Image from "Monsters" copyright Magnolia Pictures (2010)
Ruth Marcus looks at the legality of the immigration action.
Agree or disagree with Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration, the president did something important, laudable, and with potentially long-lasting consequences in announcing the move: He released the Office of Legal Counsel memorandum outlining the legal justification for it.
...To understand the significance of this action, it helps to know something about the Office of Legal Counsel, commonly known as OLC. This is an elite unit within the Department of Justice, entrusted with providing legal advice to the president and the executive branch.
... in the case of executive actions on immigration, OLC found that the Department of Homeland Security had authority, in the traditional exercise of prosecutorial discretion, to give priority to some deportations over others, and also to allow the parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents to remain — and work legally — in the country. Notably, however, OLC said Homeland Security would be going too far if, as the agency proposed, protection for the so-called “dreamers” was extended to their parents.
Before we get too carried away in cheering here, while the Obama administration has been better than its predecessor in terms of secret legal opinions — okay, not a high bar — it has been far from perfect.
Marcus goes on to discuss the many instances in which the Obama administration has been cagey about releasing OLC statements and instances in which the OLC has seemed to be way out on a limb. Making the OLC process more transparent and their decisions more public would help with both.
Dana Milbank wonders if Obama's executive action might spur the legislature to actually legislate.
Here’s a paradox worth pondering: Could President Obama’s executive action on immigration actually make it easier to enact comprehensive reform?
The invective pouring forth from Republicans last week would seem to suggest not: “deliberately sabotage any chance of enacting bipartisan reforms . . . trying to pick a bar fight . . . throwing this nation into a crisis . . . anarchy.” Mitt Romney, the failed 2012 Republican presidential nominee, told CBS’s Bob Schieffer that Obama was “poking an eye of the Republican leaders in Congress.”
The natural instinct is to poke back — an eye for an eye. But one Republican, at least, has a better idea. “Rather than poke him in the eye, I’d rather put legislation on his desk,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) told me Thursday.
The idea of Congress legislating seems quaint these days, but Flake’s counterintuitive view is that Obama’s unilateral action will increase pressure on the president to accept conservative immigration bills and therefore will increase the odds that something resembling comprehensive immigration reform will be enacted. “I think it will be easier in a sense,” he said.
... Flake proposes letting the action stand — and even offering to make it permanent — if Obama first makes the three concessions that Republicans have long sought on immigration. His hunch is that Obama, to quell the Republican rage on immigration and to make his executive action permanent, would ultimately take that deal.
If it strikes you that most of this Milbank piece involves praising Jeff Flake, you're not wrong. Flake not only comes out of this article with his boots neatly spit shined, Milbank multiple times acts as if Flake is an independent Mr. Smith who just happens to retain "strong ties to House conservatives" and who is "coordinating with House Republicans." Hmm, might that be because Flake
is one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate? Somehow, Milbank has determined that a Senator who is willing to bring the most egregious ideas of the House crazy wing straight to the president's desk is a peach. "Good guy" isn't what it used to be.
The Miami Herald says "thank God" and is a bit more honest about Mr. Flake in Washington.
To judge from all the commotion aroused by President Obama’s executive order on immigration, it would seem that he had unilaterally declared a wholesale and unlawful rewriting of the nation’s immigration laws.
Except that he didn’t.
After years of saying that he preferred legislative action over executive action to reform the nation’s flawed immigration system, the president correctly decided that getting both the House and Senate to act was a pipe dream. If anything, his decision to proceed should give lawmakers an incentive to override his action by doing their jobs in the very way that the president recommended: “Pass a bill.”
... Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, said he, too, was disappointed with the president’s action, but he suggested this would also put pressure on the president to sign a Republican-passed bill touching on reform, even if loaded with provisions Mr. Obama would not favor.
The sad reality, however, is that no such bill is likely to emerge from Congress anytime soon, and most Republican comments condemned Mr. Obama for acting on his own.
The Herald points out that the action taken was limited, that it was taken because Congress would rather talk than act, and that Congress would
still rather talk than act. Probably the most honest review so far.
If you were expecting to hear something on Ferguson today, note that the grand jury is expected to meet again tomorrow. So it's likely that any word won't come till midweek.
Come on inside, let's see what the other pundits are on about.
Leonard Pitts on Bill Cosby...
Wow. Just...wow.
So what’s next?
Will it turn out Mother Teresa was a pornographer?
Or Mr. Rogers a meth head?
Is Billy Graham running a prostitution ring?
Why not? Such ridiculous scenarios seem far less so in the wake of recent news. Namely, renewed accusations that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist. Bill Cosby, the genial, avuncular comic who has made us laugh forever. Bill Cosby, the sleek secret agent who wisecracked with Robert Culp as they fought the Cold War on I Spy. Bill Cosby, the wise, warm, witty father on The Cosby Show, the ’80s sitcom that resurrected sitcoms, saved NBC and made him America’s Dad. Bill Cosby, the friendly pitchman for Jell-O, Coca-Cola and old-school values, the door-opening pioneer who helped make possible the likes of Chris Rock, Denzel Washington and Jamie Foxx.
How do you get from all that to...serial rapist? And make no mistake: These allegations do not “tarnish” his legacy. If true, they become his legacy, reducing to a distant second all his achievements, all those aspirational lectures about values, all those doors he opened and laughter he earned.
....
Have you ever learned something you wished you didn’t know? That’s how this story feels. You want to slam hands over ears and sing nonsense syllables until it goes away. But things don’t work like that. Ultimately, you can only struggle with your own sense of disappointment. And betrayal.
The New York TImes explains the Republican effort to remove healthcare from Americans one piece at a time.
Now that they will dominate both houses of Congress, Republicans are planning to dismantle the Affordable Care Act piece by piece instead of trying to repeal it entirely.
They are expected to hold at least one symbolic vote for repeal in the next session so that newly elected Republicans who campaigned against the law can honor their pledges to repeal it. But Republican leaders know they don’t have the supermajorities needed to override a presidential veto, so they will try to inflict death by multiple cuts.
In short, the Republicans plan to go after all the things that fund the system and keep it stable — the medical device tax, the employer mandate, etc. By disrupting the balance of the system, Republicans can then point and shout that, just as they always said, Obamacare doesn't work. You'd think that this would be so obvious that no one would ever fall for it, but "break it then scream about how it's broken" is the platform that Republicans have run on, successfully, for more than thirty years.
Ross Douthat drapes a purple robe around the shoulders of Obama the First.
Let me be clear, as he likes to say: I believe that President Obama was entirely sincere when he ran for president as a fierce critic of the imperial executive. I believe that he was in earnest when he told supporters in 2008 that America’s “biggest problems” involved “George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all.” I believe he meant it when he cast himself as a principled civil libertarian, when he pledged to defer to Congress on war powers, when he promised to abjure privileges Bush had claimed.
I also believe he was sincere when he told audiences, again and again across his presidency, that a sweeping unilateral move like the one just made on immigration would betray the norms of constitutional government.
For what it's worth, that last paragraph contains a link to "prove" that Obama said this again and again. That link is the the blog of John Boehner. Boehner's blog then includes generic quotes from Obama about the balance of power between the president and the Congress, none of them addressing the kind of executive action that Obama just took. But having "proved" that the president has broken his own rules, Douthat goes on to explain how he became a "Caesar."
Paul Krugman revisits one of Glenn beck's favorites.
Danny Vinik sends us to the latest from Schiff, who made a big splash in 2008-2009 predicting runaway inflation if not hyperinflation; he was a favorite of Glenn Beck’s.
And in his new piece Schiff lays out the analytical issue very clearly:
Mainstream economists (who hold sway in government, the corporate world, and academia) argued that as long as the labor market remained slack, inflation would not catch fire. My fellow Austrian economists and I loudly voiced the minority viewpoint that money printing is always inflationary-in fact, that it is the very definition of inflation.
...How could you test those rival views? Why, how about having a huge slump, to which central banks respond with aggressive monetary expansion? And that is, of course, the test we've just run. And everywhere you look, inflation is low, verging on deflation.
So we’ve just run the Schiff test — and his brand of economics, by his own criteria, loses with flying colors. And that goes for just about all anti-Keynesian doctrines: we ran as close to a clean experiment as you’re ever going to get, and the answer is no.
The only prediction I can make about economics is that, having been proven wrong, Austrian school economics will be back in vogue again within the week. How do I know? Because so many people with so much money simply
want it to be true. Austrian school economics has survived more disproof than Bigfoot, and somehow serious people still take it seriously.
New Sceintist says the sun doesn't like the U.K.
The Sun may be playing a part in the generation of lightning strikes on Earth by temporarily 'bending' the Earth's magnetic field and allowing a shower of energetic particles to enter the upper atmosphere.
This is according to researchers at the University of Reading who have found that over a five year period the UK experienced around 50% more lightning strikes when the Earth's magnetic field was skewed by the Sun's own magnetic field.
I think anyone who ever visited the U.K. already knew that the sun had a grudge against the place. Still, it's nice to have that backed up by science.