Immigration

Legal basis for Executive Orders on immigration

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ImmigrantsThe Office of Legal Counsel to the President last night released a legal opinion that lays out the legal authority and precedents for President Obama’s executive orders on the use of prosecutorial discretion to defer deportations. The Department of Homeland Security’s Authority to Prioritize Removal of Certain Aliens Unlawfully Present in the United States and to Defer Removal of Others (.pdf).

Moreover, a group of leading legal scholars has written a letter declaring Obama’s action is well within his legal authority to exercise broad discretion over how to employ the nation’s enforcement machinery. Legal Scholars: Obama’s Immigration Actions Lawful:

President Barack Obama’s announced immigration executive actions are lawful, a group of ten prominent legal scholars wrote in a Joint Letter (Scribd) shared by the White House with TIME.

Pushing back on Republicans who have blasted Obama’s action as unconstitutional and unlawful, the signatories include Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, conservative legal scholar Eric Posner, and former Yale Law School Dean and former State Department Legal Advisor Harold Hongju Koh.

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John Boehner has to go

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Senator John F. Kennedy wrote a Pulitzer prize winning book of short biographies about eight Senators who had demonstrated great courage under enormous pressure from their parties and their constituents, entitled Profiles in Courage (1957).

Screenshot-6If a similar scholarly work were written today about members of the House, the TanMan from Ohio, Weeper of the House John Boehner, most certainly would not qualify for this book.

This chain smoking alcoholic who once passed out checks from Big Tobacco to bribe members for their votes on the floor of the House, Did John Boehner really pass out tobacco bribe checks on the House Floor? (yes he did, and he admitted to it), deserves his own chapter titled “Profiles in Cowardice.”

Speaker Boehner has presided over the less-than-do-nothing 112th Congress, and followed up this failure with the even more spectacular failure of the less-than-less-than-do-nothing 113th Congress. This craven coward lives in fear of his own radical extremist Tea Party Caucus, and he cares more about his job title and perks than the best interests of the country or the American people. He is the weakest and most ineffectual Speaker of the House in modern American history. Boehner is unquestionably and without equal the “Worst. Speaker. Ever.”

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‘The Nation’ Scolds Network TV for Denying Air Time to President Obama

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John Nichols of The Nation
John Nichols of The Nation

NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX have decided to air their usual prime time pablum tonight, instead of airing President Barack Obama’s short speech about his executive order on immigration.

It is despicable that same corporate media who pocketed billions of dollars during the election season and fanned the flames of racial hatred by airing false negative advertising now turns their Medusa head away at a time when something positive and newsworthy comes along. What show is so important that it can’t be delayed 10 minutes? NBC will be airing The Biggest Loser, a reality show about losing weight. (Here’s a hint. Since this is the 16th season of The Biggest Loser, there will be more fat people losing weight in the future.)

This corporate arrogance shows that network executives have disdain not only for the President– but also for American citizens and our democracy. (The speech will air at 6 p.m. Arizona time on PBS, Univision, Telemundo, cable channels, and live streaming from the White House, here.)

In When Networks Snub a Presidential Address, Democracy Is ‘The Biggest Loser’, John Nichols of The Nation gives corporate TV a drubbing over their decision to snub the President and the American people.

From The Nation…

… How has the American circumstance so decayed in a nation that once so well understood the wisdom of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s observation that “democracy alone, of all forms of government, enlists the full force of men’s [and women’s] enlightened will”?

There’s plenty of blame to go around. But let’s start with broadcast media that are so indefensibly irresponsible that television networks cannot take time away from their relentless profiteering to present a short address by the president of the United States—an address announcing an executive order on an issue that is universally recognized as consequential and controversial.

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Immigration: a clarifying moment for the GOP

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ImmigrantsThe demagogues of the conservative media entertainment complex are all hysterical over President Obama preparing to exercise prosecutorial discretion by executive orders to ease some of the unfairness created by our broken immigration system that Tea-Publicans in Congress have refused to fix.

These demagogues use loaded words like “lawless”and “shredding the Constitution” and refer to the president as an “emperor” (if Obama were an emperor, would not the conservative media entertainment complex all be locked away in a political prison somewhere, unable to spew their daily dose of hateful bile?)

This is, of course, is hyperbolic nonsense. The National Journal has a good historical piece on the use of executive orders by presidents dating back to FDR on immigration matters. Critics Say Executive Action on Immigration Would Be Unprecedented. They Forget Their History. If President Obama is an “emperor” for exercising prosecutorial discretion by executive orders then his predecessors including Saint Ronnie Reagan, “Poppy” Bush and C-Plus Augustus Bush were all emperors as well. Or is it IOKIYAR?

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Reforma no racisma.

Walk Down Memory Lane to July 2013 When Boehner & #GOP Failed to ‘Govern’

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Tonight, I had planned to write a highly poignant new blog post about why movement on immigration reform now (and not when the Republicans finally… maybe… get around to it) is a good idea.

When I went back to some old articles to grab links, I found this blog post and decided a history lesson was in order– since Republicans want Obama to delay an immigration executive order to “give them time to govern”. This post was originally published on July 10, 2013, on Tucson-Progressive.com, shortly after the US Senate passed their “comprehensive immigration reform” bill with bipartisan support, including both Arizona Senators, Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio, and other Republican Senators. Where are they now when the House wants to stall further? [Related articles at the end. Go big, Mr. President. It’s the right thing to do.]

Boehner & the White Man’s Party Prepare to Kill Immigration Reform

partyofno

Knuckle-dragging Republicans in the US House of Representatives have said that they will NOT– that is NOT with capital letters– pass an immigration “reform” billthat includes a path to citizenship for 12 million immigrants living in the US.

After all, the Republican Party’s corporate masters are making big bucks exploiting and imprisoning undocumented workers; I guess their motto is: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” For big business, immigration ain’t broke (except that they would like easier access to  cheap, skilled labor from India).

The US Senate’s much-celebrated bill did have a path to citizen (plus lots of other stuff the Democrats agreed to in order to get a handful of Republicans to vote for it.)

In the spirit of full disclosure, I didn’t like the US Senate’s version of Immigration Reform for multiple reasons:

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