The Federal Observer

Cedar Rapids, Iowa ­- Democratic senator Max Baucus is retiring because he is “fed up” with the Affordable Care Act, according to his Republican colleague Chuck Grassley. Speaking at Friday night’s Lincoln Day dinner in Iowa, Grassley told the audience the Montana senator is leaving office ”because he’s so fed up with the possibility of the implementation of Obamacare being a train wreck.”

Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, played a key role in writing the 2010 law.

Grassley said that dissatisfaction with the health-care bill exists across party lines, describing a “bipartisan coalition in Washington” that considers the implementation of the law a disaster. “It’s a shame that a trainwreck even left the station a couple years ago,” he added, referring to Baucus’s now-infamous statement of frustration.

Some of the interests that stand to gain the most from the Senate Gang of Eight immigration bill, S. 744, are obvious.

Within six months of enactment of the bill, millions of illegal aliens would be eligible for Registered Provisional Immigrant (RPI) status – the first and most important step in the amnesty process. They would be granted permission to remain and work in the United States while they wait for green cards and eventual citizenship.

Also obvious winners in the 844-page bill are business interests that would gain easier access to foreign labor. S. 744 provides for significant increases in guest workers who would be made available to businesses, as well as new flows of low-skilled and skilled permanent immigrants.

But there are still others who would hit the jackpot if S. 744 were to become law: lawyers and an array of groups that advocate on behalf of illegal aliens.

The “Gang of Eight,” aka the “Eight Gangsters,” are concocting Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation. Purportedly this legislation is needed to address the presence of the officially-estimated population of 12 million illegal aliens.

While the legislation is referred to as being “Comprehensive,” there is nothing truly comprehensive about their approach, other than the fact that it would provide nearly all illegal aliens who are in the United States, or who will arrive in the months to come, with lawful status and ultimately, a pathway to United States citizenship. It would also increase the number of visas for many thousands of foreign workers and allow them to compete unfairly with American workers.

The Gang of Eight’s bill is like a bad reality TV show. How many points do you need to win a green card?

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), are urging Congress not to stop or delay the Gang of Eight’s immigration reform because of the Boston Marathon bombings. Sen. Marco Rubio’s spokesman, Alex Conant, warned on Friday, “The situation in Boston is still developing and it’s too soon to jump to conclusions, let alone use the tragedy to make political points,” referring to the Boston Marathon bomber suspects, who were legalized in the U.S.—two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, from Russia.

Let’s cut to the chase. If the Gang of Eight’s so-called immigration reform legislation becomes law, expect the number of illegal aliens that will be legalized in a broken, crime riddled agency, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), to explode. Everyone from family members, step children, gang members and drunk drivers are welcome to apply. Moreover, as Crime & Incompetence: Guide to America’s Immigration Crisis documents, the USCIS can’t process legal immigrants competently let alone millions of illegal aliens. Even the Government Accountability Office has warned that the USCIS does not operate using “best practices.” These are just some of many reasons why this reckless bill should be scrapped immediately.

Gang of Eight welcomes gang members and drunk drivers

Second Amendment: Gun ownership restrictions that the president said were supported by 90% of the nation have died in a Senate controlled by his party. Exploiting Newtown is haunting the power grabbers.

Just last week it was a political no-brainer. “Ninety percent of Americans support universal background checks,” President Obama asserted yet again. This time he was at the University of Hartford, less than an hour’s drive from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Ct., where 20 students and six staff members were slaughtered just before Christmas. With Obama were many of the Newtown victims’ parents.

11 Million? These damned bas-TURDS in DC can’t count. Get ready for an amnesty, which will allow in excess of THIRTY MILLION+++ lawbreakers to invade your neighborhood – if they are not already here. Remember 1986? They told us then, that it would be a one-time affair, allowing ONE million illegals amnesty. It wound up being THREE times that number. Governments LIE by three.

Get out the ropes boys and girls – it’s time to hold a necktie party… - Jeffrey Bennett, Editor and Publisher

The Up-Chuckster

Even with one of the largest hurdles to an immigration overhaul overcome, optimistic lawmakers cautioned on Sunday they had not finished work on a bill that would provide a path to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants.

The AFL-CIO and the pro-business U.S. Chamber of Commerce reached a deal late Friday that would allow tens of thousands of low-skill workers into the country to fill jobs in construction, restaurants and hotels.

Yet despite the unusual agreement between the two powerful lobbying groups, lawmakers from both parties conceded that the negotiations were not finished.

‘With the agreement between business and labor, every major policy issue has been resolved,’ said Sen. Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat who brokered the labor-business deal.

But it hasn’t taken the form of a bill and the eight senators searching for a compromise haven’t met about the potential breakthrough.

‘We haven’t signed off,’ said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

‘There are a few details yet. But conceptually, we have an agreement between business and labor, between ourselves that has to be drafted,’ he added.

Yet just before lawmakers began appearing on Sunday shows, Sen. Marco Rubio warned he was not ready to lend his name – and political clout – to such a deal without hashing out the details.

‘Reports that the bipartisan group of eight senators have agreed on a legislative proposal are premature,’ said Rubio, a Florida Republican who is among the lawmakers working on legislation.

Rubio, a Cuban-American who is weighing a presidential bid in 2016, is a leading figure inside his party. Lawmakers will be closely watching any deal for his approval and his skepticism about the process did little to encourage optimism.

Rubio, who is the group’s emissary to conservatives, called the agreement ‘a starting point’ but said 92 senators from 43 states haven’t yet been involved in the process.

The detente between the nation’s leading labor federation and the powerful business lobbying group still needs senators’ approval, including a nod from Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican whose previous efforts came up short.

‘I think we’re on track. . But as Sen. Rubio correctly says, we have said we will not come to final agreement till we look at all of the legislative language and he’s correctly pointing out that that language hasn’t been fully drafted,’ Schumer said.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., also noted the significance of the truce between labor and business but added that this wasn’t yet complete.

‘That doesn’t mean we’ve crossed every `i’ or dotted every `t,’ or vice versa,’ said Flake, who is among the eight lawmakers working on the deal.

Schumer negotiated the deal between AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka and Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue during a late-Friday phone call.

Under the compromise, the government would create a new ‘W’ visa for low-skill workers who would earn wages paid to Americans or the prevailing wages for the industry they’re working in, whichever is higher.

The Labor Department would determine prevailing wage based on customary rates in specific localities, so that it would vary from city to city.

The proposed measure would secure the border, crack down on employers, improve legal immigration and create a 13-year pathway to citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants already here.

It’s a major second-term priority of President Barack Obama’s and would usher in the most dramatic changes to the faltering U.S. immigration system in more than two decades.

‘This is a legacy item for him. There is no doubt in my mind that he wants to pass comprehensive immigration reform,’ said David Axelrod, a longtime political confidant of Obama.

During the last week, an immigration deal seemed doomed. But the breakthrough late Friday restarted the talks.

Ultimately the new ‘W’ visa program would be capped at 200,000 workers a year, but the number of visas would fluctuate, depending on unemployment rates, job openings, employer demand and data collected by a new federal bureau being pushed by labor groups as an objective monitor of the market, according to an official involved with the talks who also spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of a formal announcement.

A ‘safety valve’ would allow employers to exceed the cap, the official said, if they could show need and pay premium wages, but any additional workers brought in would be subtracted from the next year’s cap.

The workers could move from employer to employer and would be able to petition for permanent residency and ultimately seek U.S. citizenship. Neither is possible for temporary workers now.

‘As to the 11 million (illegal immigrants), they’ll have a pathway to citizenship, but it will be earned, it will be long, and it will be hard, and I think it is fair,’ Graham said.

The new program would fill needs employers say they have that are not currently met by U.S. immigration programs.

Most industries don’t have a good way to hire a steady supply of foreign workers because there’s one temporary visa program for low-wage, non-agricultural workers but it’s capped at 66,000 visas per year and is only supposed to be used for seasonal or temporary jobs.

Separately, the new immigration bill also is expected to offer many more visas for high-tech workers, new visas for agriculture workers, and provisions allowing some agriculture workers already in the U.S. a speedier path to citizenship than that provided to other illegal immigrants, in an effort to create a stable agricultural workforce.

Published on The Daily Mail April 1, 2013.

David and Barbara Green

In a legal argument formally presented in federal court in the case of Hobby Lobby v. Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama administration is claiming that the First Amendment, ­which expressly denies the government the authority to prohibit the “free exercise” of religion, ­nonetheless allows it to force Christians to directly violate their religious beliefs even on a matter that involves the life and death of innocent human beings.

Because federal judges ­including Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor­ have refused to grant an injunction protecting the owners of Hobby Lobby from being forced to act against their Christian faith, those owners will be subject to federal fines of up to $1.3 million per day starting Tuesday for refusing to include abortion-inducing drugs in their employee health plan.

Major labor unions and dozens of liberal groups working to elect President Obama are worried he could “betray” them in the lame-duck session by agreeing to a deal to cut safety-net programs.

While Obama is relying on labor unions and other organizations on the left to turn out Democratic voters in battleground states, some of his allies have lingering concerns about whether he will stand by them if elected.

The liberal groups are planning to launch an aggressive campaign immediately after Election Day to pressure Obama and Senate Democrats not to endorse any deal that cuts Medicare and/or Social Security benefits.

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to rule on the constitutionality of a state requirement that voters must prove they are U.S. citizens before they register to vote and cast their ballots.

The Court granted review of an Arizona case in which they previously had refused the state’s request to block a lower court decision that struck down that requirement.

Arizona’s voters adopted that law when they passed “Proposition 200″ in 2004. The Court will not rule on the case until after this year’s election, so the requirement will not be in effect next month. (The case is Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council, docket 11-71.)

That was the only new case granted Monday. In one significant denial, the Court refused to consider imposing a heavier duty on managers of employee retirement plans to justify investing plan assets in the company’s own stock. The Court turned aside without comment two petitions on that issue. (Gray v. Citigroup, 11-1531, and Gearren v. McGraw-Hill Companies, 11-1550.)

The new Arizona voting rights case is important not only because of the citizenship proof requirement, but perhaps even more so because it calls on the Court to sort out the cooperative but sometimes conflicting roles of the state governments and Congress in regulating election procedures. In its petition, the state of Arizona complained that the Ninth Circuit Court, in nullifying Proposition 200, had created a new test for when states must yield to Congress in their control of elections.

Written by Lyle Denniston, and published on the Business Insider October 15, 2012.

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More power taken from “the people.” Obama expands his power base. (Ed.)

As soon as the FRAUD puts his signature to this then he will really go wild with filling his administration with ILLEGAL appointments.  This is what you get from placing your *HOPE* in a ‘man’ to repair the damage that has been done to America.

Surely most must realize that there is NO MAN that can restore this land.  Only God can do that and that means that each of us must return to God and HUMBLE ourselves and call out to God. – Jackie Juntti

By a vote of 261-116, the House of Representatives passed a bill rewriting Article II of the Constitution and divesting the Senate of the power to accept or reject the appointment of many presidential nominees.

Last year, the Senate passed the measure by a vote of 79-20, so it now goes to the desk of President Obama for his signature.

Executive Order — Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions

EXECUTIVE ORDER

ASSIGNMENT OF NATIONAL SECURITY AND EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS COMMUNICATIONS FUNCTIONS

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Darrell Issa

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has revealed portions of sealed wiretap applications related to the botched gun-tracking operation “Fast and Furious.”

Issa entered the sensitive, and previously undisclosed, information into the Congressional Record on Thursday during the floor debate leading up to the passage of his resolution placing Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on Arizona’s immigration law, Obama administration officials announced Monday they are suspending in the state a key program that allowed state and local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law.

The move further weakens efforts by Arizona, and potentially other states, to take the reins on immigration enforcement.

The high court decision Monday struck down three provisions in Arizona’s law but left in place a central plank that required local law enforcement during routine stops to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect is in the country illegally.

UPDATED: In a split decision, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld one part of a tough Arizona immigration law, but struck down other sections.

The part of the law the justices upheld requires police officers stopping someone to make efforts to verify the person’s immigration status with the federal government.

The justices struck down three other parts of the law:

• One making it a crime for an illegal immigrant to work or to seek work in Arizona;

• One which authorized state and local officers to arrest people without a warrant if the officers have probable cause to believe a person is an illegal immigrant;

• And one that made it a state requirement for immigrants to register with the federal government.

“Arizona may have understandable frustrations with the problems caused by illegal immigration” while the federal goverrment tries to enforce immigration law, but the state “may not pursue policies that undermine federal law,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion.

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court struck down much of Arizona’s effort to crack down on illegal immigrants but left one key part intact in a ruling that gave both sides of the debate something to cheer.

In a 5-3 ruling, the court said Arizona in effect had tried to set up a parallel enforcement system that punished illegal immigrants more harshly and interfered with congressional authority over the nation’s borders. The court rejected parts of the state law known as SB1070 that made it a crime for illegal immigrants to seek work and that authorized warrantless arrests of people suspected by state and local police of committing deportable offenses.

But the court upheld for now the law’s directive that state and local police check the immigration status of people they stop when they suspect them of lacking authorization to be in the U.S. The justices observed that federal law already requires immigration officials to respond to status checks from local authorities.

There is a school of thought among GOP party pros that Fast and Furious is a distraction, that President Obama would rather talk about anything other than the economy. Much as I admire the insight and focus of people like Karl Rove, President Obama and his coterie are showing unmistakable signs of desperation. We witnessed the President’s gum chewing demeanor, and awful presser performance in Los Cabos at the G20 summit — a televised disaster that commandeered prime time television in the East.

Anyone who thinks that claiming executive privilege was a strategy to distract Americans from the economy should view the following four excerpts from yesterday’s press briefing collected by Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard. Halper’s captions capture the disaster:

At today’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney said invoking executive privilege is “entirely about principle.” The assembled reporters laughed….

While state legislatures and school boards around the country scramble to pass anti-bullying statutes, President Barack Obama is doing his utmost to bully the United States Supreme Court into ruling in his favor, specifically on the Affordable Health Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare.

While this may sound like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt circa 1937, it is President Obama, circa today.

First, Obama unleashed a broadside against the justices during his 2010 State of the Union address for their ruling on a campaign finance case known as Citizens United. With the justices seated directly in front of him, Obama publicly scolded the court for its decision-making. It was an unusual step for a lawyer-president to take the high court to the legal woodshed during a State of the Union address.

The most vile, dangerous, deadly enemy Legal American citizens have sits within the bowels of what WAS our government offices in WDC. Our enemy isn’t in the MidEast – it is right in that SWAMP called Washington DC. The sooner that swamp is drained and all predator critters are eliminated – the safer America and the rest of the world will be. Americans fell asleep and listened to the whisperings of the SERPENT and now we are at deaths door. Do we kill the snake or let it finish us off? America and the rest of the world is now being bombed by “Obama’s Toilet Tankers”. – Jackie Juntti

The U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio sets a new low for the politicization of DOJ.

Neither President Nixon’s Justice Department during the Watergate era nor the Bill Clinton-Janet Reno abuses of DOJ’s power (e.g., summary firing of all U.S. attorneys, the invasion at Waco, Bill Lann Lee’s Civil Rights Division activism) quite compares with the lengths to which Attorney General Eric Holder, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Tom Perez, and President Obama have gone to pursue a political vendetta.

Foremost to keep in mind regarding this misconduct: It’s all about immigration politics.

House Democrats said Tuesday they will offer an amendment to push to overturn stand-your-ground self-defense laws in states like Florida.

The amendment, which would withhold some grants from states that have such laws, will come as part of the House’s debate on the Commerce Department spending bill.

In his fervent defense Wednesday of Arizona’s right to crack down on illegal immigration, Justice Antonin Scalia likened immigration enforcement to crackdowns on bank robbers.

“What’s wrong about the states enforcing federal law?” Scalia said during his aggressive questioning of U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. “There is a federal law against robbing federal banks. Can it be made a state crime to rob those banks? I think it is.”

The Reagan-appointed justice mocked the Obama administration’s argument that S.B. 1070 unconstitutionally forces the federal government to re-prioritize its enforcement resources and go after undocumented people who are not dangerous.

“But does the attorney general come in and say, you know, we might really only want to go after the professional bank robbers?” Scalia said. “If it’s just an amateur bank robber, you know, we’re going to let it go. And the state’s interfering with our whole scheme here because it’s prosecuting all these bank robbers.”

Last week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said that he will respond “appropriately” to the demand made by a federal appellate judge that the Justice Department provide him with a written statement reaffirming the department’s respect for the authority of the federal courts to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. 

It is no secret that whatever ruling the United States Supreme Court reaches on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the decision will have monumental repercussions for the nation and the Obama administration.

Critical to that ruling is the ability by individual justices to render an impartial decision on the issue. Considering her history regarding healthcare reform previous to her court appointment, Justice Elena Kagan’s ability to be impartial is highly questionable.

In fact, during testimony by the Obama administration’s current Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli Jr., Kagan seemingly advocated on behalf of the government’s central argument for the individual mandate, contending that young Americans should be required to purchase health insurance because other Americans will subsidize their health care in the future, finishing one of Mr. Verrilli’s sentences for him. The critical part of the exchange:

Two weeks after fighting for the survival of its signature healthcare reform law before the Supreme Court, the Obama administration will be back in court Tuesday to defend another part of the president’s agenda to make Americans healthier.