OK, class, let’s all remove our brains from their storage boxes and use them for a sec.
Charlie Spiering has a news update at Breitbart this evening, recounting a statement from White House spokesman Josh Earnest in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd:
During an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained that the Obama administration was getting impatient with Congress.
“[W]e’re not just going to sit around and wait interminably for Congress,” he explained. “We’ve been waiting a year already. The president has tasked his Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson with reviewing what options are available to the president, what is at his disposal using his executive authority to try to address some of the problems that have been created by our broken immigration system.”
Earnest added that, although Obama was exploring executive action, it was “not a substitute for robust Congressional action” on immigration reform.
It’s not Spiering’s fault that simply reporting the news now amounts to participating in a propaganda campaign. After all, what Spiering quotes verbatim is what Earnest said.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
But now switch those brains on. Is there any reason why Obama would need to ask Congress for new legislation in order to deal with the crisis at the border? Don’t we already have laws that tell him just what to do, and empower him to do it?
For that matter, isn’t Obama already taking action at the border? Aren’t his agencies acting on orders from above to accept illegal-immigrant minors coming across the Rio Grande and house them in shelters (see here as well)? Isn’t the Obama administration trotting around the country setting up new housing facilities for them, and arranging to fly them from one place to another? Isn’t Obama emptying busloads of adult illegals at bus stations in Arizona and Texas? Isn’t he reuniting illegal minors with family members in the U.S., and turning a blind eye when they miss their assigned court dates and are never heard from again?
Obama could call out the National Guard to enforce U.S. law at our borders. He doesn’t need Congress to pass an immigration reform bill to do that. He could lift the use-of-force restrictions imposed by his administration on the Border Patrol, and make it more effective. He could cooperate with the border-state governors instead of seeming to try to selectively reward or punish them.
He could take a tougher line with Mexico – but he could also offer Mexico more effective help in suppressing the coyote-run human pipeline from Central America to our southern border. Nothing that would help outside our borders — the policy realm that’s within Obama’s purview more than in Congress’s — requires the passage of an immigration reform bill.
And everything he needs to do inside the U.S. to stem the tide of the illegal influx, he already has the authority and the policy approval of federal law to do.
Obama is just engaging in demagoguery here. Never let a crisis go to waste. Pretend, however patently false it may be, that the current crisis demands the unrelated agenda you’re pushing in order to “resolve” it. Keep those communications disciplined, and assume that the media will never call you on your bait-and-switch tactics and misdirections.
