UNFORTUNATE FOR THE RIGHT WING GOVERNORS, STATES CANNOT OVERRULE THE GOVERNMENT ON REFUGEES…THAT IS ACCORDING TO THE US CONSTITUTION

More than 23 state governors have come out against President Obama’s plans to relocate several thousand Syrian refugees within the United States. Some have pledged to actively resist settlement of these refugees. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott R, for example, signed a letter to Obama that begins “as governor of Texas, I write to inform you that the State of Texas will not accept any refugees from Syria in the wake of the deadly terrorist attack in Paris.” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal R issued an executive order instructing all “departments, budget units, agencies, offices, entities, and officers of the executive branch of the State of Louisiana” to “utilize all lawful means to prevent the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the State of Louisiana while this Order is in effect.”

The problem for Jindal, Abbott and the other governors opposed to admitting refugees, however, is that there is no lawful means that permits a state government to dictate immigration policy to the president in this way. As the Supreme Court explained in Hines v. Davidowitz, “the supremacy of the national power in the general field of foreign affairs, including power over immigration, naturalization and deportation, is made clear by the Constitution.” States do not get to overrule the federal government on matters such as this one.

Just in case there is any doubt, President Obama has explicit statutory authorization to accept foreign refugees into the United States. Under the Refugee Act of 1980, the president may admit refugees who face “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” into the United States, and the president’s power to do so is particularly robust if they determine that an “unforeseen emergency refugee situation” such as the Syrian refugee crisis exists.

This power to admit refugees fits within the scheme of “broad discretion exercised by immigration officials” that the Supreme Court recognized in its most recent major immigration case, Arizona v. United States. Indeed, in describing the executive branch’s broad authority to make discretionary calls regarding immigration matters, Arizona seemed to explicitly contemplate the circumstances that face President Obama today. The United States may wish to allow a foreign national to remain within its borders, the Court explained, because the individual’s home nation “may be mired in civil war, complicit in political persecution, or enduring conditions that create a real risk that the alien or his family will be harmed upon return.”

Moreover, the Court explained, America could suffer severe foreign policy consequences if the executive does not enjoy broad discretion over immigration matters. “The dynamic nature of relations with other countries,” Justice Anthony Kennedy explained in his opinion for the Court in Arizona, “requires the Executive Branch to ensure that enforcement policies are consistent with this Nation’s foreign policy with respect to these and other realities.”

Hines offered a similar warning about the close tie between immigration and foreign relations, explaining that immigration policy must be set by the national government and not by 50 different state governors because the entire United States can suffer when a foreign nation reacts adversely to our treatment of immigrants. “Experience has shown that international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war,” Justice Hugo Black wrote in his 1941 opinion for the Court, “may arise from real or imagined wrongs to another’s subjects inflicted, or permitted, by a government.” Thus, the Court concluded, “the regulation of aliens is so intimately blended and intertwined with responsibilities of the national government that where it acts, and the state also acts on the same subject, ‘the act of congress, or the treaty, is supreme; and the law of the state, though enacted in the exercise of powers not controverted, must yield to it.'”

To be clear, states still retain the power to deny their own resources to the federal government, so they could potentially make settlement of refugees more difficult than it would be if the states cooperated. Nevertheless, an act of Congress — the Refugee Act of 1980 — has given Obama broad discretion to allow refugees to be admitted into the United States. The states of Texas, Louisiana and others must yield to that act.

[Cross-posted from thinkprogress]

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Blogger-In-Chief

Roger West

God Wrote The Constitution?

Tom Delay, that bastion of sound political commentary, crawled out from under his rock long enough to toss some republican Jesus bullshit into the news cycle and further confuse already confounded and ignorant conservatives.

RightWingWatch:


DeLay said that Americans have forgotten "that God created this nation [and] that He wrote the Constitution, that it's based on biblical principles," but he is also optimistic that the tide is beginning to shift, noting that when he was in Congress, he sealed off the rotunda in the Capitol building so that leaders from Congress could come together for three hours to get on their knees and seek the face of God.

If God indeed write the constitution, the why prey tell did it need amending? For Tom's sake, maybe we can clear it up, based on Biblical principles.

God gave Moses the Ten Commandments.

Men wrote the US constitution, and did it with the express intention of not allowing this country to be a theocracy.

Why this asshole isn't in an orange jumpsuit putting nuts and bolts in a bag for twenty cents a day at some for profit prison created by his best friends is proof that god does not exist in this world.

To Tom DeLay I say: "nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Congrats Tom, you are today's asshat of the day! 

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Editor-In-Chief

Roger West

DID YOU KNOW

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STAFF

I Love Me Some U.S. Constitution…. That Is Until It Doesn’t Fit My Radical Ideology

Study shows: Tea partiers are deeply in love with a constitution they want to gut.

U.S. Constitution

A study led by a team of UNC-Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt professors examining what “cultural dispositions” unite the Tea Party reaching some interesting conclusions about the political movement’s relationship with the Constitution. They simultaneously revere the idea of the Constitution and hate much of what it actually says:

In our follow-up poll, 84% of those positive towards the TPM [Tea Party members] said the Constitution should be interpreted “as the Founders intended,” compared to only 34% of other respondents. Other respondents were also three times more likely not to have an opinion on the issue, highlighting the salience of the question for TPM supporters. Support for Constitutional principles is not absolute. TPM supporters were twice as likely than others to favor a constitutional amendment banning flag burning; many also support efforts to overturn citizenship as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Constitution – and Tea Party more generally – take on heightened symbolic value and come to represent a ‘way of life’ or a “world view” rather than a specific set of laws or policy positions.

Sadly, the study actually paints a much more reasonable picture of the Tea Party than the reality suggests. Amending the Constitution to literally write your own policy preferences into the document is very rarely a good idea, but it is also an entirely legitimate way of bringing about constitutional change. The Tea Party, however, seems more interested in simply asserting repeatedly and loudly that the Constitution already imposes their preferred policy outcomes on the country — and in ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

In the past two years, we’ve seen Tea Party elected officials claim that everything from Social Security, to Medicare, to Pell Grants and federal student loans, to federal disaster relief, to the minimum wage, to child labor laws, to the ban on whites-only lunch counters all violate the Constitution. In other words, it’s clear that the Tea Party has little interest in following the actual Constitution — they just think the rest of the nation is gullible enough to believe that it says whatever the Tea Party wants it to say.



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“It’s Unconstitutional I Tell You”

You can always count on a tea to claim this when an issue doesn't align with their ideology. Which is more often the case of late.

Earlier this week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) proposed an odd way to end the debt ceiling crisis: Republicans will stop holding the economy hostage and effectively allow the debt ceiling to be raised without requiring any budget cuts, if Obama gives them 12 opportunities to bash his fiscal policies.

Sarahnoya Palin

McConnell’s plan to accept political theater as an alternative to drowning the federal government in a bathtub does not please the far right, so they’ve once again fabricated an utterly nonsensical argument why something they don’t like is unconstitutional. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) laid out this argument last night on Fox News:

We will not hand over more power, which I think is unconstitutional, to President Obama to further manipulate our economy. You know, Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution spells out that Congress has the power of the purse strings, so this plan of McConnell’s I think makes no sense because it does cede power to our president and takes away that authority that is inherent in Congress to control the economic decisions that have to be made when it comes to debt.

Here we go again. When President Obama signed a health care law they don’t like, the far right immediately invented an utterly meritless constitutional argument against it. They don’t just support the House GOP’s plan to phase out Medicare, they embrace an absurd claim that Medicare violates the Constitution. If a waiter brings these people a steak that is slightly overcooked, they demand that he take it back because it’s unconstitutional.

So it’s pretty obvious that Palin’s kneejerk attack on the McConnell plan is wholly without merit. First of all, the debt ceiling fight has absolutely nothing to do with whether Congress retains the “power of the purse strings.” Congress exercises this power by passing appropriation bills that authorize the executive branch to spend money, and President Obama is still forbidden from spending money in excess of a congressional appropriation regardless of whether or not we have a debt ceiling.

Similarly, there is absolutely nothing radical about Congress delegating authority to the executive branch. The power to delegate authority is one of Congress’ most well established powers, and it is the reason why federal agencies are allowed to both write regulations and administer funds. Without this power, a functioning federal government cannot exist.

There is no modern Supreme Court case striking down this kind of delegation of power from the legislature to the executive, and the Supreme Court permits such delegations so long as “Congress clearly delineates the general policy, the public agency which is to apply it, and the boundaries of this delegated authority.” McConnell’s plan easily meets this test, it designates the president as the sole authority possessing the delegated authority. It allows him to raise the debt ceiling only in designated intervals and only if he proposes very specific spending cuts, and it places very strict limits on this authority. Because the president is forbidden to spend money in excess of a congressional appropriation, Obama’s delegated power to raise the debt ceiling would be limited by the amount of congressional appropriations.

But, of course, Palin is no more concerned with what the Constitution actually says than are her many conservative allies who claim that child labor laws, Pell Grants, federal student loans, the ban on whites-only lunch counters, and even Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution.

NFTOS asks why bother to actually read the Constitution when you can just pretend that it says whatever you want, also invoke the founding fathers as well, that seems to get radical teas through anything!


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Michelle Bachmann Never Disappoints

Michele Bachmann Calls For Stripping Judges’ Power To Enforce Parts Of The Constitution She Doesn’t Like

My favorite idiot is at it again! It comes to a point when anytime Michele Bachmann speaks its complete nonsense and utter gibberish.  

Republicans treat the Constitution like a toy that they can manipulate however they choose. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) claims that all federal education programs — including Pell Grants and student loan assistance — are unconstitutional. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says that they are constitutional problems with the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) suggested that child labor laws, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, and even Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution. And when the Ninth Circuit held that yes, the Constitution does have a First Amendment, Newt Gingrich’s political advocacy group called for that court to be abolished.

With so many Republicans claiming that the Constitution can mean whatever they want it to mean, it should be no surprise that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) wants a piece of this action. Recently, Bachmann told a gathering of social conservatives in Iowa that if the courts insist on applying the Constitution’s requirement that no state may “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” to gay people, then Congress should strip federal judges of their power to hear marriage equality cases:

Something else that we can do to reinforce our pro-marriage, pro-life, pro-family agenda is to limit the subject-matter jurisdiction of the courts. At the federal level with what are called Article III courts, Article III of the United States Constitution, we can limit the subject matter that justices can rule on. We have it within our authority to decide what judges can rule on and what they can’t. Any time the people speak, they say with one voice that marriage is one man, one woman.

Watch it here at NFTOS:  



Bachmann is, of course, wrong about the public’s view of marriage equality — 53 percent of Americans believe that gay couples should not be denied their constitutional right to marry. It is also not entirely clear that Congress actually has the power to prevent the Supreme Court from hearing a marriage equality case, although Congress could prevent lower federal courts from hearing these lawsuits.

At the end of the day, however, Bachmann’s court-stripping plan is nothing less than an assault on the Constitution itself. Bachmann does not like the fact that the Constitution requires gay people to be afforded the same legal protections as everyone else, so she wants to hamstring the courts from according equal protection to all Americans.

Typical Michele Bachmann!


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