“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
“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
“Republicans Will Now Taste Their Bitter Harvest”: The “Party Of No” Has No Agreement On What Is Yes
In the early 3rd century B.C., after King Pyrrhus of Epirus again took brutal casualties in defeating the Romans, he told one person who offered congratulations, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” In his more sober moments, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), about to achieve his lifelong ambition of becoming Senate majority leader, may wonder whether he, too, has achieved a pyrrhic victory.
Republicans are still crowing about the sweeping victories in 2014 that give them control of both houses of Congress. They will set the agenda, deciding what gets considered, investigated and voted on. Their ideas will drive the debate.
But Republicans have no mandate because they offered no agenda. Republicans reaped the rewards of McConnell’s scorched-earth strategy, obstructing President Obama relentlessly, helping to create the failure that voters would pin on the party in power. But the collateral damage is that the “party of ‘no’ ” has no agreement on what is yes. Instead of using the years in the wilderness to develop new ideas and a clear vision, Republicans have used them only to sharpen their tongues, grow their claws and practice their backhands.
Republicans paid no penalty for obstructing every measure that might have given the recovery more juice, blocking even the infrastructure spending that has been a bipartisan response in every downturn. They paid no penalty for shutting down the government and forcing mindless austerity that cost jobs. They paid no penalty for their perfervid hysteria on foreign policy issues – screeching about phantom terrors of pregnant immigrants helping Islamic State terrorists and Ebola victims slip in the country to kill us here at home. They never needed to fill in the magic asterisks in Rep. Paul Ryan’s risible budgets, enabling him to deny the damage to Medicare, education, food stamps and the most vulnerable that his plans would require.
The result is that McConnell leads into a power a party truly unfit and unready to govern. Indeed, the wingnuts at its base want it only to dismantle, not to govern. As Terrance Heath reported, the ever-apoplectic Rush Limbaugh announced that Republicans have a mandate to “stop Barack Obama” and “were not elected to govern.” Fox News host Megyn Kelly fantasized that Obama would “offend” Republicans into impeaching him; Phyllis Schlafly argued the first priority should be blocking all Obama’s judicial nominees. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) pledged once more to repeal Obamacare. The dyspeptic Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will use his chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee to demand more “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Syria, harsher sanctions to undermine negotiations with Iran and more macho posturing over Ukraine. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) will use his likely chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee to deny the existence of catastrophic climate change even while allocating billions for cleanup in the wake of floods, droughts and storms to come.
McConnell portrays Republicans as ready to embrace a conservative Chamber of Commerce agenda, repaying the big money that helped bring them victory. This would include giving multinationals a massive tax break on money that they stashed abroad to avoid taxes, passing fast-track trade authority, pushing ahead the Keystone XL pipeline, weakening the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and repealing the tax on medical devices, first of the salami-style effort to slice up Obamacare.
But the zealots in the House and Senate expect more fire and less compromise. They want Obamacare repealed. They want the scorched-earth obstruction to continue: Obama’s nominations blocked, scandals real and delusional investigated, Dodd-Frank financial regulation reversed and taxes and domestic spending slashed.
It isn’t at all apparent that McConnell and Boehner can corral Republican majorities for any measures that Obama might accept. But even if McConnell could put the Chamber of Commerce’s bills on the president’s desk, one thing is apparent: None of these will do anything to address the profound crises the country faces. There is no relief for the sinking middle class and impoverished low-wage workers, no strategy for addressing climate change, no response to the destructive excesses of banks too big to fail.
McConnell won his majority by brilliantly waging a partisan, dishonest, unrelenting policy of obstruction. But now, the absence of any ideas or of any clue will be exposed. And next time, when voters sensibly want to throw the bums out, they may have a far clearer view of just who the bums are.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post, November 11, 2014
“Congratulations Mitch”: The New Cruzians Are Ready To Make Life Hell For Mitch McConnell
Congratulations, Mitch McConnell! You now have the hardest job in Washington.
That dubious distinction used to belong to belong to House Speaker John Boehner, who has struggled since 2011 to manage a GOP majority so unwieldy he called it everything from “frogs in a wheelbarrow” to the “knucklehead” caucus.
But as the incoming Senate majority leader, it will now fall to McConnell to receive legislation from the House, shepherd it past his 53-member majority, and deliver completed bills to the president, all while keeping the government open for business.
McConnell’s difficult job will be made enormously more complicated by the makeup of his incoming three-seat majority. It includes at least three senators eyeing a run for president (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul), and 11 new Republican members, three of whom have been pegged by grassroots activists as the conservative cavalry riding in as reinforcements for the Cruz wing of the party.
Those senators—Joni Ernst of Iowa, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Ben Sasse from Nebraska—were all breakout stars for activists in the 2014 cycle. They raked in millions of dollars from outside groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund, and are the three that conservatives like Steve Deace, the nationally syndicated conservative radio host from Iowa, say they expect the most from.
“What I heard from conservatives I talked to around the country during the election was ‘Who is going to go there and help out Cruz and [Sen. Mike] Lee? Who is going to help out the wacko birds?’” said Deace, referring to the derisive term Sen. John McCain once used to describe Cruz that conservatives now wear as a badge of honor. “Our expectation is that [Ernst, Cotton and Sasse] are going to join the ranks of the wacko birds. That’s our expectation.”
Deace and his listeners won’t be the only ones looking to the trio to for results. So will conservative donors. The Senate Conservatives Fund and its affiliate Senate Conservatives Action, for example, plowed millions into the Iowa, Nebraska and Arkansas races. Ernst received nearly $450,000 in bundled contributions and $475,000 in independent expenditures from the groups for her race. Sasse got $487,000 in bundled contributions and more than $835,000 in outside expenditures in his GOP primary. Cotton picked up about $200,000 in bundled SCF money and saw more than $500,000 in outside SCF money in his race against Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor.
Another major conservative group, Club for Growth Action, poured more than $800,000 into Cotton’s race against Pryor, about $500,000 against Sasse’s primary opponents, and another $297,151 and $186,587 in bundled donations for Cotton and Sasse, respectively.
The first place conservatives will look to the new freshmen to make their voices heard is on immigration, which Ernst and SCF both call “executive amnesty.” The president has indicated he’ll soon take sweeping unilateral action, a move McConnell said won’t draw him into a government shutdown fight when he takes over the majority.
“There won’t be a government shutdown,” McConnell pledged Thursday, a commitment that left conservatives livid.
“Mitch McConnell is making promises he can’t keep,” Deace said. “Whatever enjoyment McConnell got out of being elected leader, enjoy it. Because from this point forward, power is going to be leaving his hands.”
Jim Manley, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, predicted that McConnell and the Republicans will safely navigate the lame-duck session, but once the new senators are sworn in, “All bets are off.”
“Sen. McConnell has got a whole bunch of people in his caucus, including those up in 2016, who realize the current strategy [of obstruction] is not going to work, and they need to put some legislative points on the scoreboard,” Manley said. “But whether that’s going to play out remains to be seen, in part because there are three Republicans running for president, none of whom care much about the Senate as an institution nor about their other colleagues’ views, quite frankly. And there are a handful of incoming senators who are very, very conservative.”
But Ron Bonjean, who was a senior staffer to Sen. Trent Lott when he was majority leader, said McConnell not only will have to consider the instincts of conservatives during those votes, but also the needs of several Republicans like Pat Toomey, who is up for reelection in 2016 the blue state of Pennsylvania.
“I do think McConnell knows how to manage his caucus,” Bonjean said. “While there will definitely be turbulence because he has more members to deal with, there are also some other dynamics at play for some of these members.”
Bonjean predicted that like Boehner, McConnell will need to have a majority of his majority on board to get a bill to the floor, but also will have to make the bills bipartisan enough to avoid a Democratic filibuster.
“Here’s the problem: Even if McConnell has all 53 Republicans, he’s got to get to 60 votes,” Bonjean said. “That’s very difficult to do, so they’re going to have to go for bipartisan victories to begin with, low-hanging fruit that can move through the Senate to show that they can get the work done.”
But low-hanging, bipartisan bills are exactly what Cruz and the grassroots conservatives backing Ernst, Sasse, and Cotton say they don’t want, especially in the face of an Obama executive order.
“I took an hour of calls yesterday asking what Congress should do if the president acts alone on immigration,” Deace said. “Every call, all over the country, men and women, all said the same thing: Impeach him.”
By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, November 17, 2014
“Boehner Wants To Expand Magic Obama Lawsuit”: Another Sign Republicans Don’t Have Specific Policies To Articulate And Fight For
House Speaker John Boehner’s magic lawsuit against President Barack Obama is back! And he’s considering whether to try to use it to solve his immigration problem.
Initially, the suit was intended to address a real issue for the Speaker and his party: Many Republicans were fed up with the normal frustrations of separated institutions sharing powers under divided government. Their answer was to take dramatic – but counterproductive – action, such as impeaching the president.
The lawsuit was Boehner’s solution. It was enough of a radical gesture that Republicans could feel they were doing something about the lawless Kenyan socialist in the Oval Office. But, unlike impeachment or shutting down the government, it wasn’t so radical that it would make Republicans sound like a bunch of crazy people to the 80 percent of the electorate that doesn’t get all its information from conservative talk radio.
One of the drawbacks, however, is that every precedent suggests the courts would dismiss the suit because the House doesn’t have standing to sue the president. The Republicans’ solution? Make a big fuss about the suit, even have the House vote to authorize it (thus allowing Republicans to claim they voted to Do Something about Obama), but neglect to actually file it.
The brilliance of this tactic is becoming obvious, because it turns out that the hypothetical lawsuit — which hasn’t been filed and dismissed — can be expanded to cover any new White House outrage. Magic!
So with Obama reportedly about to take executive action on immigration — which Republicans assume he has no authority to do based on their narrow, Obama-specific reading of presidential powers — Boehner once against needs to distract his cohorts from talking about impeachment or shutting down the government. Will the lawsuit do the trick? It just might.
By the way, frustration is inherent to the U.S. political system and normal political parties just try to make the best possible deal. Republicans, however, are faced with a rank and file that sees compromise as evil. And on several issues, including immigration, they don’t have a specific policy to articulate and fight for.
That is what makes magic lawsuits an ideal solution. The goal isn’t public policy; it’s expressions of outrage. And the job for Republican leaders isn’t to move public policy as close to their ideal as possible, it’s to find ways to channel the most potent expressions of outrage without hurting the party’s standing with voters.
I have no idea how long the magic lawsuit will work, but it succeeded admirably over the summer, and maybe it’s still potent enough for this immigration situation, too. And that’s also part of the reason Boehner continues to be an underrated Speaker of the House.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Bloomberg View; The National Memo, November 17, 2014
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