evade questions all the time. Yes, Democrats are attempting to fundraise off the impeachment possibility. But Scalise could have pulled the rug from beneath that effort with a simple statement that the House would not consider impeachment. Despite repeated opportunities, he did not. He pointedly left the option on the table and tried to change the subject, ironically by accusing the president of trying to change the subject.
2) Scalise claimed that instead of impeachment, the topic should be what he called “the president’s failed agenda — people paying higher costs for food, for health care, for gas at the pump.” OK, let’s take a look at those issues.
—People are not paying higher costs for food, with a few notable exceptions such as pork and fresh produce. Those costs spikes are temporary, driven by widespread drought perhaps associated with climate change, as well as by a virus that killed millions of piglets last year. I’m not sure how Obama might have intervened with those problems. Maybe he should have issued an executive order banning piglet-killing viruses, but then again, the House would have added it to the list of impeachable offenses.
—Gasoline prices are dropping, not rising, falling nine cents a gallon in the last two weeks. They have recently been 9.5 cents below what they were a year ago. If the president is to be blamed when prices increase, I suppose Scalise is willing to give him credit when they fall. Or maybe not.
—Contrary to Scalise’s claims, health care inflation also remains at near-record-low levels.
3) In an effort to document the conservative narrative that Obama has become some sort of tyrant run amok, Scalise twice repeated the claim that “more than a dozen times the Supreme Court unanimously — I’m not talking about a 5-4 decision — 9-0, unanimously said the president overreached.”
That too is a complete fabrication, and Scalise knows it.
As Politifact documented a month ago, eight of the 13 Supreme Court cases referenced by Scalise were initiated by actions taken in the administration of President George W. Bush and were inherited under Obama. Factcheck.org also studied the claim; it too rejected it as false.
In addition, most of the 13 cases had nothing to do with presidential overreach. “For example, in United States v. Jones, the court was ruling on whether the FBI had the power to use a GPS to track a suspect and gather evidence,” Politifact points out. A second case involved a court ruling that “police could not search your cell phone without a warrant if you were arrested.” A third case involved a state law in Massachusetts that regulated protests outside abortion clinics. A fourth case — begun under Bush — involved tax law on overseas income. A fifth — also a Bush case — involved the statute of limitations in securities law.
In other words, the core piece of evidence behind the GOP’s narrative of executive overreach by Obama — evidence cited by Ted Cruz, by National Review, by the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and now by Scalise — is fraudulent. But those spreading it do not care. They have fed the base this “Obama-is-an unconstitutional-tyrant” line to keep it riled up, fearful and distracted, and it has worked. That is all they care about.
And if by creating this image of Obama as tyrannical threat to constitutional government, they create a groundswell for impeachment that they cannot control? Like little boys playing with fire, they don’t seem worried by that either.
By: Jay Bookman, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Published in The National Memo, July 31, 20114
“Dereliction Of Duty”: In The Military, One Gets Court Martialed; In Congress, One Gets Re-Elected
According to the Brookings Institution there are some 47,000 unaccompanied children in the USA from Central America, almost all of whom arrived this year. There is no question that the numbers have overwhelmed an already out-of-date system and there is no question, or should not be any question, about our responsibility to care for these children while our legal process takes its course and they are either deported or granted asylum.
But now Congress, which has been the most grid-locked Congress in history, is about to adjourn for the rest of the summer without taking the actions necessary to assure that these children are cared for and that their legal process is managed properly and efficiently.
This nation has always been built on compromise. This nation became a beacon to the entire world because we had a legislative process that worked. This nation grew great and strong because we elected people to “GOVERN” and to “REPRESENT THE BEST INTERESTS OF ALL AMERICANS.” Now all of this has been thrown out the window and our system is absolutely derelict in its duty to our people, our principles and our heritage.
Maybe I am a heretic — I have been called worse — but I do not care if you are a Democrat or Republican, I do not care if you are an arch liberal or a Tea Party conservative, there are 47,000 children languishing in this country without proper care, without beds to sleep in, without medical attention or schooling. Now, 435 Representatives and 100 Senators are leaving for vacation where they will party, sun themselves, drink too much and eat some of the best food available…all while these 47,000 children languish.
Shame on all of you!
You have abdicated your right to be called “legislators.” You should be called “abdicators” for that is what you are.
In the military one gets court martialed for dereliction of duty, but in Congress one gets re-elected for another term. It is time for the American people on all sides of the aisle to speak up and tell these overpaid abdicators that they dare not leave Washington until they take care of these children!
By: Harry Leibowitz, World of Children Award Co-Founder & Board Chair; The Huffington Post Blog, July 29, 2014
“No Will To Legislate”: The GOP’s Completely Incoherent Stance On The Border Crisis
Republicans are furious about the flood of children streaming across the US-Mexico border, and are criticizing the president for not deporting the children fast enough. But now that Obama has asked for nearly $4 billion to help kick the kids out more quickly, they don’t want to fund the emergency measures.
The $3.7 billion Obama requested would boost border security as well as housing and legal services for the children, the majority of whom are fleeing violence in Central America. According to Texas Governor Rick Perry, who has become the GOP’s figurehead on the issue, too much of that money is going to shelter, healthcare and legal assistance, and not enough to enforcement. “President Obama’s appropriations request only deals with one aspect of the current crisis on our southern border, while barely addressing its root cause: an unsecured border,” Perry wrote in an op-ed on Wednesday. He wants Obama to send surveillance drones and 1,000 National Guard troops to the border.
Most minors are simply handing themselves over to border patrol agents, suggesting that a porous border isn’t really the problem. And even if the border were completely sealed, there’s still the question of what to do with the tens of thousands of children here already. Perry ignored the fact that the Obama administration is bound by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which bars the government from immediately deporting children from countries that do not share a border with the United States—such as Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, where the bulk of the children are from. The law requires border patrol to turn the children over to Health and Human Services and entitles them to due process so they may apply for humanitarian relief. Obama is trying to speed up deportations, to the consternation of immigrant rights and humanitarian groups. But unless Congress changes the trafficking law, the only way to do so is to make the legal system work faster by paying for more lawyers and judges.
Republicans are considering all sorts of roadblocks to the emergency funding bill. Some want any spending to be offset with cuts elsewhere. Others are insisting that Congress amend or repeal the trafficking law before they authorize any funding, a move that would deny children due process and, even if it were ultimately blocked by Democrats in the Senate, would at the very least hold up resources that are badly needed in the shelters where the children are housed.
Republicans, Perry included, are paying lip service to the idea that the crisis is a humanitarian one, but they don’t want to provide any humanitarian relief. As Jackie Calmes and Ashley Parker suggest in The New York Times, that’s because approving such funding “would help get [Obama] out of a situation that they believe is of his own making.” According to Perry, it’s more important for Obama to visit the border than it is for Congress to do something to address the situation. For Republicans, it’s more palatable to perpetuate the crisis and blame it on the president than to do anything that could be considered a “win” for the Democrats. Certainly it won’t be kids who win if Congress does agree to fund a smoother pathway to mass deportation.
It’s ironic that the same people who are apoplectic about Obama’s use of executive authority are now claiming that he’s the one not doing enough to fix the border crisis. Even House Speaker John Boehner, who is suing the president over his unilateral moves, had the gumption to attack the White House for not acting on its own in this instance. “He’s been president for five years! When is he going to take responsibility for something?” Boehner reportedly shouted at a press conference on Thursday morning. “We’re not giving the president a blank check.”
Republicans complain that Obama is cutting them out of the legislative process. As the border crisis demonstrates, however, it’s hard to detect real will on the part of the GOP to legislate.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, July 10, 2014
“Republican’s Tricky Dancing Dilemma”: The GOP’s Religious Liberty Sham Is About To Blow Up Their Immigration Reform Excuse
The Supreme Court’s determination that Hobby Lobby and other closely held corporations can be treated as religious entities, and are thus exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, happened to fall on the same day that President Obama announced he’ll take executive action to reduce deportations from the U.S. interior now that John Boehner has confided to him that the House won’t vote on immigration reform this year.
I’m sure the timing was coincidental. But as the consequences of each development begin to play out, I think we’ll find that they’re much more revealing side by side than they would have been running sequentially.
The key is that Democrats are going to attempt, through legislation, to remedy the damage the Court did to the contraception mandate while simultaneously acknowledging that their attempts to legislate immigration reform have failed, and that they’ll have to content themselves with whatever steps the administration can take under current law.
But at the same time, Republicans are going to try to side-step the political dangers of the contraception decision and their leading role in killing immigration reform. That would be a tricky dance under any circumstances, but particularly difficult to do all at once.
Republican leaders are pretty surefooted talking about Hobby Lobby as a religious freedom fight (although it wasn’t one). But they are also rightly wary of its potential to draw the party’s latent Todd Akinism out of remission.
Here’s Rush Limbaugh, on Monday: “[S]omehow we’ve gotten to the point where women should not have to pay for their own birth control. Somebody else is gonna pay for it, no matter how much they want, no matter how often they want it, no matter for what reason, somebody else is going to pay for it. That’s the root of all this. The employer should pay it, the insurance company will pay it, but in no way in 2014 America are women going to being pay for it, even though you can go to Target or Walmart and get a month’s supply for nine bucks.”
The risk they face is that a legislative fight over contraception—over making sure female employees of Hobby Lobby and other companies aren’t burdened by the ruling—will draw the real, driving concern out from behind the religious liberty artifice. It’s on this ground that “striking a blow for religious liberty” becomes “we don’t want to pay for your immoral sex pills, either,” and that’s where Republicans lose.
The easy way out of this conundrum would be to get it off the agenda as quickly as possible—to say that Obama administration officials should issue a new regulation, placing the onus for financing the contraception on insurance companies, and move on. Obama already did this for religious nonprofits. He could do it for the religious owners of for-profit corporations, too. And in the opinion of the Court, Justice Samuel Alito all but suggested this remedy to the Department of Health and Human Services.
“HHS has already devised and implemented a system that seeks to respect the religious liberty of religious nonprofit corporations while ensuring that the employees of these entities have precisely the same access to all FDA-approved contraceptives as employees of companies whose owners have no religious objections to providing such coverage,” he wrote. “Although HHS has made this system available to religious nonprofits that have religious objections to the contraceptive mandate, HHS has provided no reason why the same system cannot be made available to the owners of for-profit corporations have similar religious objections.”
In a political vacuum, that’s what Republicans would say in response to Democratic contraception legislation. But in the real world, Republicans are claiming that they can’t pass immigration reform because Obama takes too many administrative liberties and can’t be trusted to implement the law as written. That’s always been a disingenuous excuse, but it loses all semblance of credibility when in the next breath they argue that members of Congress don’t have to stand and be counted in the case of contraception because Obama can just fix the problem on his own. Particularly given that the proposed remedy doesn’t actually satisfy religious conservatives.
Not that Republicans would have any qualms about talking out of both sides of their mouths. But if they try to sidestep a contraception conflagration in this way, they’ll undermine their own excuse for shelving immigration reform. And if they take the contraception fight head on, they’ll stumble into the conservative sexual morality play they’ve tried to avoid by claiming this is actually all about the religious freedom of certain employers.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, July 1, 2014
“The Course Republicans Have Chosen”: The GOP Is Now Officially The Party Of “Get The Hell Out”
Exactly one year after the Senate passed an immigration reform bill that built a compromise on an exchange of increased enforcement for legalization for the 11 million, Republicans have now officially abandoned any pretense of a willingness to participate in solving the immigration crisis. Instead, they have committed the party to a course premised on two intertwined notions: There are no apparent circumstances under which they can accept legalization of the 11 million; and as a result, the only broad response to the crisis they can countenance is maximum deportations.
This means it’s now all in Obama’s hands to decide what he can do unilaterally to ease the pace of deportations and address the current unaccompanied migrant crisis.
One way to understand what happened here is to trace the evolution of GOP Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chair of the Judiciary Committee and a serious party thinker on the issue. Today Politico has a deep dive into the death of reform, reporting that in 2013, House GOP leaders privately told Hispanic leaders that they would try to embrace reform if the August recess that year went smoothly. This happened:
At one point, the Rev. Daniel de Leon, a California pastor, asked…Goodlatte about family reunification — a critical issue for religious communities. The normally reserved Virginia Republican…began to cry and choked up completely, two people inside the room recalled.
About a minute later, Goodlatte regained his composure. Apologizing for the abrupt tears, the former immigration attorney discussed how the issue is a deeply personal one: His wife Maryellen’s parents were first-generation immigrants from Ireland, he explained, and throughout his legal career, Goodlatte helped immigrants from more than 70 nations come to the United States.
Now fast forward to yesterday. Goodlatte effectively declared immigration reform dead as long as Obama is in office, blaming his decision to defer the deportation of DREAMers for the current crisis of unaccompanied migrants crossing.
This tells the entire story. Goodlatte was an early proponent of a form of legalization for the 11 million that could have been the basis for compromise. In this scenario, Republicans could have voted on piecemeal measures that included just legalization — and no citizenship — packaged with concurrent enforcement triggers. Paul Ryan and Mario Diaz-Balart both floated versions of that idea, which is to say, Republicans probably could have passed something like this, though it would have been (shock! horror!) difficult. This could have led to a decent deal for Republicans: In negotiations with the Senate, Dems would drop the special path to citizenship in exchange for Republicans agreeing to legal tweaks making it easier for the legalized to eventually find their way to citizenship through normal channels.
That’s essentially the larger scenario Goodlatte supported as early as last summer, and those who closely follow this debate have long known it was a plausible scenario and an endgame GOP leaders such as John Boehner privately hoped for. But it would have required getting the right angry at some point (which any immigration solution was always going to do). And so, it ran up against an unwillingness by a large bloc of Republicans in the House to do the hard work of figuring out what set of terms and conditions, if any, might enable them to support some form of legal status in the face of the right’s rage. Jeb Bush’s remarks were controversial precisely because he revealed the GOP unwillingness to cross this Rubicon as a moral challenge Republicans could not bring themselves to tackle. Even Boehner — who actually deserves some credit for trying to ease the party towards accepting legalization — essentially admitted this was the real obstacle to reform in a moment of candor earlier this spring.
And that’s where we are now. The current crisis is actually an argument for comprehensive immigration reform. But Goodlatte — who once cried about the breakup of families — is now reduced to arguing that the crisis is the fault of Obama’s failure to enforce the law. Goodlatte’s demand (which is being echoed by other, dumber Republicans) that Obama stop de-prioritizing the deportation of the DREAMers really means: Deport more children. When journalist Jorge Ramos confronted Goodlatte directly on whether this is really what he wants, the Republican refused to answer directly. But the two main GOP positions — no legalization, plus opposition to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (relief for the DREAMers) — add up inescapably to “get the hell out” as the de facto GOP response to the broader crisis.
This is the course Republicans have chosen — they’ve opted to be the party of maximum deportations. Now Democrats and advocates will increase the pressure on Obama to do something ambitious to ease deportations in any way he can. Whatever he does end up doing will almost certainly fall well short of what they want. But determining the true limits on what can be done to mitigate this crisis is now on him.
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, June 27, 2014
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