Amnesty: the audaciousness of Obama
How long has Congress been mulling over some sort of amnesty plan for illegal immigrants?
A long time, certainly under several presidents, whether it’s called “amnesty” or whether euphemisms are used to substitute for the word. But there’s a reason Congress hasn’t done much about it in a long time, and that’s because the American people don’t want it and Congress is at least somewhat responsive to the people, despite the fact that many politicians and those who give them money are more interested in amnesty than the general public is.
Presidents have understand that, too, and have also understood that it’s Congress that needs to deal with this for the most part. Until now.
Now we have a president who has the novel idea of completely ignoring the public during his lame duck years. Most presidents are hampered in their power during lame duck time, and they don’t want to do anything to hurt their party’s standing with the public and therefore their party’s election chances. Obama, again, has the novel idea to ignore the public and hurt his party in the short run for enormous gains in the longer run: a demographic that will be reliably Democratic and will insure the party’s hegemony (not to mention his “legacy” as a transformative president) . At least, that’s the calculation.
All the Democratic impeachment chatter (“watch out, the evil Republicans are planning to impeach me, aren’t they mean and aren’t they silly?”) is both an attempt to head outrage off at the pass and pre-characterize it as inappropriate and hateful, and an acknowledgement of the tyrannical nature of what Obama is contemplating.
I’m with Patterico here:
I think we’re at the point where Obama is actively doing things he knows he has no power to do ”” because he wants Republicans to mount an effort to impeach him. That would be a political winner, since Americans are generally rationally ignorant of constitutional processes, and impeachment polls badly as a result. They don’t really care whether Obama exceeds his lawful authority if they like what he’s doing, and they see impeachment, not as a necessary Constitutional corrective, but as an irritation brought about by those stupid politicians who can’t get along. And Big Media tells us that when the two sides don’t get along, it’s usually the Republicans’ fault, and who are we to argue?
We get the government we deserve. The idea that the Constitution restrains the branches is pretty much dead; its provisions don’t matter when the public is unwilling to back the side whose territory is being infringed.
Andrew Jackson is famous for saying: “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” Well, Barack Obama is saying: “Congress may have the ability to rein me in. Let’s see them do it.”
They won’t. And there goes the system of checks and balances. And what will the public do about it?
Nothing.
And that’s the problem.
I would add that a Congress, and a Democratic Party, that doesn’t understand the dangers here to the republic and ultimately to themselves is also a huge part of the problem, as well as a cowardly GOP.
One of the things I never see expounded on with regard to this issue is that our federal government for a long time has not wanted to do anything about illegal aliens because they have been a source of propping up the Social Security system (FICA tax) for YEARS! I am an office manager at a construction company (15 years now) and I can tell you by experience, that when you fill out the I-9 you can’t even require that the document you are recording (license, usually) be photocopied. But even when you do (all our applicants have always allowed that), when I would be notified by the Social Security Administration that there was a conflict with the name and number of the individual, I would simply be instructed to have the individual contact SSA. So all the public exclaiming (especially in the socio-political realm) about the “greedy employers” that are using cheap labor has been nothing but a mask to throw off the scent. We have always conducted our business by the book and I can emphatically state that in our small enterprise alone, the federal government has collected SUBSTANTIAL income from our employees and employer portion of FICA. If you were to combine that with the presumption that the person would not be able to collect at age 65 because of the fraud, that is quite a haul for the system. But conducted this way, how many of us going forward will be able to collect, even when we’ve handed $$ over by shovel full? Broken!
“And what will the public do about it? Nothing.
And that’s the problem.”
http://doingdemocracy.com/
Sharon W…
You must be from an alternate universe.
1) I’ve NEVER seen an employer who DIDN’T take photocopies of my I-9 identification. Not one.
2) The VAST BULK of illegal immigrants are working off the books.
3) The VAST BULK of illegal immigrants don’t work for classically small businesses. They work in huge numbers for large farms, chicken processors, general contractors, etc. all of whom have seriously large payrolls, way, way beyond any Mom and Pop operation.
4) Truly dinky small businesses can’t work with wetbacks who can’t read, write or speak English. Get real.
5) The ONLY sector that can use wetbacks is that which requires ZERO SKILLS and ZERO ENGLISH. This is the sector that always wants ‘fresh ones’ and at the lowest wages, too.
So, I must deem you a troll.
On balance, wetbacks drain our society. We’re a welfare state. The benefits to be drained are massive. Some calculations place entry as equal to $400,000 over a lifetime.
These folks are most unlikely to pay any payroll taxes for years on end… and that’s the guys. The gals will go Section 8 and NEVER kick into the tax authorities.
The tax roll back that would occur without such budget busters would solve the California fiscal crisis.
And then there’s their disparate impact on California prisons. We have entire prisons erected and run for the sole purpose of keeping violent Mexican wetbacks off our streets. Over 5,000 murder warrants remain open against Mexican wetbacks. Typically, they’ve murdered yet another illegal — both being in the drug trade. (meth)
These folks are a bane in Mexico and no gift to America, either.
Blert– I have always respected your posts, including your most recent one about Obama and his Muslim roots. I do not dispute anything you have written. My personal experience is what I am adding to the discussion. As I stated, we have always photocopied the documents, but as an employer it is stated in the “rules” that you cannot require it. Additionally, when I have tried to follow up on notices from SSA, the employer is stymied. I live in the state of California. Over time the bureaucratic framework favors looking the other way on all things pertaining to illegal immigrants. My point is, that in any business operating according to the rules (and BTW, our starting wage has always, and still exceeds the minimum wage) is being used to support the dinosaur structure that is FICA. This reality doesn’t undermine anything you have stated. It merely adds a dimension to the Machiavellian nature of our political edifice.
Also…if you think what I am sharing pertains only to small businesses then you are mistaken. The food service, hotel and garment industry in California alone would aggregate loads of revenue for the State & Fed. Do you really think all those cooks, and busboys etc are working under the table at Cheesecake Factory, Levis, etc etc? I would respectfully differ.
How we get America out of this:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+John+5%3A4-5&version=NLT
Back to Neo’s theme:
Which is why I have given up hope of any reversing of the evils besetting us. Most people are vaguely aware they are being screwed but much too lethargic to do anything about it. Stick a fork in us.
“I would add that a Congress, and a Democratic Party, that doesn’t understand the dangers here to the republic and ultimately to themselves is also a huge part of the problem, as well as a cowardly GOP.”
The criminally inclined rarely assess the risks to any illegal course of action objectively. Greed acts as a filter to reason. It is perhaps likely that many imagine that once “fundamental transformation” is a fait accompli, they will be part of a new nomenklatura…
As Patterico points out, many Americans “don’t really care whether Obama exceeds his lawful authority if they like what he’s doing” and therein lies the very heart of our problem.
Their eagerness to see the politically correct ‘solutions’ they favor implemented is so great that they fail to see that in leveling all the inconvenient laws that stand in the way of their slaying the ‘devil right’, that they will have no laws to protect them, when the real devil that their prior support has created, turns round to confront them.
What will they do then? Why they’ll form a mob to punish the scapegoat(s) that the demagogue has constructed, instituting a rein of terror and bowing down to the tyranny that will provide the bread that they need.
In 1789, the Founding Fathers created a Representative Republic to counteract democracy’s inherent flaws.
This they foresaw clearly;
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. A Democracy will cease to exist when it takes away from those who are willing to work and gives to those who would not.” Thomas Jefferson
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” Benjamin Franklin
Nor were the founders alone, in 1787 Scottish advocate, judge, writer, historian and Professor of Universal History, and Greek and Roman Antiquities, at the University of Edinburgh observed that, “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship”
Since at least the 1930’s the democrat party has been working to create a more perfect democracy so that the 51% could deny the rights of the 49%. With Obama’s election, they achieved that and now he is working to make that majority a permanent hegemony.
If Victor Frankl’s experience in a Nazi concentration camp convinced him that “The world is divided into two races – the decent and the indecent.” Then those two races divide into two as well, the aware and the unaware. The unaware but decent present no real harm to anyone and the unaware and indecent go and do as they are directed. They are a threat but their lack of awareness limits the threat they present to society. Most criminals are made of such. It is the aware and indecent who are mankind’s real threat.
Paul A’Barge,
When out at sea fishing in a little boat and a storm threatens, pray to God… and row toward shore.
My experience is the same as Sharon W’s. There are millions and millions of illegals working on the books under fake social security numbers. (As anyone in LA knows, you can buy a fake Social Security card at Alvarado & Olympic for about $400.) The fact that they’re never going to collect is what’s keeping Social Security afloat.
Want to drastically reduce illegal immigration overnight? Impose a 15% withholding tax on remittances abroad.
GF: Well-put. However…
“Then those two races divide into two as well, the aware and the unaware. The unaware but decent present no real harm to anyone and the unaware and indecent go and do as they are directed. They are a threat but their lack of awareness limits the threat they present to society. Most criminals are made of such. It is the aware and indecent who are mankind’s real threat.”
I would suggest that the unaware and decent were named among those following Nazi commands…even those loading the Jews onto the trains. In our times, I liken those who voted for Obama for whatever innocuous reason to be like the average German of that time, unaware but subservient. Hitler could never have accomplished his deeds without the unaware and relatively decent going along. That’s when the real threat to society is fully engaged.
Sharon W,
Are the unaware who passively turn their head aside as evil is done really among the decent? At some point, everyone in Germany knew that Hitler and the Nazi’s were evil. They didn’t just herd Jews into boxcars.
Let’s just stop with all this Hitler-Nazi chatter. Life for the nonJewish nonGypsy nonQueer Germans was orderly and straightforward until after Hitler joined Japan in declaring war on the USA.
Life under international Communism was clearly worse. So let’s talk of Stalin and Mao sometimes when we invoke evil.
Let us not forget it is the State that has the power, not the Citizen. We here under Barack and the Dems have no right to so freely criticize the Germans for failing to stand up to their government when we do nothing ourselves.
The contention that the Dems are doing this on immigration in order to get future voters is a red herring. They are intent on stealing as much as they can from the treasury while the gettings good. Try $3.7 billion to start and untold wealth to follow.
“Life for the nonJewish nonGypsy nonQueer Germans was orderly and straightforward until after Hitler joined Japan in declaring war on the USA.”
If by “orderly and straightforward” you mean doing what you’re told and keeping your mouth shut, I agree. Once Hitler took over, speaking out against the Nazi regime was something people only did once and that was years before Hitler declared war on the US. Stalin certainly was a brutal evil man but he wasn’t interested in a ‘final solution’, which thus fails to reach the depravity of Hitler.
And we are standing up to our government by speaking out and voting, which is all we can do as long as Obama and the Feds do not start incarcerating political prisoners.
IMO, the day is coming when armed resistance will be called for but that day is not yet and until it does arrive, we work within the political process.
Roy,
IMO, it is a profound mistake to imagine that the Left is primarily motivated by material gain.
Ideology is the means to power and POWER is their motivation with status and material gain as the benefits due those ‘most deserving’.
“Professional liberals [today’s activist progressives] are too arrogant to compromise. In my experience, they were also very unpleasant people on a personal level. Behind their slogans about saving the world and sharing the wealth with the common man lurked a nasty hunger for power. They’d double-cross their own mothers to get it or keep it.” – Harry S Truman, from a 1970 interview
G.B.
I have to say that Stalin was more depraved than Adolf… and that’s saying something.
Both were clinically judged legally insane. Adolf had drug addictions built on top of terminal stage syphilis… known to always trigger insanity. (see also Lenin: he died of terminal syphilis. The Russian government finally admitted exactly that in the 21st Century — disclosing his medical records.
As for Stalin, the foremost Russian psychiatrist diagnosed Stalin as the single most extreme case of schizophrenic paranoia he’d encountered — to include the medical literature. He was duly taken to the Lubyanka and tortured unto death.
The lesson was: don’t even tell your best and professional associate the truth in Stalinist Russia.
As for atrocities: Stalin started earlier, was more extreme, and had more victim groups. Genocide was absolutely on his mind. He deported entire nations during his reign of terror and error.
Nikita described Stalin as an anti-Semite of the first water.
There is every reason to believe that Stalin not only inspired Adolf as to how far he could go — but that in a deep deception operation co-instigated the Holocaust. This last point is alleged by Aarons and Loftus in “Unholy Trinity.”
ISBN 0-312-18199-X
They reason that something really changed in the weeks directly ahead of Barbarossa. The epic slaughter (its planning) only began at that time.
Further, they allege that Stalin jerked Adolf around with a double agent whose cover story/ rationale was that he represented disaffected White Russian officers located in an adjunct intelligence headquarters just outside of Moscow. Further, that this anti-Communist cabal would not co-operate with the Nazi state unless Adolf was as hard-line against international Jewry as the (White) Russians traditionally had been.
The agent then proceeded to give Adolf the keys to the kingdom: quite incredible tactical details about the Red Army.
The flip side is that Adolf was induced to cough up ALL of the German dispositions and tactical intentions.
This scheme almost entirely explains the facts as we know them.
Hitler even copied the NKVD style of mass executions in the Russian woods. Most of the SS/ SD victims were liquidated by bullets in the Barbarossa campaign — NOT the death camps. The numbers are astonishing, brutal and revolting.
German records indicate that mere companies of “special action troops” used more bullets that entire regiments in heavy combat! This bullet drain became general knowledge throughout the higher ranks of the German Army. So much for not knowing what was going on!
Stalin had been doing the same thing for many years. Even now, from time to time, NKVD burial grounds turn up. They are EVERYWHERE in Russia. It is now acknowledged that all prior death toll estimates for the NKVD have been way too low.
As for civilian life under Adolf, it was a nightmare even by 1936, civil rights wise. The Nazis had rolled up the press and co-opted the entertainment industry. (Goebbels) It was as if Axelrod had taken over all of Hollywood… hot babes included.
Plain theft and racketeering took off like a V-2. No small amount of that was theft of Jewish property.
Cronyism, price fixing, kick-backs, market allocation — the place was run like the Democrat party!
The courts — even for civil matters — broke down.
Pretty quickly the only thing worth a dang was the beer.
Obama, again, has the novel idea to ignore the public and hurt his party in the short run for enormous gains in the longer run: a demographic that will be reliably Democratic and will insure the party’s hegemony (not to mention his “legacy” as a transformative president)
Smoke em if you got em.
If you don’t use your power, you’ll lose your power.
Use em or lose em.
blert,
Respectfully, I remain unconvinced. Of course, once you get to a certain level of depravity assigning degrees of guilt is a meaningless exercise. Stalin did indeed practice genocide against nations and his also being an anti-Semite “of the first water” isn’t surprising. But he did not advance efforts to exterminate an entire multi-national people. Perhaps Hitler was merely more ambitious, if less maniacal. But beyond a certain point, evil is simply evil.
GB: Of course there are degrees of evil, and the degrees matter. Kinda like murder, first degree, 2nd degree, etc. On a per capita basis, Pol Pot was the most evil. The commies lead the way, hands down.
In 1940 Germany, if one kept one’s nose politically clean as a German, one could and did make a pretty decent living. The same could not be said of the USSR. Consider the massive purge by execution of the Soviet officer corps in the years before Germany attacked. Or the earlier Soviet slaughter of Polish officer POWs in Katyn Forest. Never mind life, such as it was, on the collective farms, the intentional famine in Ukraine.
I think it is important to try to understand why there were so many “good” Germans in the 1930s, and this is my thought why. They were not under individual assault then, and neither are we now (yet).
Respectfully, what is the point of counting the number of devils that dance on the head of a monster’s pin? Sociopathic monsters are sociopathic monsters when it all comes down to rotting corpses. The number of those slaughtered is far less important than the question of how were the monsters given free reign to wade through the blood and the gore? The answer is good men/ women did nothing.
Let the game begin before I am too old to contribute to the rebellion.
Don Carlos,
With the caveat that keeping “one’s nose politically clean as a German” by 1940 meant condoning and cooperating with evil… Hitler generally supported the German nation, whereas Stalin did not support the Soviet Union per se, except as it related to his power.
So, I do agree that communism was and is a more repressive system than was Hitler’s National Socialism for… the Aryan German.
As for us today, activist conservatives are under personal attack, i.e. the IRS and True the Vote’s President Catherine Engelbrecht. For the rest of us, our culture, our liberties and the rule of law are most definitely under attack by the left.
GB,
All ‘attacks’ in my neck of flyover country are strictly via the msm. And few, if any, are lapping up that bs. There are millions… 3 or 30 million (?) who are free of the mainstream meme and that does not include Texas. Come and get us. I dare you DC.
RE Hitler, Stalin, Mao — they were all Leftist/Socialists.
The lie that the National SOCIALIST German WORKERS’ Party was “right-wing” is the most successful lie the communists ever told. IIRC, someone asked Stalin if Hitler was a socialist, and he replied, “Oh, Hitler is a socialist. But he’s not OUR socialist.”
So they all suck, in pretty much the same way. And yes, daily life under National Socialism for the common non-Jewish man was certainly better in a material sense than it was under Soviet Socialism.
And Mao was hands-down the bloodiest tyrant in all of human history.
from:
Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was presented to the Communist Party’s Twenty-Second Congress in October 1961
“Capitalism extensively exploits female and child labor.” (p. 11)
“Anyone who received any benefits from society without doing his share of work would be a parasite living at the expense of others.” (p. 108)
Total industrial output proposed was to exceed in 10 years 150 percent of the 1961 level of the U.S. industrial output and in 20 years by 500 percent, leaving the U.S. far behind. This was to be accomplished by raising productivity in ten years by 100 percent and by 300-350 percent within 20 years. (p. 65)
“The highroad to Socialism has been paved. Many peoples are already marching along it, and it will be taken sooner or later by all peoples.” (p. 21)
”World capitalism has now entered a new, third stage of that crisis, the principal feature of which is that its development is not tied to a world war.” (p. 26)
“The oppression of finance capital keeps growing. Giant monopolies controlling the bulk of social production dominate the life of the nation. A handful of millionaires and multi-millionaires wield arbitrary power over the entire wealth of the capitalist world and make the life of entire nations mere small change in their selfish deals. The financial oligarchy is getting fabulously rich.” (p. 27)
“Anti-communism is a reflection of the extreme decadence of bourgeois ideology.” (p. 50)
note similarities to the goals of our dear leader:
– Caring for disabled people, orphans, and elderly with no family left (few were cared for, were abused, and died shortly in their care)
– Free education (yes, but it was highly competitive and unfairly distributed at the university level)
– Free medical services (yes, substandard care and full of malpractice that was never addressed because it was government run; severe shortage of medicines)
– Rent-free housing, free public transportation (no, it was subsidized)
– Free use of some communal services (yes, libraries, bath houses, culture houses)
– Grants to unmarried mothers (yes)
(additional notes in prior paragraph are not mine)
“And Mao was hands-down the bloodiest tyrant in all of human history.”
Chairman Mao is a great man of China, so sayeth almost every Chinese youth indoctrinated in the system.
American children will say the same thing about Hussein President for Life O, sooner or later.
Obama’s Nasty Amnesty
Don’t worry about amnesty. Obama only wants to replace the Declaration’s “unalienable rights” with a Proclamation of “ALIENable rights” !