Obama following Reagan’s footsetps
Did you know that Abe Lincoln was a tyrant?
On Jan. 1, 1863, with one swipe of his imperial pen, he issued an executive order that proclaimed that three to four million slaves would no longer be considered property.
What a crazy idea.
Smack dab in the middle of the Civil War, the President of the United States authored the Emancipation Proclamation, and there were cries from a few of his political enemies that he’d disregarded the entire U.S. Constitution.
He hadn’t.
Republicans in Congress are gnashing their teeth; threatening lawsuits; implying impeachment talk; vowing to halt all presidential nominees; and talking about shutting down the government, because President Obama is only doing what they’ve failed to do – pass a true comprehensive immigration bill.
Oh, we’re told that Obama’s use of executive orders makes him an “Imperial” President.
There’s ample proof he’s used them sparingly compared to George W. Bush (almost 100 fewer), and Ronald Reagan (nearly 200 fewer), but he still gets tagged with being a tyrant who ignores the “will of the people.”
His Immigration Executive Order is the last straw for Republicans who can’t seem to pick up a copy of the U.S. Constitution and read Article II, Section 2.
Obama’s order states that the undocumented parents of their legal children won’t be prosecuted for deportation. That’s in accord with his powers to pardon, which has already been given an OK by the U.S. Supreme Court, because it allowed for blanket amnesties for thousands of draft evaders following the Vietnam War.
Two years later, President Jimmy Carter issued unconditional pardons for those people who evaded the draft. There was some resistance, but there weren’t many folks having conniption fits on Capitol Hill.
In fact, the high priest of all-things-conservative – Ronald Reagan – has had his own brush with pardons.
Back in 1986, he’d helped engineer a sweeping law that allowed millions of foreign nationals to stay in the country if they’d arrived before 1982.
But there was still a problem with the law.
The spouses and children of those foreign nationals would have still been the subjects of deportation.
Reagan appealed to Congress to try to get it to amend the law to include those spouses and children.
Congress failed to act.
So Reagan, then, issued an (altogether now) executive order that kept families together by expanding it to cover spouses and children.
What a dictator.
Or was he?
That family-saving action, is nearly identical to Obama’s.
Reagan’s order protected the children of their legal parents, while Obama’s order is designed to protect the parents of their legal children.
Reagan and Obama – two peas in a pod, I guess.
Oh, but there are Republicans who can’t see the similarities.
Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn has been running around predicting that the country will surely fall onto the ash heap of history if Obama brandishes his executive order pen.
“The country’s going to go nuts, because they’re going to see it as a move outside the authority of the president, and it’s going to be a very serious situation. You’re going to see – hopefully not – but you could see instances of (My ALL CAPS) ANARCHY”, Coburn told USA Today.
Anarchy? Really? Come on Republicans.
You can grovel better than that.
Newly crowned Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is claiming Obama’s executive order is nothing, but what the president thinks is “good politics.”
The fact that Republicans in the U.S. House refused to even consider a comprehensive immigration bill after it received bipartisan support in the Senate, is really bad politics.
The kind of politics that leaves Republicans searching for answers.
They know that they already have a severe Latino-vote deficit.
If they act to undo Obama’s executive order without replacing it with a serious comprehensive immigration policy, that Latino-vote deficit could increase by 2016.
That still hasn’t prevented McConnell from issuing (hollow) warnings. “Make no mistake, when the newly elected representatives of the people take their seats, they will act,” McConnell said on the floor of the Senate.
Yeah. Sure.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20 year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net