My article from the July 28, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:
Bracing for Amnesty
By Matthew Vadum
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 little chance 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 social 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.