In enjoining Arizona’s landmark immigration law, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton maintains the Obama administration’s carefully cultivated fiction: that what concerns the White House regarding S.B. 1070 is its effect on legal, rather than illegal, aliens. Almost nowhere in the government’s briefs or the judge’s ruling is the arrest and detention of illegal aliens addressed. This fiction is transparent, however. The real threat posed by S.B. 1070 was that it would disrupt the de facto amnesty that the executive branch has accorded to the vast majority of illegal aliens. It would start to implement congressional mandates and the public will that the immigration laws be enforced. For that reason, it had to be stopped.
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Eric H. Holder Jr. is more interested in helping felons vote than in helping the military to vote. Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, has put a legislative hold on the already troubled nomination of James M. Cole to be deputy attorney general until the attorney general ensures full protection for voting rights of our military (and associated civilian personnel) stationed abroad. The senator is right to raise a ruckus.
Mr. Cornyn co-authored a 2009 law mandating that states mail absentee ballots to military voters at least 45 days before the election. Yet, as former Justice Department lawyer Eric Eversole first reported in The Washington Times last week, the department seems to be encouraging states to apply for waivers so they won’t have to follow that law. More than 17,000 Americans serving overseas were denied the vote in 2008 – but, presumably because military personnel are thought to lean conservative, the liberal Obama administration is in no hurry to correct the situation.
I am continually mystified by conservatives who urge Republicans to pick their battles against President Obama out of fear we’ll compromise our effectiveness if we oppose him every time he needs to be opposed. What a defeatist mindset!
For instance, some I respect recommend against Republican efforts to repeal the Democrats’ financial “overhaul” bill. They laud the effort but believe it will reduce the likelihood of their repealing Obamacare.
I reject the notion that Republicans possess a finite amount of political capital to oppose bills that are bad for America. It’s not as if they’re playing “Monopoly” and must conserve their “Monopoly” money. This isn’t about what’s good for the Republican Party. It’s about opposing – as a matter of principle – Obama’s systematic assault on America. Americans understand that.
Those who suggest that we approach these matters delicately grossly underestimate the American people and their innate appreciation for liberty. The timid approach, the fear of governing to the right, is always what gets Republicans in trouble.
Modern history bears this out. President Ronald Reagan won landslides by sticking to his conservative principles, albeit imperfectly.
President George H.W. Bush lost favor with the electorate, starting with his base, for defecting from conservative principles, e.g., with his broken “no new taxes” pledge.
President George W. Bush lost favor with the electorate far more because of his betrayal of conservative principles on domestic policy than because of the unpopularity of the protracted Iraq war. Liberals would have us believe Dubya was too conservative, but for mainstreamers, he wasn’t nearly conservative enough.
Republicans urgently need to jump onto the Obamacare repeal bandwagon because if left in place, even if significantly diluted, it will destroy the best health care system in the world, greatly erode our individual liberties, further expand the government and bureaucratic classes, and accelerate the nation’s financial ruin.
Attorneys for Gov. Jan Brewer have asked a judge to throw out the U.S. Justice Department’s challenge to the state of Arizona’s new immigration law.
The governor’s lawyers said Monday the federal government hasn’t shown it has suffered actual harm from the law and instead bases its claim on speculation.
The federal government says the state law is trumped by federal law and that it has hurt U.S. relations with Mexico. It is scheduled to take effect Thursday.
Attorneys for Brewer say Mexico’s disapproval of the law doesn’t make it unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton is considering requests by the Justice Department, a Phoenix police officer and civil rights groups to put the law on hold.
The federal government meanwhile is rapidly expanding a program to identify illegal immigrants using fingerprints from arrests, drawing opposition from local authorities and advocates who argue the initiative amounts to an excessive dragnet.
The program has gotten less attention than Arizona’s new immigration law, but it may end up having a bigger impact because of its potential to round up and deport so many immigrants nationwide.
Under the program, the fingerprints of everyone who is booked into jail for any crime are run against FBI criminal history records and Department of Homeland Security immigration records to determine who is in the country illegally and whether they’ve been arrested previously. Most jurisdictions are not included in the program, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been expanding the initiative.
“Why do they hate us?”
It’s a burning question on the minds of border-dwelling taxpayers, small business owners, farmers, and Rocky Mountain oil and gas industry workers suffering under punitive Democrat policies. Eighteen months into the Obama administration, the war on the American West is in full swing.
The first battlefront: Immigration. On Wednesday, Senate Democrats rejected a GOP amendment banning the use of federal funds to participate in any litigation against the new Arizona immigration enforcement law. “Our federal government should be doing its job to secure our borders rather than trying to bully and intimidate the people of Arizona,” argued Republican amendment sponsor Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina. “We should not be suing and really hassling the people of Arizona for doing what we should be doing here and that’s protecting the citizenry.”
All but five Senate Democrats (Indiana’s Evan Bayh took a pass and didn’t vote) sided with the anti-Arizona Obama administration – and against not only a majority of Arizonans, but a majority of Americans who support the state’s effort to restore order on the chaotic southern border and protect American workers facing double-digit unemployment. Several House Democrats have actively lobbied to boycott Arizona and crush its economy – most notably, southern Arizona’s own Democrat Rep. Raul Grijalva, who urged civic, religious, and political groups to take their convention dollars elsewhere. “Do not do business with this state,” Grijalva told open-borders zealots bent on punishing law-abiding citizens to “send a message.”
According to sources who watch the inner workings of the federal government, a smackdown of Barack Obama by the U.S. Supreme Court may be inevitable.
Ever since Obama assumed the office of President, critics have hammered him on a number of Constitutional issues. Critics have complained that much if not all of Obama’s major initiatives run headlong into Constitutional roadblocks on the power of the federal government.
(AP Photo/Keith Srakocic). Chief Justice John Roberts, U.S. Supreme Court.
Obama certainly did not help himself in the eyes of the Court when he used the venue of the State of the Union address early in the year to publicly flog the Court over its ruling that the First Amendment grants the right to various organizations to run political ads during the time of an election.
The tongue-lashing clearly did not sit well with the Court, as demonstrated by Justice Sam Alito, who publicly shook his head and stated under his breath, ‘That’s not true,’ when Obama told a flat-out lie concerning the Court’s ruling.
As it has turned out, this was a watershed moment in the relationship between the executive and the judicial branches of the federal government. Obama publicly declared war on the court, even as he blatantly continued to propose legislation that flies in the face of every known Constitutional principle upon which this nation has stood for over 200 years.
Obama has even identified Chief Justice John Roberts as his number one enemy, that is, apart from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. And it is no accident that the one swing-vote on the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy, stated recently that he has no intention of retiring until ‘Obama is gone.’
Apparently, the Court has had enough.
The Justice Department’s lawsuit against Arizona’s controversial immigration law won’t stop Prince William Board of County Supervisors Chairman Corey A. Stewart’s campaign to bring a similar law to Virginia.
If anything, said Stewart (R-At Large), he will push harder to get legislation passed at the state level that would enhance police officials’ power to capture, detain and deport illegal immigrants and create specific Virginia penalties for illegal immigrants.
“I think the Obama administration has made a strategic blunder,” Stewart said. “The Justice Department is going to have egg on its face when its case is dismissed. Arizona is on very firm legal footing, and the administration is just trying to intimidate Arizona.”
Attorney General Eric Holder speaks, Friday, June 11, 2010, at the Richard B. Russell Federal Courthouse in Atlanta. (AP)
The lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Arizona claimed the state was infringing on federal immigration responsibilities and urged the judge to prevent the law from going into effect at the end of July. Despite some officials’ claims that the law could lead to racial profiling, that concern was not cited as grounds for the suit.
However, Holder said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the federal government was leading with its “strongest” argument in the suit filed Tuesday and would not rule out a second suit months down the road — if the law ends up going into effect.
It looks like the Obama spin machine is at it again, this time launching a concerted effort to rebut reports this week that President Barack Obama is anti-business. But given Obama’s record of stoking government intervention in the private sector and creating an environment of uncertainty poisonous to business growth, hiring and expansion, it’s no wonder the President is branded with an anti-business scarlet letter.
The storyline began in The Washington Post, where columnist Fareed Zakaria endeavored to find out why America’s 500 largest nonfinancial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, rather than spending it on expansion (which would mean new jobs). Business leaders told Zakaria that it comes down to economic uncertainty surrounding new laws, regulations and taxes; the expansion of federal agencies’ authority; and the unknown implications of Obamacare, financial reform and cap-and-trade. And the kicker? Zakaria notes that most of them had voted for Obama yet all of them now believe he is “at his core, anti-business.”
According to news reports from around the world, two top jihadists are now in custody. Such news should be the cause for celebration by the United States and the rest of the Free World. The Obama administration, however, is likely instead to see them as inconvenient.
News of the first apprehension actually broke weeks ago at our sister site, BigGovernment.com, thanks to intrepid reporting by contributor and best-selling author Brad Thor. The Chinese news service Xinhua yesterday confirmed Thor’s revelation: “An Afghan popular television channel Tolo, citing Pakistani media, reported Tuesday that Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar has been arrested in Pakistan. Tolo also showed a picture of the one-eyed Mullah Omar without giving more details.”
The second arrest took place closer to home when Mexican authorities arrested a senior operative of the Lebanese terrorist group, Hezbollah, named Jameel Nasr. The story was first broken Tuesday by the Kuwaiti daily Al-Seyassah, which — in the words of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz – credited Mexico with “foil[ing] an attempt by Hezbollah to establish a network in South America.”
