Posted on 07/28/2014 2:45:19 AM PDT by markomalley
Amnesty is coming — big time.
Americans need to brace themselves for a huge new wave of Obama-led lawlessness because the president is planning what a top schemer in the White House calls a “very significant” executive action on immigration after the summer.
Undoubtedly this means some kind of amnesty for illegal aliens is in the works over and above what Obama has already done, the Constitution and public fury notwithstanding.
Obama’s “planned executive orders” would give legal status “to another 5–6 million illegal immigrants,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, (R-Alabama). “This would effectively end immigration enforcement in America.”
Leftist congressman Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) boasted Friday that the Obama administration could unilaterally provide legal status to as many as 5 million illegals. The lawmaker said he planned to meet with White House officials “to negotiate additional terms and avenues the president can use” through executive action.
“I think we can get 3 or 4, maybe even 5 million people,” Gutiérrez said.
The news comes as Americans grow increasingly angry over the border crisis that has been staged and carefully choreographed by the far-left levelers of the Obama administration. Flames of discontent are flickering even in places like Lynn, Massachusetts, long a Democratic Party bastion, as local residents grow weary of the seemingly unending influx of illegal aliens that they are hard-pressed to feed, house, and clothe. As many as an estimated 10,000 people protested illegal immigration outside the Massachusetts legislature in Boston over the weekend.
Because a U.S. Senate-approved immigration package has very limited possibility of passing the House, Obama has decided yet again to usurp the power of the Congress and make law, a clear violation of the Constitution and an impeachable offense.
But instead of getting serious about border security, the Obama administration views the ongoing invasion by gang members, criminals, and other illegal immigrants from Central America as an opportunity to dynamite what remains of the nation’s southern border. He doesn’t care that plenty of illegal aliens, many of them children, are dying in the act of crossing the border. They are mere collateral damage in the pursuit of so-called justice.
Borrowing a catch-phrase popular among Alinskyite community organizers, Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer said Friday that the crisis confers “broad permission” to act. The president intends to do an end-run around the “broken Congress” and move forward after consulting with Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Security Jeh Johnson, said Pfeiffer whose official title is Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor.
Obama wants to make sure that whatever he does is on “solid legal footing” and has maximum impact, Pfeiffer said. Pro-illegal alien groups like the National Council of La Raza want Obama to stay deportation proceedings for millions of illegals and place those people on a so-called path to citizenship consistent with an immigration reform bill approved by the Senate but stalled in the House, the Christian Science Monitor reports.
Pretending he’s interesting in the well-being of the Grand Old Party, Pfeiffer implied Republicans will take heat from voters if they oppose the Obama scheme.
Republican lawmakers will have to make a decision, he said: “Are they going to go back and try to pass comprehensive immigration reform – [after] which the president will rip up whatever executive action he does the day they pass that? Or are they basically going to set themselves up for the next two and a half years here to be arguing to elect a Republican in order to deport all these people?”
Pfeiffer threw out the red herring of impeachment, as if risk-averse Republicans in the Senate would ever convict Obama of what the Constitution calls “high crimes and misdemeanors” and remove him from office.
“The president acting on immigration reform will certainly up the likelihood that [Republicans] would contemplate impeachment at some point,” said Pfeiffer in an effort to drum up donations to the Democrats’ war chest.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said he has no interest in initiating the impeachment process.
“This is a fundraising exercise for Democrats,” said Boehner aide Michael Steel. “It is telling, and sad, that a senior White House official is focused on political games, rather than helping these kids and securing the border.”
Steel wasn’t just shooting from the hip. The Washington Times reports that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) immediately began begging supporters for money after Pfeiffer’s statement. The email suggested that Boehner’s planned lawsuit against Obama for overstepping his constitutional authority “could lead to the impeachment of President Obama.”
Left-wing activists secretly plotted with Obama at a June 30 White House meeting, Time reports:
They hope [Obama's] decision will offer relief to a significant percentage of the estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. ‘He seems resolute that he’s going to go big and go soon,’ says Frank Sharry, executive director of the pro-reform group America’s Voice.
An incredibly awful reform bill approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate last year is languishing in the Republican-controlled House. Open borders advocates hope lawmakers move on the legislation in the lame duck session of Congress that is expected to follow the November election.
Sen. Sessions previously described the measure as “dangerous,” saying it will devastate America’s labor marketplace and “guarantee” the country will have to grant “another amnesty” in the future.
In a time of unremittingly high unemployment, record food-stamp dependency, and economic stagnation, a minimum of 11 million illegal immigrants would immediately be given Social Security cards that would allow them to compete for government and blue collar jobs. The legislation puts “tremendous pressure” on the job market and makes it harder for workers to find jobs and leave welfare programs, according to Sessions.
Although amnesty remains deeply unpopular among the American public at large, the activist Left wants the low-ball estimate of 11 million illegal aliens present in the U.S. to be processed because they see them as future Democratic voters. In addition, many labor unions, such as SEIU (which has executives focused solely on immigration issues) see today’s illegals as future union members. Business lobbies favor amnesty because they crave the cheap, largely unskilled labor.
The Left’s goal with the current immigration bill, which a Heritage Foundation study found would lard $6.3 trillion onto the nation’s budget deficits over the coming 50 years, is the same as with most of its major policy initiatives over the past half century: To destroy the American system.
As this writer has opined previously, the radicals’ goal is to use immigration to subvert the American system, just as it has been since the 1960s when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) shepherded reform of that era’s comparatively sensible immigration laws through Congress. The goal is to import Third World tyranny by flooding America with people who don’t share Americans’ traditional philosophical commitment to the rule of law, limited government, and markets. This would force changes in American society. Latinos are particularly hard to win over to the Republican side because they tend to be ideologically aligned with big-government solutions traditionally associated with Democrats.
An added benefit, from the Left’s perspective, is such a sweeping amnesty would destroy once and for all the Republican Party. Any new bleeding-heart voters it brings into the party will not even come close to offsetting the all-but-certain exodus of fed-up conservatives that enactment of the legislation would spur. Among those disgruntled Republican-leaning voters are the same people whose failure to vote in November 2012 helped to deprive GOP candidate Mitt Romney of the presidency.
Democrats, on the other hand, know with much greater certainty that the legislation will secure more votes for their party. “This legislation is all about the Democrats bringing in new voters who will assure them of a permanent leftist majority,” Paul Mirengoff has written.
President Obama is, of course, a master thespian.
To low-information voters, Obama must now seem like he is coming to the rescue, nipping a growing problem in the bud.
In fact he created all of this political theater, this manufactured border crisis, precisely so he could solve it. And the Radical-in-Chief doesn’t care how many people get hurt or killed as a result of his malevolence.
Yep, and there’s no law that can be written that can prevent a president’s constitutional power.
I think we’re screwed on this one. Zero recourse.
Yes, just as I thought. Obama doesn’t need congress to grand pardon, and amnesty can be a synonym for reprieve or the result of reprieve.
It was probably part of what got Johnson impeached, but there will no impeachment of the first black president. It simply won’t happen, whether or not it should happen.
And we have to wonder if he will make that pardon for all who have or WILL enter illegally. That could only be rescinded by a future president.
At what point do we Americans decide we have nothing left to lose and respond accordingly. Vigilante style.
Remember the irate town hall meetings where citizens lambasted the Democrats’ plan of “free health care”?
Hugely unpopular, even more so now, but they rammed it through anyway, making themselves exempt of course.
Same thing here and the GOP eunuchs will do nothing.
CW II? As ‘Charlie Waits’ put it, “Some things are worse than dying.”
And I’m fed up with tyranny.
We have never before had a president who was so anti-American and brazen about it before. Obama’s going to do it. The only question is how will the 300 million real Americans react to it?
Ho Hum or a call to arms?
His thinking?
I imagine he thinks that he’s losing the senate anyway, and the House is already in Rino hands, and he’ll not be convicted for exercising a constitutional power. It can hardly be a ‘high crime or misdemeanor’ to exercise authority granted you by the constitution.
So, he’s a ‘lame duck’ for 2 more years. He’ll play golf and simply not care. Vetoing a bill takes a minute, and it’s extremely hard to override.
The media will turn the final 18 months in a 24/7 dialogue about the candidates running in primaries, and it will pass out of the news cycle, and that will be the end of it.
America will not rise up.
America will scale down from Applebees to Arbys and continue in their fog.
You know there is only one way that can be accomplished.
I will not speculate on what that way might be, but I will support all appropriate efforts to restore constitutional government and the rule of law in our country.
I have thought about this issue and it is true that Obama has the power to grant pardons and reprieves, but his power is limited to pardoning and granting reprieves for crimes against the United States. He could stop the prosecution of illegal aliens for entering into the United States and even for breaking such laws as working without a green card or even for using false identification.
However, he does not have the power to grant anyone the right to continue to break the law after amnesty is granted, nor does he have the power or authority to change the status of an illegal alien to a legal resident. He can pardon people for breaking the law, but he can’t unilaterally change the law.
In other words, all he can do is stop the criminal proceedings. He can’t stop the civil proceedings such as deportations based on status defined as unlawful under current law.
So if he grants a blanket amnesty, that will really have no effect on the status of illegal aliens other than to prohibit them from being prosecuted for specific criminal violations done before the amnesty.
Those are all good points, but I think there’s a difference between reprieves and pardons. The constitution says he has both powers. The pardon takes away the vulnerability to prosecution by altogether taking away the crime. The reprieve — when reprieve is defined as relief — means that he can grant them relief. What relief can he grant them that would best fit his agenda?
Work status.
And, as you have so carefully pointed out in the past, once status is granted, some court will find it a violation of our laws to have a group that is in some kind of limbo status — allowed to be in our country but now allowed to file citizenship paperwork. Allowed to work, but not to participate. Some court will find that the equivalent of servitude.
I do not believe Obama has the Constitutional authority to grant anyone a specific right to work absent them obtaining a valid green card under the existing laws. Now they could become eligible to apply if somehow their status was changed from illegal alien to invited guest. But I don’t really see that as implied in the pardon clause. Only Congress has the power to change the laws and actually grant a wholesale change in status.
If Obama tries it, and I am certain he will, it will be challenged in court. What happens there is anybody’s guess.
I’m not trying to sound pessimistic; I just managing to accomplish that anyway.
I agree with everything you write.
My only holdback is on the definition of the word “reprieve”. It has a secondary meaning of ‘relief’. Whatever it means, I assume the Founders intended it to mean something different than the word ‘pardon’. They generally did not toss around synonyms for hope of writing engaging prose.
If the courts see ‘reprieve’ as ‘relief’, then it means Obama CAN suspend such laws in the case of those he has pardoned.
And we already know that pardon means that a convicted criminal has had those laws, and a legal conviction, set aside.
I’m beginning to think this ‘pardon’ power is a mistake on the Founder’s part. Ford/Nixon, Clinton/Rich, and I’m sure others. Nothing to brag about.
I think that the word “reprieve” would not be a sufficient word to change a person’s immigration status from illegal alien to green card holder absent the person going through the normal hoops that legal aliens have to go through. A reprieve is generally used to commute sentences after conviction and a pardon is used to undo a conviction or prevent a prosecution for an offense already committed.
Obama can try this, but it will be heard in the courts. This would be an unprecedented usurpation of legislative authority
Let’s say he does it. Imagine that he pardons all illegals, and those who hire them, and he says they’re free to stay and work, but must apply for status.
Will someone take him to court? What will happen when they try to take an employer or an illegal to court?
It will be utter chaos.
And he’ll be gone before it’s over.
Ask Speaker Boehner or minority leader McConnell.
Disgusting gutless poltroons worrying about their power positions within the party and what the NYT will write about them while the COUNTRY BURNS.
Here in northern NJ you’d hear Hindi, Korean, and Ordu as well. Mostly foreigners shopping, and they’re smart with their money; our malls are hurting badly.
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