Once More, President Obama Is Doing The Republicans’ Jobs For Them

There is an idiom that parents and employers likely put in practice when an important task has to be completed correctly; “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” President Obama certainly understands that sentiment with a slight variation; if the nation wants anything done at all, the President has to do it himself due to Republicans who have done nothing since January 2009.

Sometime next week, after waiting patiently for Ted Cruz to order House Republicans to take up, and pass, the Senate’s bipartisan immigration reform, the President will take action on immigration reform. The President’s patience has been rewarded with Republican refusal to act despite overwhelming public support, so he will order a far-reaching overhaul of the immigration enforcement system that will protect at least five million undocumented immigrants from the threat of summary deportation.

The President has authority to enforce federal laws with discretion and his order will refocus the activities of immigration agents, including allowing many parents of American citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents to end the terror of being separated from their families and thrown out of “the shining city on a hill.” That part of the plan could affect 3.3 million people, but they have to have lived in America for at least five years according to analysis by the Migration Policy Institute. The plan also may include a much stricter policy to limit benefits to immigrants who have lived in America for at least ten years affecting approximately 2.5 million people.

The President is also considering extending protections to more undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, and to their parents, that could affect an additional one million people. There is also a possibility of protecting undocumented farm workers who have entered the country illegally, but have helped feed Americans for decades working in the agriculture industry.

Included in the enforcement overhaul are expanded opportunities for legal immigrants who have high-tech skills, and shifts extra security resources to the nation’s southern border. A new memorandum will direct immigration enforcement officials, border agents, and immigration judges to continue deportations for convicted criminals, foreigners who pose national security risks, and recent border crossers; Central American children are shielded under the George W. Bush law providing them with due process prior to being thrown out of America.

The President has overwhelming support from pro-immigration groups, Hispanics, 62% of Americans, and advocates who expect the President to take bold action after years of frustration, and seeing the wide-ranging Senate bipartisan immigration bill fall victim to Ted Cruz-Republicans in the House last year. In fact, a recent poll found that even 4 out of 5 Republicans, or 78%, support the President’s “stepped approach” to immigration reform their xenophobic Congress refuses to consider. The President has called for, and pledged to act on, immigration reform for six years, and clearly his patient reliance on white obstructionists doing anything whatsoever is at an end. The director of migration policy at the United States Council of Catholic Bishops, Kevin Appleby, said “This is his last chance to make good on his promise to fix the system. If he delays again, immigration activists would jump the White House fence.” However, the USCCB most certainly have ulterior motives for supporting immigration reform founded on documenting more Catholics; but at this juncture their support is welcomed regardless their theocratic reasons. Clearly, any Presidential executive action is necessary because Obama, like most Americans, knows Republican do-nothings have no intention to act on much-needed immigration reform; unless it means mobilizing the U.S. military, armed white militias, and weaponized drones at the Southern border in an act of war against, most recently, Central American immigrant children.

Republicans in Congress have already levied a rash of threats against the President for doing the job they refuse; work for the good of the people and the nation. In the Senate, a group of extremist teabaggers led by de facto Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader Texas Ted Cruz with Mike Lee of Utah and Jeff Sessions of Alabama in tow are already planning to thwart any executive action on immigration. The obstruction-minded fascists intend on rallying their Republican cabal to block passage of a budget next month unless it contains a measure abolishing President Obama’s executive authority to act on immigration. Teabagger Mike Lee said “I think it’s very important for us to do what we can to prevent it (executive action and immigration reform),” and it includes, at least, shutting down the government; a prospect Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have proposed to abolish President Obama’s authority to use executive actions on anything.

In the House, “official” Speaker John Boehner warned the President that if he exercised his executive authority on immigration, Republicans would “fight the President tooth and nail. He also warned the President that Republicans would sue him for using executive authority as the said promised over the Affordable Care Act. Boehner also refused to rule out shutting down the government if the President dared to be President. Boehner said, “We are looking at all options, and they’re on the table.”

What irks Republicans to no end is that the primary features of President Obama’s plan are founded on longstanding legal precedents granting the executive branch the right to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” in how it enforces laws. In fact, it is precisely those precedents that informed the President’s decision in 2012 to protect children who were brought to America by their parents through no fault of their own, and “dream” of being “legal citizens;” they are, for all intents and purposes Americans. Republicans, and their white xenophobic base, want them and likely all Hispanics, deported with prejudice whether they are undocumented or not.

Republicans have had six years under President Obama, and eight years under Bush to reform immigration policy, but they have adhered closely to their agenda of doing nothing positive for the people or the nation; particularly since 2008. Their only action over the past four years is taking any and everything from the people and handing it all to the rich. President Obama has exercised nothing but patience in waiting for Republicans to act on immigration reform, and as he said shortly after the midterms, “Before the end of the year, we’re going to take whatever lawful actions that I can take to improve the functioning of our immigration system. What I’m not going to do is just wait.” Throughout this President’s tenure, with obstructionist Republicans in Congress, anything that has needed to be done he has had to do himself. It is why Republicans seriously need to put in practice what they claim America’s poverty-wage workforce needs to do; learn the value and culture of work.

The Constitution never provided a grant of power to the Executive branch which designated that, should a Congress fail to enact a law which was preferred by the Executive, then the Executive was empowered to act alone. That is a perversion of the Constitution's careful dividing, separating, balancing, and providing numerous checks and balances on the strictly-limited powers "the People" allowed their government to possess.

Here are the words of an early President who was, himself, the son of a President, and one who well understood what the Declaration of Independence and "the People's" Constitution meant:

In 1839, John Quincy Adams was invited by the New York Historical Society to deliver the "Jubilee" Address honoring the 50th Anniversary of the Inauguration of George Washington. He traced the history of the development of the ideas underlying and the actions leading to the establishment of the Constitution which structured the United States government. His 50th-year summation seems to be a great source for examining what is happening today.
He addresses the ideas of "democracy" and "republic" throughout, but here are some of his concluding remarks, including his comments on the President and his role:
"Every change of a President of the United States, has exhibited some variety of policy from that of his predecessor. In more than one case, the change has extended to political and even to moral principle; but the policy of the country has been fashioned far more by the influences of public opinion, and the prevailing humors in the two Houses of Congress, than by the judgment, the will, or the principles of the President of the United States. The President himself is no more than a representative of public opinion at the time of his election; and as public opinion is subject to great and frequent fluctuations, he must accommodate his policy to them; or the people will speedily give him a successor; or either House of Congress will effectually control his power. It is thus, and in no other sense that the Constitution of the United States is democratic - for the government of our country, instead of a Democracy the most simple, is the most complicated government on the face of the globe. From the immense extent of our territory, the difference of manners, habits, opinions, and above all, the clashing interests of the North, South, East, and West, public opinion formed by the combination of numerous aggregates, becomes itself a problem of compound arithmetic, which nothing but the result of the popular elections can solve.
From the immense extent of our territory, the difference of manners, habits, opinions, and above all, the clashing interests of the North, South, East, and West, public opinion formed by the combination of numerous aggregates, becomes itself a problem of compound arithmetic, which nothing but the result of the popular elections can solve.
"It has been my purpose, Fellow-Citizens, in this discourse to show:-
"1. That this Union was formed by a spontaneous movement of the people of thirteen English Colonies; all subjects of the King of Great Britain - bound to him in allegiance, and to the British empire as their country. That the first object of this Union,was united resistance against oppression, and to obtain from the government of their country redress of their wrongs.
"2. That failing in this object, their petitions having been spurned, and the oppressions of which they complained, aggravated beyond endurance, their Delegates in Congress, in their name and by their authority, issued the Declaration of Independence - proclaiming them to the world as one people, absolving them from their ties and oaths of allegiance to their king and country - renouncing that country; declared the UNITED Colonies, Independent States, and announcing that this ONE PEOPLE of thirteen united independent states, by that act, assumed among the powers of the earth, that separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled them.
"3. That in justification of themselves for this act of transcendent power, they proclaimed the principles upon which they held all lawful government upon earth to be founded - which principles were, the natural, unalienable, imprescriptible rights of man, specifying among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - that the institution of government is to secure to men in society the possession of those rights: that the institution, dissolution, and reinstitution of government, belong exclusively to THE PEOPLE under a moral responsibility to the Supreme Ruler of the universe; and that all the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed.
"4. That under this proclamation of principles, the dissolution of allegiance to the British king, and the compatriot connection with the people of the British empire, were accomplished; and the one people of the United States of America, became one separate sovereign independent power, assuming an equal station among the nations of the earth.
"5. That this one people did not immediately institute a government for themselves. But instead of it, their delegates in Congress, by authority from their separate state legislatures, without voice or consultation of the people, instituted a mere confederacy.
"6. That this confederacy totally departed from the principles of the Declaration of independence, and substituted instead of the constituent power of the people, an assumed sovereignty of each separate state, as the source of all its authority.
"7. That as a primitive source of power, this separate state sovereignty,was not only a departure from the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but directly contrary to, and utterly incompatible with them.
"8. That the tree was made known by its fruits. That after five years wasted in its preparation, the confederation dragged out a miserable existence of eight years more, and expired like a candle in the socket, having brought the union itself to the verge of dissolution.
"9. That the Constitution of the United States was a return to the principles of the Declaration of independence, and the exclusive constituent power of the people. That it was the work of the ONE PEOPLE of the United States; and that those United States, though doubled in numbers, still constitute as a nation, but ONE PEOPLE.
"10. That this Constitution, making due allowance for the imperfections and errors incident to all human affairs, has under all the vicissitudes and changes of war and peace, been administered upon those same principles, during a career of fifty years.
"11. That its fruits have been, still making allowance for human imperfection, a more perfect union, established justice, domestic tranquility, provision for the common defence, promotion of the general welfare, and the enjoyment of the blessings of liberty by the constituent people, and their posterity to the present day.
"And now the future is all before us, and Providence our guide."
In an earlier paragraph, he had stated:
"But this institution was republican, and even democratic. And here not to be misunderstood, I mean by democratic, a government, the administration of which must always be rendered comfortable to that predominating public opinion . . . and by republican I mean a government reposing, not upon the virtues or the powers of any one man - not upon that honor, which Montesquieu lays down as the fundamental principle of monarchy - far less upon that fear which he pronounces the basis of despotism; but upon that virtue which he, a noble of aristocratic peerage, and the subject of an absolute monarch, boldly proclaims as a fundamental principle of republican government. The Constitution of the United States was republican and democratic - but the experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived; and it was obvious that if virtue - the virtue of the people, was the foundation of republican government, the stability and duration of the government must depend upon the stability and duration of the virtue by which it is sustained."

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