“Remaining Vigilant”: Attorney General Eric Holder, “Civil Rights Under Renewed Threat”
In an address to the National Council of La Raza convention in Las Vegas on Saturday, Attorney General Eric Holder told the Hispanic advocacy group that the gains of the Civil Rights era were coming “under renewed threat,” and touted the administration’s efforts in protecting the rights of minority groups and immigrants.
“Many of you know this firsthand – and have felt the impact of division, and even discrimination, in your own lives,” said Holder in his address, according to prepared remarks released by the Justice Department.”
The attorney general pledged that the civil rights advocacy group would “never have a more committed partner than the United States Department of Justice” and touted the administration’s record on those issues.
In particular, Holder highlighted the Supreme Court’s ruling last week striking down much of Arizona’s law targeting illegal immigration.
In a 5-3 ruling, the court rejected most provisions of the law, but let stand a key measure allowing police to check the legal status of those stopped on suspicion of committing unrelated offenses.
Holder said with the decision, the justices were “confirming the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate with regard to immigration issues.”
But Holder, expressed concerns over the provision left standing. “We’ll work to ensure – as the Court affirmed – that such laws cannot be seen as a license to engage in racial profiling. And we’ll continue to enforce federal prohibitions against racial and ethnic discrimination, in order – as President Obama has promised – to “uphold our tradition as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants,” he said.
The attorney general also touted the administration’s decision to halt the deportation of some young illegal immigrants, a move popular within the Hispanic community, calling it “a significant – and long-overdue – improvement to our nation’s immigration policy.”
Holder said the next step was for lawmakers to push through more comprehensive immigration reform and he said the administration would “keep working with Congressional leaders – from both parties – to advance the passage of critical legislation like the DREAM Act.”
Holder’s address to the prominent Hispanic organization comes as both President Obama and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s campaigns boost their efforts to win over voters from the key demographic. Hispanics hold sway in many pivotal battleground states, adding to their importance this election cycle.
Polls, however, show Hispanics overwhelmingly backing Obama, bolstered in part by the decision to change deportation rules.
Holder told the civil rights group that the DOJ would remain vigilant to protect the rights of all Americans.
“Over the past three years, our Civil Rights Division has filed more criminal civil rights cases than during any other period in its history – including record numbers of human trafficking, hate crimes, and police misconduct cases,” said Holder, pledging that such efforts would remain a “top priority” for the department.
The Obama administration is also sending Vice President Biden to the convention. He is scheduled to speak on Tuesday.
Romney, however, will not be attending, and chose instead to send a surrogate, former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. Gutierrez was not given a speaking role and instead met with attendees at the conference.
By: Meghashyam Mali, The Hill, July 7, 2012
“A Blatant Political Actor”: Justice Scalia Must Resign
Justice Antonin Scalia needs to resign from the Supreme Court.
He’d have a lot of things to do. He’s a fine public speaker and teacher. He’d be a heck of a columnist and blogger. But he really seems to aspire to being a politician — and that’s the problem.
So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did this week, when the court announced its decision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of the line.
Not content with issuing a fiery written dissent, Scalia offered a bench statement questioning President Obama’s decision to allow some immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children to stay. Obama’s move had nothing to do with the case in question. Scalia just wanted you to know where he stood.
“After this case was argued and while it was under consideration, the secretary of homeland security announced a program exempting from immigration enforcement some 1.4 million illegal immigrants,” Scalia said. “The president has said that the new program is ‘the right thing to do’ in light of Congress’s failure to pass the administration’s proposed revision of the immigration laws. Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so. But to say, as the court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of federal immigration law that the president declines to enforce boggles the mind.”
What boggles the mind is that Scalia thought it proper to jump into this political argument. And when he went on to a broader denunciation of federal policies, he sounded just like an Arizona Senate candidate.
“Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem,” the politician-justice proclaimed. “Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are simply unwilling to do so.
“Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty — not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it.” Cue the tea party rally applause.
As it happens, Obama has stepped up immigration enforcement. But if the 76-year-old justice wants to dispute this, he is perfectly free as a citizen to join the political fray and take on the president. But he cannot be a blatantly political actor and a justice at the same time.
Unaccountable power can lead to arrogance. That’s why justices typically feel bound by rules and conventions that Scalia seems to take joy in ignoring. Recall a 2004 incident. Three weeks after the Supreme Court announced it would hear a case over whether the White House needed to turn over documents from an energy task force that Dick Cheney had headed, Scalia went off on Air Force Two for a duck-hunting trip with the vice president.
Scalia scoffed at the idea that he should recuse himself. “My recusal is required if . . . my ‘impartiality might reasonably be questioned,’ ” he wrote in a 21-page memo. Well, yes. But there was no cause for worry, Scalia explained, since he never hunted with Cheney “in the same blind or had other opportunity for private conversation.”
Don’t you feel better? And can you just imagine what the right wing would have said if Vice President Biden had a case before the court and went duck hunting with Justice Elena Kagan?
Then there was the speech Scalia gave at Switzerland’s University of Fribourg a few weeks before the court was to hear a case involving the rights of Guantanamo detainees.
“I am astounded at the world reaction to Guantanamo,” he declared in response to a question. “We are in a war. We are capturing these people on the battlefield. We never gave a trial in civil courts to people captured in a war. War is war and it has never been the case that when you capture a combatant, you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts. It’s a crazy idea to me.”
It was a fine speech for a campaign gathering, the appropriate venue for a man so eager to brand the things he disagrees with as crazy or mind-boggling. Scalia should free himself to pursue his true vocation. We can then use his resignation as an occasion for a searching debate over just how political this Supreme Court has become.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 27, 2012
“Not So Fast Missy”: How Jan Brewer and Many Others Got The Supreme Court’s Immigration Ruling Wrong
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer sounded triumphant Monday as she declared that the “heart” of SB 1070, Arizona’s harsh anti-illegal immigration law, had been “upheld” by the Supreme Court.
“The heart of Senate Bill 1070 has been proven to be constitutional. Arizona’s and every other state’s inherent authority to protect and defend its people has been upheld.”
There’s just one problem: The high court did not find any provision of Arizona’s law to be constitutional—it did not “uphold” any part of the law. The distinction here is a technical legal one, and plenty of reporters and media outlets got it wrong. (My first tweet about the ruling was wrong. Politico, the Los Angeles Times*, and PBS’ Newshour also initially misreported the ruling.) Other supporters of the law, including Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (who is a lawyer) also referred to part of the law being “upheld.”
Here’s what the Supreme Court actually did on Monday. The justices decided that the lower court that prevented SB 1070 from taking effect was mostly correct—because most of the law’s provisions were likely unconstitutional. The Supreme Court declined to block the “papers, please” provision of the law—which Brewer refers to as its “heart”—that requires local authorities to check the immigration status of anyone they arrest. But the high court did not find the controversial provision constitutional, and so it was not “upheld.” Instead, the high court deferred judgment on the matter. Saying that part of the law was “upheld” incorrectly implies that the court decided the “papers, please” provision was constitutional. The justices were actually decidedly agnostic on that point.
“The majority said it didn’t know enough about how the law would work in practice to rule decisively. Because the law has never gone into effect, it just wasn’t clear whether the law would conflict with federal policy.” says Adam Winkler, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law who wrote a column for the Daily Beast noting that many media outlets got the distinction wrong. “The court said to Arizona there’s a right way and a wrong way to apply this law and we’re watching you.”
Although it’s anyone’s guess how the court might ultimately rule on the “papers, please” provision, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion gives very specific guidance on how that part of the law should be enforced. That suggests that in the future, the court could very well find the provision unconstitutional—meaning that Brewer’s celebration was beyond premature.
“They absolutely left open the possiblity of future challenges,” says Elizabeth Wydra, chief counsel at the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center. “We achieved victory on three out of the four provisions [Monday], and I think it’s going to be a delayed victory on the fourth.”
By: Adam Serwer, Mother Jones, June 26, 2012
“Quiet Room Magical Thinking”: Mitt Romney Pretends Congress Doesn’t Exist
Mitt Romney went before a group of Latino public officials today to offer some remarks on immigration. Calling it a “plan” would be too generous, although there were a couple of details, some of them perfectly reasonable, like giving green cards to people who get an advanced degree at an American university. But the part everyone has been waiting for—his reaction to President Obama’s recently-announced mini-DREAM Act—was pretty disappointing, because it engaged in a kind of magical thinking that has become increasingly untenable:
Some people have asked if I will let stand the President’s executive action. The answer is that I will put in place my own long-term solution that will replace and supersede the President’s temporary measure. As President, I won’t settle for a stop-gap measure. I will work with Republicans and Democrats to find a long-term solution.
I will prioritize measures that strengthen legal immigration and make it easier. And I will address the problem of illegal immigration in a civil but resolute manner. We may not always agree, but when I make a promise to you, I will keep it.
It’s certainly nice to know he’ll be “resolute,” but you may have noticed that getting a major immigration reform through Congress is kind of a difficult thing to do. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both tried to do it and failed. So how is Mitt going to accomplish this feat? He will “put in place my own long-term solution.” Now why didn’t anyone think of that before?
This isn’t something new, of course—most challengers act as though through the overwhelming force of their personality, they’ll sweep away all opposition, bring both parties together, and get things done. The messy details are left for when you’re actually in office. Obama certainly talked that way four years ago. But after all we’ve been through in the last few years, isn’t it incumbent upon a presidential candidate to at least not pretend that enacting large, sweeping legislation that requires bipartisan cooperation on an intensely controversial issue is going to be a piece of cake?
Last weekend, Bob Schieffer asked Romney what he would do about the Obama policy while he was getting his awesome new policy in place, and Romney dodged the question. But no one who knows anything about Congress believes it’ll be anything but enormously difficult.
And it’ll be particularly difficult for Mitt Romney. It isn’t a matter of the complexity of the issue, as it was with health care reform where there were hundreds of small and large details to be worked out. In this case, it’s about the fragile coalition that would have to be assembled to pass immigration reform. I spoke today to a staffer for one of the most influential members of the House on the immigration issue, and he pointed out that there have been comprehensive immigration bills sitting around for ten years. The problem, he said, is the House Republicans. As long as they’re in control, no immigration bill that grants any undocumented immigrant anything other than a swift kick in the pants has any hope of passing. If a President Romney was to pass immigration reform, he’d have to do it with overwhelming support from Democrats and enough moderate Republicans peeled off to get to 218 votes.
But this is Mitt Romney we’re talking about. The guy who is going to have to spend his entire first term convincing conservatives he’s still one of them, lest he face a primary challenge from the right. What do you think are the chances he’d take on a high-profile fight with his party’s right wing, with the odds stacked against him?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 21, 2012
“Nutballs And Buffoons”: The GOP’s Next Internal Debate
This morning, Jeb Bush said some somewhat surprising things in a meeting with reporters, at least for a Republican. He noted that neither Ronald Reagan nor his father could be elected in today’s GOP, and said in essence that Mitt Romney had moved too far to the right on immigration. He also said some of the things you’d expect a Republican to say, like that the blame for the current partisan atmosphere lies with President Obama, because he didn’t seek common ground with Republicans enough. Anyone who has been watching politics for the last three and a half years knows how utterly insane this is, but in case you missed this tidbit, a bunch of influential congressional Republicans got together on the night of Obama’s inauguration to lay out a plan for how they would obstruct everything they could and sabotage his presidency.
The question of what Jeb is up to sheds some light on where his party is going to find itself this coming fall, should it lose the presidential election. The simplest explanation for his willingness to tenderly criticize other Republicans is that he is realistic about the country’s yearning for more Bushes in the White House, so he feels free to state the blindingly obvious about his party’s gallop to the right. The alternative answer, which Jonathan Chait suggests, is that Jeb “is clearly engaged in an effort to position himself as the next leader of the Republican Party.” Chait explains:
To understand what Bush is saying, you need to anticipate how the party might diagnose the causes of a loss in 2012, and then you can see how he is setting himself as the cure. Bush has been publicly urging Republicans to moderate their tone toward Latinos and to embrace immigration reform. Here is the one issue where Republicans, should they lose, will almost surely conclude that they need to moderate their party stance. The Latino vote is both growing in size and seems to be tilting ever more strongly toward the Democrats, a combination that will rapidly make the electoral map virtually unwinnable. Indeed, the body language of the Romney campaign suggests it already regrets the hard-line stances on immigration it adopted during the primary…
If you try to imagine the Republican consensus after a potential losing election, it will look like this [a moderation in tone, without a moderation in substance]. It will recognize that its harsh partisan rhetoric turned off voters, and will urgently want to woo Latinos, while holding on to as much as possible of the party’s domestic policy agenda. And oh, by the way, the party will be casting about for somebody to lead it.
Chait may indeed be right about what Jeb is thinking. But it’s important to remember that if Romney loses, there will be a vigorous debate within the GOP about why he lost, and the outcome of that debate is not completely certain. Many Republican leaders will certainly argue that the rhetoric got out of hand, and they’ll be right. But lots of other Republicans, including the remnants of the Tea Party and the people who represent them, will argue that there was only one reason Romney lost: he was too liberal. They will push for more hardline positions, more uncompromising obstruction, and more conservative candidates, at all levels but especially when it comes to the 2016 presidential race.
You might say, well, that happened in 2012, didn’t it? And the establishment’s candidate eventually prevailed. That’s true enough, but Mitt Romney had the good fortune to run against a remarkable collection of nutballs and buffoons. It isn’t as though defeating Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum makes you some kind of giant-killer. After a few months of those primaries, he came out looking like the closest thing the party had to a candidate who was in possession of all his faculties.
In every presidential election in the last half-century with the exception of 2000, Republicans have nominated the person who was “next in line,” almost always someone who had run for president before and come in second. But the closest thing to a next in line for 2016 will be Santorum, and the party couldn’t possibly be dumb enough to nominate him. There will likely be some candidates more acceptable to the establishment, and some who appeal more to the base. But the former group will still feel enormous pressure to move as far right as possible to placate those base voters. In other words, it’s possible Jeb Bush will wind up as the leader of the GOP. But if he does, it won’t be because he’s a moderate. It’ll be because, like Romney, he can give the base the wingnuttery it demands, while winking to the establishment that he’s not as crazy as he sounds.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 11, 2012
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