Ken Berwitz
Did we elect a President to uphold the law, or did we elect a dictator to make up the law as he goes along?
How many times does Barack Obama have to show us that he thinks it is option #2, before we force him back to option #1?
Maybe this will be the time.
A newly leaked internal DHS memorandum produced for an off-the-record agency conclave reveals that the Obama administration is actively planning to circumvent a federal court injunction that suspended part of last November\’s deferral-based amnesty initiative. The document, apparently prepared as follow-up from a DHS “Regulations Retreat” last summer, appears sure to re-ignite concerns in Congress as well as federal judges in the Fifth Circuit. The Administration has already been criticized from the bench for handing out work permits to hundreds of thousands of deferred action beneficiaries, in direct violation of a district court\’s order. With the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals deciding any day now whether to deny the Administration\’s request to reverse that injunction, this public leak has come at a critical juncture for U.S. enforcement policy.
Last June, four months after Texas federal judge Andrew Hanen\’s order to freeze President\’s DAPA and Expanded DACA programs-disclosure: the Immigration Reform Law Institute has filed briefs in these cases-DHS\’s immigration policy makers apparently held a “Regulations Retreat” to discuss “different options” for “open market Employment Authorization Document (EAD) regulatory changes.” EAD is the statutory term for work permits. From a memo recording these discussions, we now know that the Obama DHS has, rather than pausing to allow the courts to assess the constitutionality of its enforcement nullification initiatives, been gearing up to roll out one or more of four plans drawn up at the meeting, each one designed to provide EADs to millions of nonimmigrants, including those lawfully present and visa overstayers, crippling the actual employment-based visa system on the federal statute-book.
The internal memo reveals four options of varying expansiveness, with option 1 providing EADs to “all individuals living in the United States”, including illegal aliens, visa-overstayers, and H-1B guest-workers, while option 4 provides EADs only to those on certain unexpired non-immigrant visas. Giving EADs to any of the covered individuals, however, is in direct violation of Congress\’s Immigration & Nationality Act and works to dramatically subvert our carefully wrought visa system.
Let me say this plainly. We either have laws or we don\’t. If President Obama can ignore the laws he chooses not to enforce, we don\’t. We don\’t even have laws that he does enforce, since they are only being enforced at his discretion, subject to change at any time.
And where are our mainstream media on this?
In Kentucky, kim davis, an obscure county clerk, refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. If she were allowed to continue doing so, the consequence would be that some number of gay couples would have to go elsewhere to get their marriage licenses. For this lawbreaking, media gave us non-stop coverage, almost all of it negative toward davis.
But here we have the President of the United States ignoring the law to reward people who are here illegally – not a few, but untold thousands of them. And where are those same media?
The answer is that most mainstream media support gay marriage, and support illegals being given some kind of amnesty. So they demand that kim davis follow the law and issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and will largely look the other way as President Obama hands out amnesty to illegals.
Please be assured that what you have just read has nothing to do with my positions on gay marriage or a path for some illegals to stay in the United States. As most readers know, I support gay marriage, and I support a method – albeit limitedly and with significant provisos – of allowing illegals who have been here for an extended period of time and demonstrated their quality as citizens to have a path to legal status.
But when there are laws they must be followed.
If a President doesn\’t like a law, he can exert his power and his influence to change it. When he ignores the law, he turns this from a democracy to a dictatorship.
While Venezuela\’s hugo chavez was still alive, I did a series of blogs titled “Chavezing The USA”, in which I detailed instances where President Obama used his status as an elected head of state to elevate himself to dictator status. I think I may have to resurrect that series, because – with the disgraceful complicity of so many in mainstream media – that is exactly what Mr. Obama is doing here.
