“A Long History Of Pleasing Conservatives”: Meet Conservatives’ New Favorite Judge
Few outside of a tiny Texas border town knew who Federal District Court Judge Andrew Hanen was until Monday night when he became a right-wing hero.
But this isn’t the first rodeo the judge who delayed implementation of the Obama Administration’s executive order on immigration.
Hanen, a federal district court judge in Brownville, Texas, has a long history of taking a conservative approach to immigration issues in his courtroom, which is located just over a mile from the Mexican border.
The once obscure justice, whose only other previous claim to fame was serving as the President of the Houston Bar Association 15 years, has now made himself a right wing celebrity.
But his ruling on Monday is by far the most consequential that the George W. Bush appointee has ever issued.
He first gained notice for his willingness to entertain the arguments of landowners on the Mexican border who opposed the construction of a fence on their land by the federal government.
The Texas Observer described him in 2010 as “the only federal judge in the nation who forced Homeland Security to acknowledge landowners’ constitutional protections. In case after case, Hanen refused to rubber-stamp the condemnations and ruled that the government would have to provide ‘fair compensation’ for the land it was taking.”
But Hanen became a darling of immigration hawks in a 2013 order in which he vented against a decision made by the DHS not to deport a woman in the country illegally who had paid for her daughter to be smuggled into the United States.
While the smuggler was sentenced to jail, the government allowed the woman and her daughter to remain in the country under a 1997 settlement agreement.
Hanen was not pleased.
In an order he attacked the DHS’s “apparent policy … of completing the criminal mission of individuals who are violating the border security of the United States” and compared the action to “taking illegal drugs or weapons seized from smugglers and delivering them to the criminals who initially solicited their illegal importation/exportation.”
Hanan’s order may not have been binding but it certainly electrified many conservatives as one of the most powerful statements from a federal judge on the issue.
On Monday he made good for conservatives again.
Hanan ruled in favor of 25 states that sued the federal government to stop the implementation of a 2014 executive order to allow millions of undocumented immigrants to apply for “deferred action” from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This executive order enabled the undocumented immigrants to work legally and avoid deportation for several years—a move many Republicans have decried as “executive amnesty.”
Hanen didn’t reach a final decision but instead issued a preliminary injunction, which keeps DHS from enforcing the executive order until a final decision is issued.
His injunction though is not expected to last.
The federal government is expected to appeal to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans and is considered likely to get Hanen’s ruling overturned in that venue.
However, in the mean time, the decision to delay the executive order has major political ramifications in Washington DC where a potential partial government shutdown is looming over this issue.
But no matter what happens in this standoff, there is one clear winner: Judge Hanen.
Immigration reform is likely to remain a quagmire and Congress will continue to be dysfunctional. But, at least, Hanen will increase his Q-rating and become the most consequential federal judge ever to sit in the Brownsville Division of the Southern District of Texas.
By: Ben Jacobs, The Daily Beast, February 17, 2015
“Mollifying The Extremists”: GOP Back To ‘Impeachment,’ ‘Jail Time’ For Obama
As the 2014 cycle progressed, the number of congressional Republicans talking about impeaching President Obama faded, and there’s no real mystery as to what happened. GOP leaders, fearing a public backlash, told Republican incumbents and candidates to dial it down a notch. Why rile up Democrats, who too often stay home in midterm cycles, when they’re tuning out?
And as a consequence, for months, the “i” word more or less faded. That is, until very recently.
Last week, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), less than a month into his first term in Congress, announced his belief that President Obama, without a doubt, “deserves impeachment.” He’s not the only one talking like this.
Republican Rep. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania says President Obama is “getting close” to impeachment. “People say, ‘should the president be impeached?’ I say, we’re getting close to that,” Marino said in a video posted on YouTube Wednesday by the local newspaper, the Wellsboro Gazette.
Marino said he was talking about impeachment because “it comes up consistently at town hall meetings.”
Well, that’s a good reason. Marino was a little fuzzy on what, exactly, would be the grounds for presidential impeachment, but for many GOP lawmakers, that’s a minor and inconvenient detail that shouldn’t interfere with reckless rhetoric.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), meanwhile, has no use for subtlety and is already talking publicly about “jail time” for the president:
In an appearance on “The Steve Malzberg Show” [Tuesday], Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., continued his crusade against President Obama’s executive actions on immigration reform, calling on the federal courts to find that the president’s actions violated the law.
If Obama defies such a ruling, Brooks said, then Congress should pass a contempt citation against the president for his “reckless conduct” and demand that he comply with the court’s decision.
He said that Obama would then drop his executive actions since he, like Richard Nixon, doesn’t want to “incur the wrath that comes with a contempt citation with potential fines and jail time.”
At this point, I still consider it unlikely that GOP leaders will go along with the far-right’s impeachment crusade, but conservative media appears to be on board, and the number of congressional Republican talking up the idea since the elections keeps growing.
Even if party leaders balk, this only means they’ll have to think of something else to mollify the extremists in their midst, and pointless anti-Obama lawsuits probably won’t cut it.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 4, 2015
“The ‘Wayback’ Machine”: Republicans And The Siren Song Of The Past
President Obama’s dramatic move to reopen relations with Cuba crystalizes the larger story of his presidency: In many significant ways, he has dragged America into the 21st century. But how long will we stay here? I ask because so many Republicans seem nostalgic for the golden era of Chubby Checker, Elvis Presley and The Shirelles, or the slightly more recent decade when Lionel Richie and Olivia Newton-John topped the charts.
For now, Republicans are sitting in the metaphorical green room of history, waiting for their onstage close-up. They’re free to rail against anything and everything Obama does, knowing that his core achievements will be protected for two more years by Senate Democrats and Obama himself. Even the new Republican-controlled Congress can expect filibusters and vetoes if it goes too far in trying to obliterate the Obama era.
The real test will be what the GOP does if and when it has the relatively unfettered capacity to work its will — for instance, if it elects a president in 2016. That person would have to decide whether to roll back the many Obama policies achieved through executive action, regulations and a handful of major laws. Would he or she revive a Cold War with Cuba, stop nuclear talks with Iran, break a climate agreement with China? Revoke temporary legal residency for millions of immigrants? Take away health coverage from millions who are newly insured? Lower the minimum wage for federal contractors? Weaken consumer protections against banks? Reduce tax rates on the rich?
At least a few GOP lawmakers and 2016 prospects must be secretly relieved that Obama is taking the heat for some decisions that were necessary and/or inevitable. We have thriving automobile and renewable energy industries, even as Republicans have been able to rail against government “bailouts” and “picking winners.” We aren’t sending combat troops into quagmires, prolonging a long-failed isolation policy toward Cuba or courting confrontation with Iran, and the GOP can still hammer Obama as weak, indecisive and naive. America has finally joined the rest of the developed world in offering broad access to health insurance — and Republicans, in an act of political jiu-jitsu for the record books, have ridden the new law to two midterm routs.
The positioning so far in the 2016 presidential race is revealing. Most of the hot GOP prospects have a foot in the 1980s, the 1960s or both. The field is crowded with aggressive interventionists, supply-side tax cutters and climate-change skeptics. Some seem to want to prolong the Cold War. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, whose parents left Cuba well before Fidel Castro’s revolution and takeover, has been so emotional and militant in opposing Obama’s Cuba shift that The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz wrote a parody called “Rubio Vows to Block Twenty-First Century.” (“We cannot stop time, perhaps, but we can defund it”). What’s most striking about Rubio’s old-school views is his age. He’s just 43.
To give them their due, several future contenders are trying to formulate plans for a 21st-century Republican Party. Rubio and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan are looking at alternative ways to fight poverty, while Rubio and former Florida governor Jeb Bush support comprehensive immigration reform that deals with the millions of illegal immigrants already in America. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is a warrior for privacy rights and criminal justice reform, he backs Obama on Cuba, and he’s against what the libertarian Cato Institute’s David Boaz calls “promiscuous interventionism” abroad.
Yet in crucial areas, they and many other GOP prospects are still modeling themselves on an illusory Ronald Reagan. The actual Reagan raised as well as cut taxes, grew the government, terminated a U.S. mission in Lebanon — that is, cut and ran — after 241 military personnel were killed in a bombing, and negotiated with “evil empire” leader Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce nuclear weapons. But who in the Republican field will emulate the practical, flexible Reagan who was open to discussion and compromise?
Paul stands out at this point for rejecting the Reaganesque Republican ideal of America as global supercop with its nose — not to mention its bombs and troops — in everyone’s business. He’s on the same page as his colleagues, however, when it comes to tax cuts as an economic cure-all. His draconian proposals to cut taxes, slash spending and balance the budget in five years are about as newfangled as Hall and Oates.
Given his name and his race, Obama’s two election victories were potent symbols of a new century and the promise of an increasingly diverse nation. Yet the real 21st-century pillars of his presidency are his policies, from energy and health care to immigration and diplomatic engagement. My fingers are crossed that in their rush to reject all things Obama, Republicans won’t reflexively climb into the wayback machine and embrace the ideas of the past.
By: Jill Lawrence, The National Memo, January 1, 2015
“Not Cowering Or Conceding”: President Obama Plays The Long Game
The media is settling on a new narrative about President Obama. It’s always interesting watching one after another join in that process. For example, Timothy Egan calls it Obama Unbound.
Perhaps the best thing to happen to him [Obama] was the crushing blow his party took in the midterm elections. Come January, Republicans will have their largest House majority in 84 years — since Herbert Hoover was president. Granted, no politician wants to join Hoover and history in the same sentence. But Obama is not cowering or conceding. He’s been liberated by defeat, becoming the president that many of his supporters hoped he would be.
He promised to be transformative. Instead, especially in the last two years, he’s been listless, passive, a spectator to his own presidency. Rather than setting things in motion, he reacted to events. Even Ebola, the great scare that prompted so much media hysteria it was awarded Lie of the Year by PolitiFact, was somehow his fault. No more. Of late, the president who has nothing to lose has discovered that his best friend is the future.
Glenn Thrush calls it Operation Revenge.
“He needs to run, to compete – or more to the point, he needs someone to run against,” a former top Obama adviser told me.
He’s got that now, in a Republican-controlled Capitol Hill. Obama, a political counterpuncher who often needs a slap in the face to wake up, got a gut-shot in November. The Democrats’ staggering loss in the midterms – like his disastrous performance in the first presidential debate against Mitt Romney in 2012 – seems to have jolted him to the realization that he’ll have to act boldly to preserve what he’d assumed was a settled legacy.
The trouble with this kind of analysis is that it is ahistorical. Every one of the things these pundits name as an example of the President’s newfound persona – executive actions on immigration, new EPA rules, climate change agreement with China, Russian sanctions, normalization of our relationship with Cuba – has been in the works for at least the last 1-2 years (during the time he was supposedly a listless, passive spectator). Back in January of this year, he announced his intention to implement the “pen and phone strategy” we’re all witnessing unfold.
President Barack Obama offered a brief preview Tuesday of his State of the Union address, telling his Cabinet that he won’t wait for Congress to act on key agenda items in 2014.
“I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” he said at his first Cabinet meeting of the year. Outlining the strategy, Obama said he plans to use his pen to sign executive actions and his phone to convene outside groups in support of his agenda if Congress proves unable or unwilling to act on his priorities.
It’s true that President Obama might have a new lightness in his step. But that could just as well be because he’s finally off for a much-needed vacation in Hawaii with his family. Anyone who has really watched this President operate knows that he plays the long game. Here’s how Michelle Obama described that back in 2011.
Here’s the thing about my husband: even in the toughest moments, when it seems like all is lost, Barack Obama never loses sight of the end goal. He never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise, even if it comes from some of his best supporters. He just keeps moving forward.
And in those moments when we’re all sweating it, when we’re worried that the bill won’t pass or the negotiation will fall through, Barack always reminds me that we’re playing a long game here. He reminds me that change is slow — it doesn’t happen overnight.
If we keep showing up, if we keep fighting the good fight and doing what we know is right, then eventually we will get there.
We always have.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, 2014
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