posted November 18, 2014 10:44 PM            

Jonathan Turley, a liberal law professor and attorney, announced on his blog Tuesday he will be representing the House of Representatives in its lawsuit against the Obama administration. Here's Turley:

As many on this blog are aware, I have previously testified, written, and litigated in opposition to the rise of executive power and the countervailing decline in congressional power in our tripartite system. I have also spent years encouraging Congress, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, to more actively defend its authority, including seeking judicial review in separation of powers conflicts. For that reason, it may come as little surprise this morning that I have agreed to represent the United States House of Representatives in its challenge of unilateral, unconstitutional actions taken by the Obama Administration with respect to implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It is an honor to represent the institution in this historic lawsuit and to work with the talented staff of the House General Counsel’s Office. As in the past, this posting is meant to be transparent about my representation as well as my need to be circumspect about my comments in the future on related stories.

posted November 19, 2014 11:22 AM            

Talk about cognitive dissonance !!

First, your far left fringe loon friends accuse the Governor of doing something he had the authority to do...partially shut down a highway system. Hello, hello, is there any intelligent life on the left? Christie is the Chief Executive of the state and part of what Christie does is "oversee the highway system". Is the freeway surface too grainy, too slick, shut it down. Are the paint stripes too short, too long, too wide, too narrow...shut It down. Are the reflectors the wrong shade of amber...shut it down!

Yet, as it turns out, Christie had nothing whatsoever to do with shutting down the highway in the first place.

And, here's one of the leftist fringe loon friends pi$$ing and moaning about the cost to defend Christie because their accusations...TRIGGERED LANGUAGE IN THE NEW JERSEY CONSTITUTION WHICH REQUIRES THE STATE TO DEFEND THE GOVERNOR...AND OTHERS AGAINST ACCUSATIONS MADE AGAINST THEM.

Talk about cognitive dissonance!

As for Perry, he had the perfect right...as Governor of Texas to take the actions he took.

On the other hand, your little Marxist Messiah is totally over the line constitutionally...in violation of the US Constitution and a very liberal attorney and "REAL CONSTITUTIONAL SCHOLAR" is going to call the Marxist Messiah O'Bomber on the carpet before a Federal Court.

posted November 23, 2014 01:22 AM            

And while the distractions continue to parade as derring do by intrepid freedom fighters the "free trade pacts" that will circumvent all our laws are being hammered out in the back room.

posted November 24, 2014 11:28 AM            

Of course, I don't expect O'Bomber's Kool-Aid drinkers to understand this.

We have 3 co-equal branches of government. We don't have an executive branch vested with the constitutional authority to do whatever they want, whenever they want, because they want it and Congress refuses to authorize their actions with legislation.

posted November 24, 2014 12:43 PM            

Many other presidents including your precious Reagan.. have taken similar executive actions on immigration and other matters.

The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order.

Meanwhile Kongress are threatening to block a new Attorney General in retaliation not for any real reasons if he uses his executive powers.

Who is overstepping/misusing their powers?

posted November 24, 2014 01:39 PM            

Reagan and Bush implemented executive orders AFTER Congress passed immigration laws and those executive orders clarified what Congress had expressly sought to do with immigration legislation. They DID NOT write executive orders to BYPASS Congress...as your little Marxist Messiah did.

When you post leftist horseshiiit dreamed up by leftist loon sycophants of O'Bomber, it doesn't do much for your own credibility.

posted November 24, 2014 06:55 PM            

Other recent precedents have been part of the contemporary debate. In 1985, during the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan, Congress passed a reform bill that shielded some 3 million immigrants from deportation. The bill, however, did not include family members and Reagan responded to this flaw by halting the deportation of their children without waiting for Congress to act. In fact, Congress failed to act during his tenure and Reagan's Republican successor, George H. W. Bush, acted unilaterally to protect families from breakup through deportation. Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican President George W. Bush also used presidential powers to make policy on immigration.

In none of these many examples did the opposition party raise sweeping objections comparable to those of today's Republicans in challenging the authority of the president to act broadly in interpreting, implementing and administering immigration policy.

posted November 24, 2014 06:57 PM            

Of course the Congress of the time did not spend all its energy trying to discredit and undercut the President.

posted November 25, 2014 11:35 AM            

Reagan and Bush wrote executive orders to implement the law congress passed....not executive orders to do an end run around the Congress of the United States...as the Marxist Messiah O'Bomber has.

Btw, the US Senate IS NOT the Congress of the United States.

posted November 25, 2014 01:19 PM            

Yes and the owner of Hobby Lobby didn't know what was in his insurance policy. ..until he looked. It was totally Secret till then! You think Outsiders are better able to see Boehner's investments than he is?

posted November 25, 2014 03:05 PM            

But, the Senate is not the Congress and leftist loons...including O'Bomber continue to attempt to add significance to the Senate passage of a dud immigration bill.

posted November 27, 2014 01:52 PM            

But most dastardly of all, the Hitleresque EO of FDR when he changed the date of Thanksgiving!! Bypassing the legislature with tyrannical intent! Sacrilege as well as Dictatorship!

posted November 28, 2014 11:30 PM            

O'Bomber is acting on his own without ANY legislative amnesty bill for illegal aliens being passed by Congress.

His actions are illegal, unconstitutional and tear at the fabric of the Separation of Powers Doctrine.

No, Reagan Did Not Offer An Amnesty By Lawless Executive Order
By Gabriel Malor
November 20, 2014

Today is the big day, and the Progressive media is in full spin to mitigate the anger Americans are expressing about President Obama's decision to offer legal status to millions of people who broke the law. That spin has taken many forms, including the novel arguments that the executive branch is empowered to act whenever the legislative branch declines and that the executive branch's enforcement discretion includes the affirmative grant of benefits not otherwise authorized by law. Most recently, however, Progressive columnists have settled on an old favorite tactic: justify Democratic misbehavior by claiming (falsely, as you will see) that a Republican did it first.

Democrats across print, web, and cable media have been repeating the claim that Obama is doing nothing more than what Presidents Reagan and Bush 41 did first. They point to executive actions taken in 1987 and 1989 that deferred the removal of certain aliens. But, as usual for Progressive commentators, they elide the crucial facts that distinguish those actions from Obama's. The sign that you're being swindled isn't so much what the con artist tells you, but what he does not tell you. What the Progressive commentariat is not telling you is that the Reagan and Bush immigration orders looked nothing like Obama's creation of a new, open-ended form of immigration relief.

Legally, illegal immigration is dealt with in two steps. First, the Department of Homeland Security (in Reagan and Bush 41's time, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS) has to show that an alien is removable (deportable, in Reagan and Bush 41's lingo) from the United States. Then the alien gets a chance to show that they are eligible for some form of relief from removal or deportation. Ordinarily, those forms of relief are created by Congress. There is asylum and adjustment and cancellation of removal, and so on and so forth, all set down in statute by Congress over the decades (more than a century in the case of certain waivers) in an overlapping mess of eligibilities and disqualifiers and discretionary decisions.

With some regularity, however, the existing forms of immigration relief have been overtaken by circumstances. When that has happened, Congress steps in. In 1986, faced with a large and growing population of illegal aliens, Congress created a new, time-limited form of immigration relief for certain aliens who, among other things, had to have come to the United States more than six years previously. This is the much ballyhooed Reagan amnesty. It was, unfortunately, riddled with fraud in its execution, the uncovering of which is still roiling the immigrant community. But even setting that aside it left President Reagan with a moral dilemma. Congress's amnesty was large, just shy of 3 million people and it had the unanticipated effect of splitting up freshly-legalized parents from their illegally-present minor children who did not qualify for relief.

What the Progressive commentariat is not telling you is that the Reagan and Bush immigration orders looked nothing like Obama's creation of a new, open-ended form of immigration relief.

So Reagan, seeing this family unity problem that Congress had not anticipated or addressed when it granted amnesty to millions of parents, issued an executive order to defer the removal of children of the people who had applied for immigration amnesty under Congress's new law. He allowed those children to remain in the United States while their parents applications for amnesty were pending. A few years later, Bush 41 extended this bit of administrative grace to these same children plus certain spouses of the aliens who had actually been granted immigration amnesty under Congress's new law.

Congress, though it had desired to grant amnesty, had not considered and not included the spouses and children. Importantly, nor had it excluded them. So Presidents Reagan and Bush 41 filled that statutory gap. What do we do with spouses and children? INS asked. Well, the executive branch leaders said, defer their deportation. Decline to exercise your lawful authority for the particular cases that are related to those Congress has offered amnesty.

These Reagan and Bush 41 executive actions were obviously different than what Obama is doing now. They were trying to implement a complicated amnesty that Congress had already passed. Congress', action was a form of immigration relief that obviously fit within our constitutional system. Moreover, Congress left a gap when it came to immediate family members, including minor children, of individuals who qualified for the amnesty. Presidents Reagan and Bush 41 forbore from deporting people in that select group.

Obama is clearly contravening both ordinary practice and the wishes of Congress as expressed in statute by declaring an amnesty himself. This is nothing like Reagan's or Bush's attempts to implement Congress's amnesty.

Obama, in contrast to Reagan and Bush 41, is not trying to implement a lawfully created amnesty. There has been no congressional amnesty. In fact, there has been no immigration action from Congress in the past few years except the post-9/11 REAL ID Act of 2005, which made it harder, not easier, for aliens to qualify for immigration relief. More than that, Congress declined to pass a legalization of the type Obama is issuing during both Obama's term and in a hotly-contested bill during President Bush 43's term.

Thus, Obama is clearly contravening both ordinary practice and the wishes of Congress's as expressed in statute by declaring an amnesty himself. This is nothing like Reagan's or Bush's attempts to implement Congress's amnesty. The progressive media's claims otherwise are blatant lies, relying on their reader's ignorance of events in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Such attempts should be rejected wherever they are found.