Washington Is Flying Apart at the Seams

With two and a half years still to go in his presidency, Barack Obama has given up on a Congress that resolutely refuses to do much of anything, while House Speaker
John Boehner is suing the President for doing something.

Exasperated after another year of Congress refusing to confront the nation’s problems, Obama had given notice in his State of the Union that he would henceforward use “pen and phone” to get things done. Congressional Republicans were infuriated that he already had, especially his excessive tampering with the Affordable Care Act. The President had unilaterally made 30-odd changes to the law by their count, and has since used or threatened to use executive orders to issue whatever edicts he fancies without involving congress. “As long as they’re doing nothing, I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something”, says the President.

Obama implores the Congress to work with him. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Boehner implore the President to work with them. Neither side yields, the one spiting the other.

Republicans are equally angry over the disputatious Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s practice of blocking any of their amendments to legislation, most recently to a popular energy efficiency bill that otherwise would have passed.

And not to leave out the third branch, Obama and Democrats are outraged at the Supreme Court's decisions, the one effectively eliminating a president’s right to make appointments when the Senate is in recess, the other taking yet another bite out of Obamacare. Republicans are gleeful that the “imperial president” has been dealt his comeuppance, and trumpet the Hobby Lobby decision as a victory for "religious freedom". Senate Democrats are fighting back — working on a bill to overturn the Supreme Court's ruling by restoring contraceptives to workers at religious corporations.

In other words, all three branches are at war with one another.

The dog fight reached its current intensity over immigration and the flood tide of young immigrants flowing across the southern border. Immigration reform was to have been Obama’s chief second term achievement. When Boehner called him this summer to say, once again and finally, that the House would take no action this year, a disgusted Obama announced he will now use all means at his disposal to “fix as much of our immigration system as I can on my own, without Congress”. The two men show an intense dislike of one another at the nation’s expense.

Boehner, who evidently thinks his branch of government has no obligation to produce, is livid over Obama acting in its stead. He doesn’t mince words:

“The President has circumvented the American people and their elected representatives through executive action, changing and creating his own laws, and excusing himself from enforcing statutes he is sworn to uphold”.

The Speaker intends to introduce legislation that would allow the House to sue the President over his abuse of executive power.

“So sue me”, said Obama, sounding decidedly un-presidential. He calls it a “stunt”. “They don’t do anything but block me. And call me names. It can’t be that much fun”, he said in Minneapolis. He may have been playing it for laughs, but it comes across as whining. On the PBS NewsHour Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson quipped, “When Ronald Reagan said, ‘Go ahead make my day’, it was Clint Eastwood he was parroting. When you say ‘So sue me’, it’s like the annoying guy who takes your parking space and taunts you afterward".

Having given up on any further overtures to Congress, Obama broadens the breach with snide remarks about Congress in public appearances. His flippancy squares with a Politico piece at the beginning of June that reports him spending more and more time playing golf and hanging out with celebrities, hosting “star-studded dinners that sometimes go on well past midnight”.

Honduras is called the world’s murder capital, thanks to it’s being a hub for drug trafficking. As in Guatemala and El Salvador the level of violence has become so dangerous that families hope to protect their young by sending them to the United States in the belief that they will be allowed to stay.

Republicans blame Obama for putting out the message that children will not be turned back. A 2012 executive order did say that, but only children brought here by parents, and before June 2007. But it pays politically for those on the right to overlook a rule exclusively for families living here for at least seven years to make it seem like Obama has broadcast an open door policy. The Wall Street Journal editorial page likes to keep it that simple by saying, “The President is...responsible for the current spectacle of federal incompetence at the border with Mexico”.

Compassion aside, why not just send them back? Because that would run afoul of a law passed in Clinton’s last year and renewed three times during the Bush administration to fight human trafficking. That law guarantees the youths an asylum hearing. It was passed by voice vote in the House and unanimous consent in the Senate. We now have 57,000 new arrivals herded into "detention facilities" with completely inadequate resources for processing them. There are 228 immigration judges and a backlog 375,000 cases pending. People have been waiting years.

So getting emergency funds from Congress should be a slam dunk, right? Obama is asking Congress for $3.7 billion; these are kids and this is a crisis. But objections surfaced immediately. As if joined at the hip, McConnell said on the Senate floor, “What he appears to be asking for is a blank check”, and Boehner echoed with, “We’re not giving the president a blank check”.

Only $50 million is for asylum-hearing judges whereas $1.8 would go to the Health and Human Services Department. That's a red flag for conservatives. It's money for placing the youths with families to act as guardians, says Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Az), and placing the children tells the smuggler networks to keep actively marketing to the fearful that if they get to the U.S. they will be allowed to stay. Why? Because once housed and dispersed, the youths are told to appear in court at some later date where their case will be adjudicated, but experience tells us that 90% do not show up.

It’s therefore the law that guarantees an asylum hearing before deportation that must be changed, says Flake and others. We will only stem the tide when those countries see a plane coming back with their kids and people spread the word that they paid $3,000 to a smuggler for nothing.

Incidentally, we might pause to consider whether those kids, who braved the roofs of box cars on their own for over a thousand miles to get here, just might have the right stuff that's worth keeping here.

It would have been largely symbolic, but Obama handed his critics a plum by going to Texas for a fund raiser without making a visit to the border. “This isn’t theater”, he retorted. “This is a problem. I’m not interested in photo-ops.” But a photo-op would at least have suggested that he was on the job.

This latest crisis is yet another instance — like his unawareness that Obamacare would crash on launch, like his inattention to the mess at Veterans Administration hospitals until it blew up — where the president’s negligence has allowed events to take him by surprise. The flood of youth coming into the country because of the false belief that they can stay is hardly news. In fiscal 2012 there were 10,000 arrivals, in 2013 that number doubled, and now the 57,000 are on our doorstep with months still to go in the current fiscal year. He did nothing to head off the growing problem.

Nor did the House of Representatives. Right after the 2012 election, we, like so many, wrote a piece that expected immediate attention to immigration reform by Republicans in Congress because 71% of Hispanics had voted for Obama. George W. Bush had won 40% of their vote (he had espoused a path to citizenship for undocumented Latinos, which ran counter to most of his own party), whereas the Latin vote for Romney dropped to 27%. The demise of the Republican Party was even forecast if they failed to curry favor with this growing voting bloc by developing compassionate immigration legislation.

Well, silly us. No immigration reform. Actually, the Senate did pass a comprehensive bill a year ago (interesting that one provision called for 75 new immigration judges a year for three years). When it arrived on the House doorstep, Boehner’s imperious greeting was, “I’ve made it clear and I’ll make it clear again, the House does not intend to take up the Senate bill. The House is going to do its own job in developing an immigration bill.” Which it never did.

Even the dawning of this election year failed to spur Congress to action. In February, House Speaker John Boehner announced — rather incredibly one might say, with the entire year remaining — that nothing would be done about immigration in 2014 because it is an election year. His reason? President Obama can’t be trusted to enforce whatever law they might pass.

But isn’t that the same President Obama who has deported record numbers of Latinos — 370,000 in fiscal 2013 — breaking up families who have been in this country for years to the extent that members of his own party implore him to stop?

The real reason is that Republicans can’t go near the subject of immigration in an election year else be attacked by the Tea Party, which is 68% against, says a June Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. Can’t say that, so blame the President.

So when Republicans blame Obama for the tsunami at border crossings, the administration makes the case that had Congress passed that immigration bill a year ago, it would have sent the people of Central American countries the clear signal to stay home, that entry to the U.S. would be denied. And yet we have Boehner saying, “This is a problem of the President's own making! He has been president for 5½ years! When is he going to take responsibility for something?". The Speaker wants us to forget that it is for Congress to make laws.