The day after President Obama decided to act on immigration, Republicans went ahead and announced that they have filed a lawsuit against the president. The lawsuit does not deal with the president’s immigration order, but deals exclusively with healthcare and and the so-called “abuse of power” claim made against the president by Republicans.
In announcing the filing of the lawsuit, Republican House Speaker John Boehner inadvertently explained that President Obama has the authority to make the decisions he has made theough Executive orders. Speaking to Reporters, Boehner said;
“Time after time, the president has chosen to ignore the will of the American people and rewrite federal law on his own without a vote of Congress. That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. If this president can get away with making his own laws, future presidents will have the ability to as well. The House has an obligation to stand up for the Constitution, and that is exactly why we are pursuing this course of action.”
John Boehner has been in politics for a long time and he is well aware that past presidents have taken the same executive measures to attempt to fix the immigration problem.
When both Reagan and George Bush used their executive authority for immigration reform, Republicans stayed quiet. No Republican, including the Speaker of the House, saw anything wrong and accepted the precedent set by these previous presidents, and understood that this precedent would be followed by future presidents. To quote Boehner, “future presidents will have the ability to as well.”
Well if it was accepted back then that future presidents would “have the ability” to follow set precedent, then clearly Obama, being a president, has that ability and is working within his constitutionally allowed boundaries. And John Boehner and his Republican block party have expected and accepted it as the norm.
Luke Russert of MSNBC is stunned. According to Russert, who has covered Congress for the entire time John Boehner has been in charge of the House of Representatives, “…the week the House GOP sued the president over his issue of executive actions, they are now encouraging on a statement to act by himself regarding the border,” Russert said. “You really can’t make that up.”
The MSNBC reporter was talking about the House Republicans canceling a vote on the border bill before heading home for yet another vacation. The bill never made it to the floor and Republicans were okay with leaving Washington and heading home, with the border crisis still unsettled. Russert reported that they now want President Obama to use his Executive Order authority, although they’re presently suing him for using his Executive Order authority.
In his reporting, Russert couldn’t believe what was happening. Like he said, “you really can’t make that up.”
So, Chris Matthews and MSNBC are trying to get Republicans to come on their network by appeasing them and repeating their talking points. And over at Fox, Republicans are slowly beginning to find out that Fox News may no longer be the safe haven for their lies and misinformation.
Megyn Kelly first took on Dick Cheney, calling him a liar when he spoke about Iraq, then she took on John Bolton questioning his lies and the role he played in the Iraq invasion.
Now Neil Cavuto interviewed Michele Bachmann and a shouting match ensued!
The interview had to do with the laughable Republican notion that President Obama is overstepping his authority by issuing Executive orders. John Boehner, as you would recall, just announced that he is planning to sue the president over said orders. Cavuto brought Bachmann on his Fox show on Wednesday and asked her about this lawsuit and whether this was the more efficient way to tackle this issue. He refered to Boehner’s suit as an “enormous waste of effort” and “a political football.”
Bachmann of course tried to defend the enormous waste of effort because, like a typical Republican, that is what she does. And so began the shouting match.
If you only listen to these Republicans, you’d thing that the term “Executive Orders” originated in the Obama administration. And you’d think that Republicans have gone above and beyond, doing all they can to work with the president in making sure the country moves forward. You’d be perplexed, trying to figure out what the President’s State of The Union Address was all about and you’d be confused as to why Obama talked about doing it alone if Congress failed to act.
If the person described above fits your way of thinking, then I’d say you’re probably an avid Fox News viewer. But as usual, you’re not getting the truth watching Fox.
The facts of the matter is, Congressional Republicans have done everything possible to block this president, to render his presidency a failure, to make sure Americans feel the pain, to make sure they suffer for electing the black dude in the White House. And after years of reaching out to Republicans, waiting for them to come to their senses, President Obama realized that time would never come and declared that he is now prepared to use the powers authorized by the Constitution, and do what he can for the American people.
And for his decision, Michele Bachmann is flipping out. How dare he follow the Constitution!?!?
Responding to the President’s State of the Union Address, Bachmann threw down the gauntlet!
“He’s the president of the United States. He’s not a king. He may think he’s a king, he may declare himself king, but that’s not what he is under our Constitution.”
“If he wants to move forward with this unilateral activity, he better be prepared for the lawsuit that the United States Congress will bring to him.”
Yea, you do that Michele. We already know that you have no clue about the Constitution, forget he Constitution. We all know you have serious issues with thinking. So do you Michele, do you…
President Obama‘s Administration is looking to secure the same policy to declare war as the George Bush Administration had before him. Whats different about Obama’s policy is that war will be carried out not by soldiers on the ground, dispatching in huge battalions to remote areas of the world risking life and limb, but with the technological advancement of The War Drone.
Will this be our new mode of war, carrying out exempt strikes with laser pinpoint accuracy, taking out the enemy in the middle of the night while the rest of America sleeps soundly?
A new report by Stanford and New York Universities today, claims that just one in 50 victims of American drone strikes in Pakistan are terrorists while the rest are innocent civilians. The study lays much of the blame on the use of the ‘double-tap’ strike–where a drone fires one missile and then another as rescuers try to get to victims.
All is fair in war, right?
Obviously warfare has changed exceedingly from when we used spears, muskets, cannons, and bomber jets, detractors still say that there’s enormous opportunity for abuse in having such a lethal program run entirely by executive order, maybe not with Obama but certainly some future President with a long list of perceived enemies who may use the weapon as a personal means of retribution…
Mark R. Jacobson, a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States who served with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, created a 5 point lists of misconceptions about President Obama and the Drone War (abbreviated here):
1. Drones are immoral.
Drones are neither autonomous killer robots nor sentient beings making life-or-death decisions. Yet, with the “Terminator”-like connotations of the term, it is easy to forget that these vehicles are flown via remote control by some 1,300 Air Force pilots. Drones are an evolution in military technology, not a revolution in warfare.
2. Drone strikes cause inordinate civilian casualties.
Armed drones are some of the most precise weapons used in conflict; we hit what we aim for. But any lethal force results in some civilian casualties, and the use of drones beyond “hot battlefields” means that the civilian-combatant distinction is harder to make.
3. Drones allow us to fight wars without danger.
The allure is simple: A drone swoops in while its operator is safe, thousands of miles away, and the precision-guided ordnance hits a target, with little risk to our troops.
But drones should not give us a false sense of security. After all, the intelligence required for targeting may require U.S. boots on the ground. And drone attacks will not improve governance in a nation that offers a haven to terrorists.
4. Drones are technologically complex weapons that only rich nations can afford.
Armed drones are neither as simple as model airplanes nor as complex as high-performance fighter jets. Of course, a remote-controlled helicopter that you can build in your garage is certainly not as capable as the $26.8 million MQ-9 Reaper, the primary U.S. hunter-killer drone. But drones are much less expensive than fighter aircraft, and in an age of increasing austerity, it is tempting for nations to consider replacing jet fleets with armed drones.
5. Obama will be remembered as the drone president.
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq compelled the United States to boost the speed and accuracy with which it targets terrorists. But it was not until the Obama administration that U.S. technology and intelligence caught up with the need to take down terrorist networks rather than just individual leaders. As a result, there have been three to six times more drone strikes under Obama than under Bush. While the use of drone warfare has come of age under Obama, whether he comes to be defined by this weapon is very much a political question. ~ h/t The Washington Post
Why drones? Better yet, why war period? I’d like to see that discussion on the table one day. In the meantime the Drone War question rages on.
Today, the President has announced that he and the administration will:
1. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.
2. Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.
3. Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system.
4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.
5. Propose rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.
6. Publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.
7. Launch a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.
8. Review safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission).
9. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.
10. Release a DOJ report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement.
11. Nominate an ATF director.
12. Provide law enforcement, first responders, and school officials with proper
training for active shooter situations.
13. Maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime.
14. Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.
15. Direct the Attorney General to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenge the private sector to develop innovative technologies.
16. Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.
17. Release a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities.
18. Provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.
19. Develop model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship and institutions of higher education.
20. Release a letter to state health officials clarifying the scope of mental health services that Medicaid plans must cover.
21. Finalize regulations clarifying essential health benefits and parity requirements within ACA exchanges.
22. Commit to finalizing mental health parity regulations.
23. Launch a national dialogue led by Secretaries Sebelius and Duncan on mental health.
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