My article from the Aug. 1, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:
Conservatives Kill Amnesty Bill —- For Now
By Matthew Vadum
A conservative-led uprising among House Republicans scuttled Speaker John Boehner’s worse-than-useless border crisis and immigration legislation yesterday but party leaders vowed to try again today to pass the emergency funding bill.
“The bill as it was had more loopholes than a knitted afghan,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said in a statement released exclusively to FrontPage late yesterday.
Tonight, many members were able to come together and hammer out many of those problems so that we could live with the result. Whether the final product gets the needed 218 votes will depend on how the final product looks once it is typed and printed.
Conservatives are apparently doing the people’s will. A new poll suggests Republican voters side with conservative lawmakers over House GOP leadership. Breitbart News reports:
Polling data compiled by Tea Party Patriots and provided exclusively to Breitbart News shows that a majority of Republican voters think Republicans standing strong on immigration is more important than repealing Obamacare, getting to the bottom of the Benghazi or IRS scandals—or anything else for that matter.
When asked by TPP’s pollster which issue they think is the [most] important for Republicans in Congress to deal with, 34.6 percent of GOP voters said stopping the flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border. Stopping Obama’s ‘illegal overreach’ with executive power came in a distant second with 24 percent of GOP voters saying that’s the most important, while 23 percent saying repealing Obamacare is the most important and just 7.2 percent say the IRS scandal is the most important issue and 2.8 percent say the Benghazi scandal is most important. A total of 8.4 percent of GOP voters said they don’t know or refused to answer.
The poll was conduc[t]ed with 1,000 likely GOP voters on Thursday, July 24 via a combination of cell phones and landlines nationwide, with a margin of error of 3.2 percent.
The showdown between rank-and-file Republicans and their leaders in the House 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.
President Obama threatens to plunge the nation into a grave constitutional crisis after Labor Day by using executive orders to grant a huge amnesty to millions of illegal aliens now in the United States. Of course, in the American system of government, Congress, not the president, is supposed to make laws. Congress has repeatedly refused to grant the amnesties that Obama seeks, but the president refuses to take no for an answer, pressing on regardless of how much damage he does to the country.
Lawmakers in the nation’s capital had been racing to wrap up legislative business and leave Washington for a five-week summer recess yesterday but Boehner put their vacation plans on hold after a revolt forced him to temporarily shelve his border bill that conservatives say is really amnesty legislation.
Some House members were already at the airport preparing to fly back to their congressional districts but “a sudden and fierce backlash forced Boehner to rescind the decision” to put the bill on the back burner, Breitbart News reports.
Lawmakers held a two-hour emergency meeting in mid-afternoon and agreed to stay in town and try to get some kind of legislation aimed at the border crisis to a vote.
Tea Party-backed Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a prominent anti-GOP establishment figure, said he was optimistic that a legislative package would pass.
“We are a good working team in there, it didn’t start with acrimony and didn’t end with acrimony, and now we’ve got a little work to do and I think we’ve got a shot to get’r done,” he said.
House Republicans are scheduled to meet at 9 o’clock this morning for a strategy session.
Conservatives scratch their heads, complaining that excessively risk-averse GOP leaders refuse to take aim at the Democrats’ unpopular immigration policies — even when the American people overwhelmingly side with Republicans.
The Boehner measure is so Obama-friendly that it constitutes the political equivalent of “catching your opponent’s Hail Mary pass and running it into your own end zone for them,” said Daniel Horowitz, policy director for the Madison Project.
Conservatives don’t like the bill because it would boost and speed up the migration of low-skilled workers from Latin American, give Democrats and lobbyists a chance to resurrect the Senate-approved amnesty measure from last year, but do zilch to prevent President Obama from unilaterally, unconstitutionally handing out millions of work authorizations to illegal aliens.
Instead of pounding away at Obama, whose poll ratings are deteriorating dramatically because of his irresponsible immigration polices, GOP leadership is content to let Obama walk all over them, conservatives say.
Republicans cannot exploit Obama’s political weaknesses because the party’s leaders “suck at politics,” Horowitz said, a viewed also held by Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has been trying to convince House members to reject any bill that fails to curb Obama’s amnesty-granting powers.
The immigration measured backed by leadership “is a plan for expedited asylum, not expedited removal” of the more than 100,000 illegal aliens from Central America, Sessions said.
Reps. Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) and John Fleming (R-La.) say few lawmakers, even those with Rs after their names, are serious conservatives.
“In my judgment, a majority of the senators and the House members of both parties are more than happy to betray America and the principles who made us who we are, first and foremost of which is the rule of law,” Brooks said. “Those of us who are fight for hard-working families, unfortunately, we’re in a minority.”
Fleming said that the “GOP leadership has two audiences, two bases.”
“One is the established Chamber of Commerce group that is looking for less expensive labor and they’re the ones who contribute a lot of money and so the [leaders] want to keep them happy,” the Louisiana lawmaker said.
“On the other hand, the Republican voting public out there wants the problems fixed, they want illegals treated humanely and they want border security and they want the newest wave sent back,” he said.
But if President Obama gets his way, no one will be deported.
The huddled masses yearning to get free stuff who insert themselves into the U.S. through the Rio Grande Valley are going to be held in relative luxury in a newly renovated 532-bed immigration detention complex for women and children near San Antonio, Texas.
Word of American taxpayers’ decadent generosity will no doubt spread at lightning speed to prospective uninvited immigrants in Matamoros, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, and points beyond.
“I will refer to everyone in this facility as a resident,” said Enrique Lucero, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) San Antonio field office director. ”
“ICE generally refers to people in custody as detainees,” he added sanctimoniously.
While the nation’s veterans suffer and die after being stuck on the falsified waiting lists produced by Obama administration bureaucrats, federal officials plan to roll out the red carpet for the alien invaders whose housing and amenities will cost the government an average of $140 per day per detainee.
Newly arrived lawbreakers will be housed in what federal officials call “suites,” that will feature bunk beds, flat-screen TVs, and landline telephones. The facility also has a soccer field, ping pong tables, a weight room, and basketball courts. A playground will be added soon. Children will attend a nearby charter school and receive medical screenings, dental care, and new clothes.
It is unclear if youthful aliens will be taken to Disneyworld or to branches of the more modestly priced Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain for birthday celebrations.
Meanwhile, CNSNews reports that “a thousand children said to be fleeing the violence in Central America will be welcomed to Chicago, where local children are routinely in the cross-fire of gang-related grudges.”
“The influx of unaccompanied child migrants is a growing humanitarian crisis that we can no longer ignore,” said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, an Alinskyite charlatan who no doubt helped to engineer the ongoing invasion when he served as President Obama’s White House chief of staff.
“While we have our own challenges at home, we cannot turn our backs on children who are fleeing dangerous conditions,” Emanuel said of young people who are probably just fleeing the ordinary perils and inconveniences of everyday life in Latin American banana republics. “We will do our part to ensure that these children are given access to services and treated fairly and humanely.”
Socialist kook Luis Gutierrez, a Democratic congressman from Illinois who wants to import even more illegals into the U.S. in order to help President Obama destabilize the country, said the fact that Chicago is “welcoming migrant children and working with them as their cases are resolved” made him proud of the Windy City.
Those young people aren’t exactly healthy, reports suggest. A Department of Homeland Security study indicates that the “unaccompanied alien children,” or UACs, from Central America are spreading tuberculosis (TB), chicken pox, and scabies, a contagious skin disease spread by mites. Several DHS workers at the various facilities where these aliens are being warehoused have been infected.
Many of the facilities are filthy because the new arrivals don’t know how to use bathroom facilities and have been relieving themselves at will, exposing DHS employees to human waste.
And over on the Left Coast, California’s far-out governor, Democrat Jerry Brown, offered the startlingly idiotic suggestion that climate change will somehow exacerbate the invasion of the U.S. by Central Americans, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“We can see how some are fearful of children walking across the border,” said the man who is presiding over California’s ongoing fiscal collapse. “What will they think when millions of people are driven north from the parched landscapes of a world degraded by intensifying climate change?”
Perhaps Gov. Brown needs to lay off the medical marijuana.