In 2001 Representative Luis Vicente Gutiérrez (D-IL) drafted the Immigrant Children's Educational Advancement and Dropout Prevention Act which would have prevented the deportation of illegal immigrants who had been brought to the United States before their 16th birthday and who were enrolled in primary, secondary, or college classes, or who were under the age of 25 and of “good moral character” – a trait undefined by the bill.
The Gutiérrez bill was scrapped in favor of a more limited Senate bill introduced later in 2001 by Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT.) It was titled, no doubt after laborious hours of searching for a cutesy acronym, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM). The bill subsequently went through numerous re-writes and amendments to placate constituencies with Senate and House versions. So far it has not made it into law.
Critics say the DREAM Act rewards and encourages illegal immigration, consumes state and federal education dollars on illegals, discriminates against legal immigrants whose children were born in the US and don’t therefore qualify for the education subsidies received by illegals, that children as old as 16 have been acculturated to their home country making the cut-off age too old, gang members could slip through the Act’s provisions, drop-out fraud would be difficult for deportation authorities to detect, and the Act is tantamount to amnesty.
Supporters of the bill – mostly Democrat politicians who benefit from illegal Hispanic voting – simply deny the critics’ arguments as if denying them dismisses their merit.
Then on June 15, 2012, with his polling among Hispanics legals and illegals sagging, Obama announced that his administration would hereafter and unilaterally cease the deportation of illegals who met the criteria of the DREAM Act, essentially enacting the DREAM bill on his own authority, by-passing the legislative role of Congress. It was an unambiguous display of naked power by a President whose allegiance to the US Constitution has been suspect since his inauguration.
Was there an outburst in the halls of Congress regarding this preemption of its legislative role? No. Did Americans take to the streets and protest that “No one is above the law!” as they did when Nixon defied constitutional authority during the Watergate crisis? No. Did the talking heads of the MSM and editorial pundits put their constitutional knowledge to work, complaining that the arbitrary acts of a monarch were hazardous to our private pursuit of liberty and extrapolating Obama’s lawlessness to future generations of Presidents who, allowed to make the same symbolically obscene hand gestures toward the American people by overriding laws, would become little more than ancient Persian tyrants? No.
Obama got away with it. Maybe he’s evolving, as he claimed his view on the same-sex marriage “evolved,” because in speaking to Univision on March 28, 2011, he said:
With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations (of immigrants brought here illegally as children) through executive order, that's just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed.
Speaking on May 1, 2011 to the United We Dream (UWD), Education Not Deportation Campaign, an association of illegal immigrant youths, Karen Maldonado rose from the audience and challenged Obama to stop the deportations. His answer:
America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the President, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that. That’s part of my job. … There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply, through executive order, ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as President.
Then, speaking to the radical activist Latino group, National Council of La Raza (The Race), whose avowed purpose is to reconquer (La Reconquista) American territory and ethnically purge it of Europeans, Obama told them last July 25, 2011:
Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own. ... But that's not how our system works. That's not how our democracy functions. That's not how our Constitution is written.
Americans have the governmental architecture willed to us by the Founders because those men knew there would be fundamental disagreements among elected representatives over policy – even among men and women of good faith – and those differences were to be reconciled in debate, not steamrolled over by a majority party or the President,. Differences were to be resolved in deference to our mutual allegiance to constitutional order – a deference that Obama is willing to forego when his reelection is at risk.
He thus rationalized his about-face by saying Congress didn't act (i.e. in passing the DREAM Act, something it’s been unable to do since first proposed a dozen years ago.) Apparently King Obama doesn’t considered settled immigration law sufficient to prevent his taking matters into his own hands and making Congress irrelevant as of June 15 by his de facto creation of the DREAM Act.
Article II, Section 3 of the US Constitution says:
… [The President] … shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed …
Wow! “Faithfully executed.” I guess that eliminates picking and choosing the ones you want to enforce as the British kings did. I guess that eliminates creating law out of bills that have not been passed by the elected representatives of the people.
Obama’s June 15 edict allows some 800,000 people to receive deferred action from deportation, among them Israel Velazquez, a 16-year-old who was brought to this country by illegal parents when he was two years old. Now living in Asheboro, NC and educated by gringo taxpayers, he told reporters of the immigration checkpoints he had to circumvent while driving, often making an ordinary trip to town a challenge. But now – now Obama has given him a bright future and …
… the opportunity to go through university without paying very much. It gives me the opportunity to work, to have a better career for myself, and it gives me the opportunity that my parents didn't have.
Well, maybe Israel won’t have to pay much for his education at the university. I’m sure the fiscal custodians of that bastion of liberalism will find a scholarship for him while the state’s local kids and taxpayers foot the bill for their education and Israel’s.
The day that Obama made his outrageous declaration that Homeland Security would no longer deport students who met Obama’s criteria (even though he filched them from the DREAM Act), John Yoo wrote in National Review Online:
Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal ObamaCare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.
So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices.
And yet that is precisely what Obama did after the recent Supreme Court ruling gave Arizona police the right to ask the occupants of a vehicle for identification.
After the Supreme Court’s decision, the Obama administration announced that it is suspending existing agreements with Arizona police over enforcement of federal immigration laws and that it had issued a directive telling federal authorities to decline calls from Arizona police to Homeland Security reporting illegal immigrants.
Homeland officials told reporters they expected the number of incoming calls from Arizona police to increase – presumably indicating a rise in illegal immigration – but Homeland Security wouldn’t be answering the phone, increasing staff to handle call volume, or putting more boots on the ground in Arizona. Why don’t we just run ads in the Mexican dailies “Come on over, boys, there’s nobody going to stop you here!”
This is obviously a smack down of Republican Governor Jan Brewer whose well-publicized photo of her in the presidential face, her forefinger pointing at him while both stood on the Arizona tarmac. Arizona has been under assault in Mexican gun violence and private property trespass crimes, yet when it tried to enforce federal immigration law, Obama and his laughable excuse for an Attorney General spent all of their energy going to court to assert that border defense and immigration enforcement was a federal responsibility even when the feds ignored enforcing it.
What Brewer’s attempt to be the people’s Governor accomplished, it seems, is to have gotten Arizona added to the Obama grudge file while writing off its electoral votes for the Obama reelection campaign – unless he can get enough illegal voters in the state by November 6.
This is the same tactic that Obama and Napolitano pulled on Texas when it asked for help along the Texas-Mexico border. According to the GAO, the federal government can actually prevent or stop illegal entries into the US along only 129 miles of the 1,954-mile-long US border with Mexico. That’s less than 7%. Yet in May of last year Obama reeked sarcasm as he addressed a crowd in El Paso, across the border from Juarez, one of Mexico’s most violent cities, to stump for his passage of the DREAM Act.
So, we have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement, all the stuff they asked for, we've done. But even though we’ve answered these concerns, I've got to say, I suspect there's still going to be some who are trying to move the goals posts on us, one more time.
You know, they said we needed to triple the border patrol. Well, now they're going to say we need to quadruple the border patrol. Or they'll want a higher fence. Maybe they'll need a moat. Maybe they'll want alligators in the moat. They'll never be satisfied.
Yes they’ll be satisfied, Obama, when you grow up and begin acting like a leader rather than an over-indulged brat who was given opportunities you didn’t deserve and thus grew old without growing up. One of life’s tough lessons is that you don’t always get your way even if you’re President, you’re not always right, you’re not the smartest person in the room every time. Border governors know something you don’t because you never governed anything before hoodwinking a majority of people into elevating you into the highest office of the land despite your astonishing lack of qualifications. Governors know that borders must be secure before any immigration policy can be effective. Congress figured that out long before you began to briefly warm one of its Senate benches. This partially explains why the DREAM Act has gone nowhere. How many times do we have to grant reprieve to illegals before we admit people are slipping over our southern borders faster than we can decide what to do with them – like the 13 million illegals already here, which some think could be as high as 20 million?
Suppose a person broke into someone’s home, Obama, and illegally lived there with minor children for years but was otherwise a model citizen in obeying the laws, supporting the community, and caring for his neighbors. Would that make the initial crime of breaking and entering less relevant? Would their squatter’s rights continue under protection of the law? Should the legal landlord have any say in recovering his property, especially if he has legal renters or buyers standing in line? When people illegally enter and live in this country, it isn’t free. The fact that they make an economic or social contribution to the country is irrelevant. At a minimum, they should leave and go to the end of the line in their home country to be fair to the people who are lawfully waiting to enter the US.
To me that would be a reasonable solution. It doesn’t necessarily mean that one’s place in line determines who gets the opportunity to immigrate. We could always set qualifications, deferring to those who bring skill sets and personal qualities that Americans want in new citizens. But at least it would be our choice, not the immigrant’s.
Article Four, Section Four of the Constitution says: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion …” It doesn’t say a military invasion. It doesn’t say an armed invasion. It simply says “invasion” – to intrude, encroach, infringe without permission.
Writing in The National Review several years ago, Andrew McCarthy described it as well as I’ve seen:
In adopting the Constitution, in giving their consent to our social contract, the sovereign states agreed to cede some of their authority in exchange for one overriding benefit. It was not to have an overseer to monitor our salt intake, design our light bulbs, prepare for our retirement, manage our medical treatments, or mandate our purchases. It was to provide for our security. It was to repel invasion by aliens who challenged our sovereign authority to set the conditions of their presence on our soil.
For that reason, border security has always been the highest prerogative of sovereignty. Immune from judicial interference, it answers to no warrant requirement. At the border, the federal government does not need probable cause – or any cause at all – to inquire into a person’s citizenship, immigration status, or purpose for attempting to enter our country. Agents can detain immigrants and citizens alike. They can perform bodily searches. They can go through every inch of a would-be entrant’s belongings, read his mail, and scrutinize the contents of his computer. A person subjected to this treatment may find it degrading or unfair, but the courts have nothing to say about it. At stake, after all, is the irreducible core of a sovereign people’s power to protect themselves from intruders.
For the several states along the border with Mexico, however, the federal government has surrendered its power … and thus its legitimacy.
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