Saturday, August 7, 2010

Obama Is Demagogue in Chief on Immigration Issue

By: David Limbaugh

As the granddaddy of political demagoguery, President Obama might have outdone himself with his recent admonition to political opponents not to "demagogue" the immigration issue.

A "demagogue" is "a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument."

"Ah," you say, "Obama is onto something here. Those who oppose his open-border policy are appealing to prejudice against immigrants instead of to rational argument." Wrong.

Rather, those who support defending our borders believe in the rule of law and in law enforcement. The people of the United States — and Arizona in particular — have a rational interest in protecting their borders and in wanting to prevent illegal immigration.

Though we've had immigration laws on the books for years, are Obama's Democrats saying they are irrationally based — that anyone who wants to enforce these laws is prejudiced? That anyone throughout our history who favored controlling immigration was harboring racial prejudice?

It is Obama and many of his supporters who fall into the demagogue category by appealing to prejudices and fears in lieu of rational argument.

Even in his invocation of the term "demagogue" to describe this issue, Obama himself is demagoguing. He must, because he has no reasonable arguments to justify his lawless policy.

Obama is implying — and has been implying for months — that the people of Arizona didn't pass an enforcement law to ensure their own safety or to facilitate legitimate ends of law enforcement authorities, but to discriminate against legal aliens.

Indeed, the thrust of the administration's ill-conceived lawsuit against the state of Arizona and its people is that legal aliens would be targeted by the reach of the new law.

Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder know better, as Arizona officials testified under oath and averred otherwise in court filings, but they choose to persist in this destructive lie anyway because rational arguments fail them.

The law will not be applied to legal aliens, but it doesn't target illegal aliens, either. It merely allows authorities to demand documentation from those who are already detained because of a reasonable suspicion they broke a law.

If they don't put themselves in a position of being under such suspicion, the immigration law is powerless against them.

Being "a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices," Obama wants to inflame Hispanics into believing the Arizona people and Republicans nationwide are motivated by a prejudice against Mexicans.

Liberals have been hyping this malicious canard for years, suggesting that Republicans and conservatives are nativists and racists.

This is part of a pattern for Obama: to hold himself out as transcending race while exploiting the issue worse than anyone has in the past 50 years.

Whether in his self-indulgent autobiographies or his stump speeches, Obama consistently reveals his deep-seated racial baggage, and he simply will not desist from projecting that baggage onto his political opponents, who oppose him because of his policies. Obama's mentor Saul Alinsky would heartily approve.

In his "bitter clingers" speech, Obama suggested that small-town Americans cling to not only their "guns or religion" — as if that were unhealthy — but also their "antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

"Antipathy to people who aren't like them"? Notice how he unctuously conflates racial prejudice with anti-trade and anti-immigration ideas. He's talking about political conservatives here — Middle America — and implying they're racists.

No mistake about it. Apparently, he can view things only through race-tinted spectacles and insists on forcing those glasses on the rest of us as well.

"High-minded" liberal elites were beside themselves proclaiming that Obama, because of his race, was in a special position to usher in an era of racial harmony.

Well, if we accept the premise that his race should matter on race relations, then it's also fair to say that he has a special responsibility not to exploit the race issue and that he should take extraordinary care not to inflame the already sensitive passions that exist.

It can't reasonably be argued that it's healthy for race relations for Obama to gallivant about suggesting ordinary Americans are routinely prejudiced, whether against blacks, Hispanics, or other "minorities."

Such reckless speech does more to exacerbate racial tensions than his election could ever do to heal them.

Falsely accusing people of racism is essentially the same thing as racism. It's time for Obama and many other liberals to rise above their own categorical prejudice against conservatives and quit slandering them as racists and nativists. Then we can proceed to have a rational discussion on the issue of immigration.

David Limbaugh is a writer, author, and attorney. His new book, "Crimes Against Liberty," will come out in August. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his website.


© Creators Syndicate Inc.

Who Makes The Laws, Anyway?

by Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Last week, a draft memo surfaced from the Homeland Security Department suggesting ways to administratively circumvent existing law to allow several categories of illegal immigrants to avoid deportation and, indeed, for some to be granted permanent residency.

Most disturbing was the stated rationale. This was being proposed "in the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform." In other words, because Congress refuses to do what these bureaucrats would like to see done, they will legislate it themselves.

Regardless of your feelings on the substance of the immigration issue, this is not how a constitutional democracy should operate. Administrators administer the law, they don't change it. That's the legislators' job.

When questioned, the White House downplayed the toxic memo, leaving the impression that it was nothing more than ruminations emanating from the bowels of Homeland Security. But the administration is engaged in an even more significant power play elsewhere.

A 2007 Supreme Court ruling gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate carbon emissions if it could demonstrate that they threaten human health and the environment. The Obama EPA made precisely that finding, thereby granting itself a huge expansion of power and, noted The Washington Post, sending "a message to Congress."

It was not a terribly subtle message: Enact cap-and-trade legislation -- taxing and heavily regulating carbon-based energy -- or the EPA will do so unilaterally. As Frank O'Donnell of Clean Air Watch noted, such a finding "is likely to help light a fire under Congress to get moving."

Well, Congress didn't. Despite the "regulatory cudgel" (to again quote the Post) the administration has been waving, the Senate has repeatedly refused to acquiesce.

Good for the Senate. But what to do when the executive is passively aggressive rather than actively so? Take border security. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., reports that President Obama told him about pressure from his political left and its concern that if the border is secured, Republicans will have no incentive to support comprehensive reform (i.e., amnesty). Indeed, Homeland Security's abandonment of the "virtual fence" on the southern border, combined with its lack of interest in completing the real fence that today covers only one-third of the border, gives the distinct impression that serious border enforcement is not a high administration priority absent some Republican quid pro quo on comprehensive reform.

But border enforcement is not something to be manipulated in return for legislative favors. It is, as the administration vociferously argued in court in the Arizona case, the federal executive’s constitutional responsibility. Its job is to faithfully execute the laws. Non-execution is a dereliction of duty.

This contagion of executive willfulness is not confined to the federal government or to Democrats. In Virginia, the Republican attorney general has just issued a ruling allowing police to ask about one's immigration status when stopped for some other reason (e.g., a traffic violation). Heretofore, police could inquire only upon arrest and imprisonment.

Whatever your views about the result, the process is suspect. If police latitude regarding the interrogation of possible illegal immigrants is to be expanded, that's an issue for the legislature, not the executive.

How did we get here? I blame Henry Paulson. (Such a versatile sentence.) The gold standard of executive overreach was achieved the day he summoned the heads of the country's nine largest banks and informed them that henceforth the federal government was their business partner. The banks were under no legal obligation to obey. But they know the capacity of the federal government, when crossed, to cause you trouble, endless trouble. They complied.

So did BP when the president summoned its top executives to the White House to demand a $20 billion federally administered escrow fund for damages. Existing law capped damages at $75 million. BP, like the banks, understood the power of the U.S. government. Twenty billion it was.

Again, you can be pleased with the result (I was), and still be troubled by how we got there. Everyone wants energy in the executive (as Alexander Hamilton called it). But not lawlessness. In the modern welfare state, government has the power to regulate your life. That's bad enough. But at least there is one restraint on this bloated power: the separation of powers. Such constraints on your life must first be approved by both houses of Congress.

That's called the consent of the governed. The constitutional order is meant to subject you to the will of the people's representatives, not to the whim of a chief executive or the imagination of a loophole-seeking bureaucrat.

Mr. Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist.