Posts

Senator: Obama’s Amnesty Gives Illegals A Fast-Track To Voting Booth

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: American Spectator

Photo Credit: American Spectator

by Daily Caller

President Barack Obama’s Nov. 21 amnesty puts millions of illegals on a fast-track to citizenship, Utah Sen. Mike Lee announced Thursday.

Obama and his administration “have cleared the pathway to citizenship for millions of people who have crossed our borders illegally,” Lee said in a Thursday speech on the Senate floor.

“They know what they have done, and it is illegal,” he added.

Obama’s amnesty allows illegals with U.S.-born children to briefly leave the country, perhaps for a business meeting in Canada, and then be given “advanced parole” by border officials that lets them legally return to the United States.

Once they have legally returned under “advanced parole,” they can be immediately sponsored for a green card and citizenship by their adult child, he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

See the 17 States Who Filed a Lawsuit Challenging O's Executive Amnesty

/14 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Breitbart

Photo Credit: Breitbart

Seventeen states are involved in a lawsuit filed Wednesday challenging President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and the governors of Mississippi, Maine, North Carolina and Idaho filed the suit in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Texas.

The states — led by Texas — charge that Obama’s actions violate the president’s duty under the Constitution to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

“The Constitution’s Take Care Clause limits the President’s power and ensures that he will faithfully execute Congress’s laws – not rewrite them under the guise of ‘prosecutorial discretion,’” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said after filing.

Abbott, who will become governor in January, went on to call the immigration orders “nothing but an unlawfully adopted legislative rule: an executive decree that requires federal agencies to award legal benefits to individuals whose conduct contradicts the priorities of Congress.”

Read more from this story HERE.

____________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: AP / Susan Walsh

Photo Credit: AP / Susan Walsh

LEFT MOCKS: Claims ‘War’ on Obama’s Immigration Order Lasted About 5 Minutes…

By Sahil Kapur.

Five months ago, conservatives were so livid over President Barack Obama’s upcoming “executive amnesty” that incoming House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) couldn’t bring himself to rule out impeaching the president as punishment.

Now, even firebrand Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Obama’s chief immigration foes, have ruled that out. GOP leaders were never seriously considering the idea, but they’ve successfully tamped down any talk of it.

What’s more, Republicans may be on the brink of avoiding a government shutdown fight, at least until March, and effectively permitting the executive actions by “Emperor Obama,” as Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) office has dubbed him, with no pushback other than a symbolic vote of disapproval.

Republicans don’t have the votes for this watered down plan yet, and it could still collapse. But it has significant GOP support, a sign that the fury has calmed quite a bit.

How did things change so much?

Read more from this story HERE.

__________________________________________________________________

Gutiérrez presses ‘millions’ to get documents ready for legal status

By Sarah Ferris.

Immigration reform champion Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) on Tuesday urged undocumented immigrants to take quick advantage of President Obama’s executive actions giving them temporary legal status.

Speaking in both English and Spanish, he urged those eligible for the new program to also get their paperwork ready for legal status.

“When that door opens, we should have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, with their documents, ready to submit them,” Gutiérrez said at a Capitol Hill press conference. “While Republicans are complaining and bellyaching, we’re going to act.”

Gutiérrez appeared with five other Democrats who sit on the House Judiciary Committee, which will consider on Tuesday the legality of Obama’s actions.

The Chicago-area lawmaker slammed Republicans for trying to derail Obama’s plans for immigration reform without presenting other options.

Read more from this story HERE.

House Passes Symbolic Measure to 'Block' Obama's Executive Amnesty

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

By Guy Benson.

It’s symbolic because it’s dead on arrival in Harry Reid’s Senate (a formulation that will meet its glorious expiration date in a few weeks), and because President Obama has already issued a veto threat if Reid and company accidentally passed the thing. Congressional Republicans, and some Democrats, believe that Obama lacks the authority to impose his amnesty fiat. Obama disagrees, naturally — although his stance on that question was both adamant and completely different not too long ago. Barack Obama’s legal constraints depend on Barack Obama’s political needs. Regardless, this afternoon’s vote was little more than an on-the-record ‘sense of the House’ rebuke:

A small handful of partisans on each side broke with their parties; conservative Democrats, and a number of Republicans from heavily Hispanic districts. The narrative that this vote was at its core about immigration, rather than preserving the Constitutional order, was too powerful for some to resist, evidently. Which helps explain why the White House has zero problem flouting the law and pushing executive power as far as its has: Republicans have few viable retaliatory options, and the separation of powers issue at stake is easily sidetracked and demagogued as just more proof that the GOP hates brown people, or whatever. So long as the public loathes the idea of a shutdown, and so long as that same public is primed to reflexively blame Republicans for any shutdown, the GOP is basically cornered. They and their base don’t want to allow Obama’s power grab to go unchallenged, but many of the tools at their disposal aren’t politically attractive or practical. Hence the White House’s extraordinary arrogance.

Read more from this story HERE.

______________________________________________________________________

SOWELL: ‘PSYCHIATRIST’ NEEDED TO EXPLAIN GOP WANTING MORE FOREIGN WORKERS

By Breitbart TV.

Thomas Sowell, author of “Basic Economics,” argued that increasing the number of foreign workers in the US “will keep down the wages of American workers” and that “you would have to get a psychiatrist” to explain the GOP’s support for increased foreign labor on Thursday’s “Laura Ingraham Show.”

“The competition will keep down the wages of American workers, I mean, this is not a new principle. I mean this has been known for hundreds of years,” he stated.

Read more from this story HERE.

______________________________________________________________________

Senate Conservatives Huddle With House Members to Plot Immigration Revolt

By Joel Gehrke.

A trio of senators crossed the Capitol last night to discuss the congressional response to President Obama’s recent executive orders on immigration. The consensus: Republican leadership doesn’t want to fight Obama, so the lawmakers have to hope that grassroots activists can goad their colleagues into a more aggressive posture.

“I hope that the American people will speak up and share their views with Congress and good strong language will come out of the House,” Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) told NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE Thursday afternoon.

Sessions demurred when asked about coordination with House colleagues — “all of us are curious about what they’re doing,” he said — but multiple sources tell NROthat Sessions, Senator David Vitter (R., La.), and Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) met with a group of House members last night in the office of Arizona representative Matt Salmon. Vitter also organized a conference call with some House Republicans Wednesday afternoon. The purpose of the two encounters, which happened on the same day that Texas senator Ted Cruz met with Iowa representative Steve King, was to emphasize that “the first bill that you guys do was really our best and only chance,” according to one Senate aide; the Senate hawks won’t be able to instigate a fight if the House passes a bill that provides long-term funding for the entire government.

In the evening meeting, the lawmakers compared notes about their distrust for Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and House speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio)

Read more from this story HERE.

'A Well-Understood Agreement': Top GOP Leader Promises Total Amnesty In 2015

/9 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

House Speaker John Boehner’s top committee chairman says he wants an immigration bill that would allow millions of foreign migrants to stay and work jobs sought by Americans.

“I’m going to use my assets and resources in the new year to work with this Congress… to have a well-understood agreement about what the law should be, and how we as communities, and farm communities, and tech communities, create circumstances where we can have people be in this country and work, and where not one person is quote ‘thrown out’ or ‘deported,’” said Rep. Pete Sessions, the chairman of the powerful House rules committee, told a group of Democratic legislators.

The committee has the power to kill or boost members’ bills because it decides how each bill will be considered in floor votes.’

Sessions’ promise of de-facto amnesty to Democrats was welcomed by Chicago Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who frequently describes unauthorized migrants as members of his community.

“My heart was filled with a lot of joy when you said that people who are working here, who don’t present a danger, basically should be set aside, that those aren’t the people we should be going after,” said Gutierrrez, four hours and 16 minutes into the hearing.

Read more from this story HERE.

WATCH: Even Saturday Night Live Hammers Obama For His Lawlessness

/2 Comments/in , /by

0 (4)The term *facepalm* (The act of dropping one’s face / forehead into one’s hand) may be the most fitting end-reaction to watching this skit. (Following the laughter, of course.)

The breakdown:

A bill (Kenan Thompson) and an executive order (Bobby Moynihan) explain how government really works with a little help from President Obama (Jay Pharaoh).

Now watch and weep.

Actually, Republicans Can Cut The Funding For Obama’s Amnesty

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Getty

Photo Credit: Getty

Congress has the power to defund President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty order, the Congressional Research Service announced Wednesday. This, after a week of bipartisan declarations that Congress was powerless to stop the order.

“In light of Congress’s constitutional power over the purse, the Supreme Court has recognized that ‘Congress may always circumscribe agency discretion to allocate resources by putting restrictions in the operative statutes,’” reads a report from the Congressional Research Service. The report was sent to Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions’ office, first reported by Breitbart News, and has since been obtained by The Daily Caller.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is an “authoritative, confidential, objective and nonpartisan” congressional analysis outfit that operates out of the Library of Congress.

The analysis stands in stark contrast with a previous analysis by the Republican-dominated House Appropriations Committee, which issued a Thursday statement saying that the agency tasked with executing the order, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, ”is entirely self-funded through the fees it collects on various immigration applications. Congress does not appropriate funds for any of its operations, including the issuance of immigration status or work permits, with the exception of the ‘E-Verify’ program. Therefore, the appropriations process cannot be used to ‘defund’ the agency.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Four Pinocchios: WaPo Fact-Checker Shreds WH on Executive Amnesty 'Precedent'

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

If you’ve been following our coverage of President Obama’s executive action on immigration, you already know that a key pillar of the White House’s defense is that plenty of precedent exists for this type of move. Nothing to see here, except a bunch of anti-Obama overreaction from the usual suspects (if the “usual suspects” include multiple Congressional Democrats and Independents). We’ve repeatedly linked to a pair of columns that take apart the Obama administration’s dishonest justification; they point out that Obama’s move is much, much broader in scope and implication than anything executed by his predecessors — whose far narrower previous orders either applied to discrete, targeted groups of people, or were issued in an effort to enforce a duly-passed law. The White House seems to be gravitating toward one ostensible parallel in particular, stating that Obama’s decision is comparable to President George HW Bush’s 1990 action on immigration. The president himself touted this exampleduring his appearance on ABC’s This Week, which we discussed earlier:

“If you look, every president – Democrat and Republican – over decades has done the same thing as I mentioned in my remarks,” he added. “George H. W. Bush, about 40 percent of the undocumented persons at the time were provided a similar kind of relief as a consequence of executive action.” When asked about using executive action, the president said his view on the issue has not changed. “If you look – the history is that I have issued fewer executive actions than most of my predecessors, by a longshot,” Obama said. “The difference is the response of Congress, and specifically the response of some of the Republicans. But if you ask historians, take a look at the track records of the modern presidency, I’ve actually been very restrained, and I’ve been very restrained with respect to immigration. I bent over backwards and will continue to do everything I can to get Congress to work because that’s my preference.”

First off, tallying the raw number of executive orders is pure misdirection. Conservatives aren’t objecting to how many unilateral actions Obama has taken; they’re upset about the magnitude, impact and context of those decisions. Obama surely realizes this, but since he’s staked much of his legacy on the “stupidity” of the American people, this sort of answer is par for the course. As for the ‘Bush did it, too!’ excuse, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler — who last week dismantled Obama’s ‘royal flip-flop’ on the legality of this decree — again goes to work:

Bush’s action in 1990 was designed to ease family disruptions caused by the landmark 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which allowed nearly 3 million illegal immigrants to gain legal permanent residency…The 1.5 million [40 percent] figure is too fishy to be cited by either the White House or the media. As best we can tell, this is a rounded-up estimate of the number of illegal immigrants who were married (1.3 million became 1.5 million.) But that figure was already overstated because it included applications that were pending or on appeal…Indeed, the 100,000 estimate that the INS gave on the day of the announcement might have been optimistic. Fewer than 50,000 applications had been received before the policy was superseded by a new law. The numbers generated by that law — a little more than 140,000 — further indicate that the universe of potential applicants was much smaller than 1.5 million, especially given that the law eased restrictions even more. In the end, 200,000 amounts to about 6 percent of the illegal immigrant population at the time, not 40 percent. Small wonder the White House prefers the larger number.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Cost of Changing The Law 'Willy Nilly': $2 Trillion

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

President Barack Obama’s amnesty for four million illegal immigrants will cost Americans about $2 trillion, or roughly $40 billion a year for the next five decades.

The cost of Obama’s generosity is equivalent to 30 cents extra for every gallon of gas bought by Americans.

Or a $10 monthly fee added to every cellphone.

Or a $22,000 tax on every American graduate’s four-year college degree.

The $2 trillion cost is driven by the federal government’s support for all poor people, says Robert Rector, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Rector explained that, on average, the illegal immigrants benefiting from the amnesty have a 10th grade education.

Read more from this story HERE.

Kansas Secretary of State to File Suit Against King Obama's Executive Amnesty

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

TONGANOXIE, KAN. – [Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach] has devoted his career to an immigration fight he always believed would be incremental. First he sued states for offering in-state college tuition to illegal immigrants. Then he wrote tough immigration enforcement laws for Arizona and Alabama. Then he counseled Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) on the legality of using the National Guard to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. He has been playing the long game, hoping to build a consensus case against amnesty over the course of his career . . .

People are enraged. They ask about the possibilities of impeachment or arresting the president for treason, and Kobach shakes his head. “Then what can we do?” one man asks.

Kobach says he has spent the last week considering that question, and he can think of only two options. “Congress could vote to defund parts of the government,” he says, but his friends in Congress tell him that is unlikely. The other option is a lawsuit filed by states and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents against the federal government. “That one’s on me,” he says. He tells the group he has already begun drafting a suit as the lead attorney, with plans to file it in early December. Texas is interested in being a plaintiff. So are a few other states. . .

“What bothers me most is the constitutionality of this,” he tells one Republican lawmaker over the phone, the day after Obama’s [amnesty] announcement. Kobach is working on the lawsuit, 40 or 50 pages already written. “We have a clear violation here of Article 2, Section 3,” he says. . .

The key to his lawsuit is finding the right plaintiffs, he says, so he has spent the last weeks compiling a list of more than a dozen ICE agents who he says are eager to file suit. They were hired and trained to enforce the country’s immigration laws, and now, he says, they believe that the president is essentially asking them to break those laws. Kobach also wants at least one state to be a plaintiff, likely Texas and possibly others. States are “lining up to sue this time,” he says. He could file one lawsuit on behalf of several states, which he thinks might have the best chance of reaching the Supreme Court. Or he could file individual lawsuits, one for each state, and force the issue into several federal court districts.

Read more from this story HERE.

Mexico and Central America Thank Obama for Amnesty Decree

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The presidents of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, the leading source countries of illegal immigrants in the United States, hailed Obama’s executive decree to stop the deportation of many of their compatriots.

Obama’s unilateral measures will shield nearly five million illegal immigrant from U.S. immigration laws by granting them work permits, Social Security numbers, and deportation reprieves.

In administering the president’s overhaul of America’s immigration laws, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will prioritize the removal of certain serious criminal aliens.

Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are the top four countries where the majority of illegal aliens in the United States originate, according to the latest DHS estimate of the unauthorized immigrant population living in the U.S. The DHS data is consistent with most recent estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center.

About 73 percent of the estimated 11.4 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. were born in Mexico (6.7 million), El Salvador (690,000), Guatemala (560,000), and Honduras (360,000), DHS data shows.

Read more from this story HERE.