Trump Official: "Religious Freedom" Order Is Still Coming

Previous post looked at a leaked draft of a foul executive order to be signed by Der Trumpenführer to grant the Christofascists - or American Taliban, if one prefers that label - special rights that would allow these hate drive and self-centered individuals and their businesses to ignore non-discrimination laws and protections and openly discriminate against same sex married couples, LGBT individuals in general, those who are divorced and remarried, those who use contraception, among others.  These special rights would allow both businesses and individual government officials to refuse to provide service to citizens against whom the bore prejudice based on real or feigned religious belief.  Worse yet, the targets of such discrimination would have no recourse.  When the draft executive was leaked, the hue and cry caused the Trump regime to disclaim that such an order would be forthcoming.  But, like so much that comes from Der Trumpenführer and his henchmen, it now appears that such disclaimers were lies.  As Michelangelo Signorile details in a piece at Huffington Post, such an order is "still coming" based on statements of a Trump official.  Here are highlights:

Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who has served as domestic policy chair of President Donald Trump’s transition team, told me in an interview on SiriusXM Progress that the controversial “religious freedom” order that leaked to the press a few weeks ago is very much on the way, even though White House officials had played it down. 

Earlier this month, The Nation’s Sarah Posner reported on the draft order, which would allow exemptions for those who oppose same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity, among many other things: 

The four-page draft order, . . . . . construes religious organizations so broadly that it covers “any organization, including closely held for-profit corporations,” and protects “religious freedom” in every walk of life: “when providing social services, education, or healthcare; earning a living, seeking a job, or employing others; receiving government grants or contracts; or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public square, or interfacing with Federal, State or local governments. 

At the time, Trump administration officials claimed the draft was among hundreds of draft orders circulating within the administration. ”We do not have plans to sign anything at this time but will let you know when we have any updates,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokesperson, told ABC News at the time.

But Blackwell, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council (deemed an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Policy Law Center), said in our interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) over the weekend that the order is far from dead. He also confirmed that the former director of Family Research Council’s Center for Religious Liberty, Ken Klukowski, had “actually structured” the draft order as a legal advisor to Trump’s transition team. Klukowski, who is now a senior attorney at the Liberty First Institute and a Breitbart contributor, is one of the lawyers “in the process of redrafting it,” Blackwell said. . . .

Blackwell envisions the “anchor concept” of the order as one that will allow people with devoutly religious beliefs to turn away LGBTQ people in the course of business.

In an interview with me at the Republican National Convention in 2008, Blackwell had explained that he doesn’t view LGBTQ people as a class of people who are discriminated against, but rather sees homosexuality as a “compulsion that can contained, repressed or changed.”

In terms of “administrative actions” such as an executive order, Kuklowski said there are “various types of actions” that Trump could take, and he referred to “federal law and federal programs” that the president could affect. (He acknowledged that state laws protecting LGBTQ people could only be overturned via the “federal judiciary,” again stressing the importance of putting originalists on the federal courts.)

“And I’m confident,” he continued, “that the president is showing ― much to the shock of many establishment people who said, ‘There’s no way this’ll happen’ ― that he keeps his promises, even when they’re things that an establishment player would never do. And I’m confident that he’s going to keep his promise when it comes to protection of religious liberty as well.” 

As for my "friends" who voted for Trump, will they be calling their members of Congress and opposing such an order and/or the First Amendment Defense Act?  I'm not holding my breath.

How Obama Turned the Tables on the GOP

From the moment of his first inauguration in January 2009, the Republicans have done everything in their power to obstruct his presidency and block legislative and policy successes.  In the process, Republicans did much to damage the economy and impede economic recovery in the hope that Obama would not be reelected.  That effort failed and the increasing racist GOP base, blinded by its outrage of having a black man in the White House was too stupid to see that their party's policies were harming average Americans.  On immigration, Obama turned the tables on the GOP.  Now, with his executive order, the GOP must either abide with the results or pass the legislation that it has kept bottled up in the House of Representatives.  Even sweeter, Obama has ignited the ugliest elements of the GOP who now will make it very clear to Hispanics and minorities that they are hated by the Republican base.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this turning of the tables.  Here are highlights:

One of the strangest things about the immigration debate is the fervent belief by conservatives that President Obama is motivated only by devious partisan considerations. . . . This is a strange belief, first of all, because it fails to recognize the blindingly obvious humanitarian motive that surely supplied much of Obama’s incentive. Obama is a liberal Democrat. Liberal Democrats like immigrants. They want to do something to help the millions of people who have committed a victimless crime in order to give their children a better life.

The second and even stranger thing about conservative suspicions is that they seem not to have fed back into the right’s own decision-making matrix. Obama has been threatening to, for months on end, act unilaterally if Republicans would not pass a bill. The threat such an action posed should have been obvious enough to spur Republicans to head it off. Passing some kind of bill through the House, even one that fell far short of Obama’s ambitions, would have placed the president in a tough spot, muddying the political issue and making his unilateralism harder to sustain. Rather than complain about Obama’s diabolical maneuver, they should have thought about maybe preventing it.

It is clear that Obama’s executive action places Republicans in a near-impossible spot. The newest evidence is a poll this week from Latino Decisions, finding that 89 percent of Hispanics support Obama’s move.  

If, as seems likely, the next Republican nominee is forced to promise to overturn it during the primary, it will lock the GOP into a stance of implacable hostility toward the overwhelming majority of the Latino community.
 
Why have Republicans allowed themselves to be felled by such a telegraphed punch? Internal dysfunction plays a major role, of course, along with sheer distrust. But one underappreciated factor may be that Republicans have come to rely on a strategy that works extremely well in other cases.

The GOP has withheld cooperation from every major element of President Obama’s agenda, beginning with the stimulus, through health-care reform, financial regulation, the environment, long-term debt reduction, and so on. That stance has worked extremely well as a political strategy. 
Most people pay little attention to politics and tend to hold the president responsible for outcomes. . . . It’s a formula, but it works.

The formula only fails to work if the president happens to have an easy and legal way to act on the issue in question without Congress. Obama can’t do that on infrastructure, or the grand bargain, and he couldn’t do it on health care. But he could do it on immigration. So Republicans were stuck carrying out a strategy whose endgame would normally be “bill fails, public blames Obama” that instead wound up “Obama acts unilaterally, claims credit, forces Republicans to take poisonous stance in opposition.”

 

The Anxieties of the Republican Majority

Now that the Republican Party will hold a majority in both houses of Congress come January, the big challenge will be facing the reality that the GOP must govern and - the horror - come up with legislative proposals to address the nations problems.  This from the party that opposes anything and everything that Barack Obama and the Democrats propose but which has offered no real plan for alternatives to things ranging from the Affordable Health Care ct to how to deal with children born in this country to illegal immigrant parents.  Saying "no" and opposing everything is easy.  Now it's time to see concrete proposals and alternatives.  Not surprisingly many in the GOP (outside the Kool-Aid drinking party base) are anxious.  Here are highlights from a piece in Politico:

Outwardly, Republican rhetoric toward the president hasn’t softened much, especially since Obama’s speech Thursday night. The consistent meme is that he is behaving like an unconstitutional monarch.

What has changed is the underlying balance of power in the party and, perhaps, the terms of debate within the GOP over how to deal with the Democratic Party and its surprisingly aggressive leader. Obama might be behaving like a usurping monarch without a mandate, in the eyes of the newly powerful GOP, but no one is seriously threatening to impeach him — as Republicans have repeatedly done in past years. Nor, despite the angry rhetoric, does there seem to be a serious possibility of government shutdown.

Call it thoughtfulness — or call it confusion. All in all, the mild, somewhat subdued response to Obama’s immigration move is evidence that the uncompromising GOP insurgency that so paralyzed Washington in 2013 has lost some potency.

Even some of the House’s most conservative members have little appetite for a government shutdown, saying that while they’re determined to level sharp criticism against the president, they’re not thinking about going much further than that. According to the head of a national, GOP-aligned Republican group, party leaders strongly suspect that Obama is trying to goad conservatives into throwing a fit: “I think the president is counting on a Republican overreaction, where it really takes over the agenda of the new Congress. … I think this president is counting on an overreach.”

The immigration issue, of course, is also about the reckoning of 2016, which is a lot closer than it was during the shutdown crisis. With the race for the White House rapidly approaching, a growing number of Republicans are concerned about alienating Latinos, whom many in the GOP see as a natural constituency.

In 2014, Latino turnout was seen as low across many crucial races. But that’s likely not to be the case in a presidential election. In 2012, Obama amassed an astonishing 71 percent of the Hispanic vote to 27 percent for Mitt Romney, who had declared during the primaries that he would make it harder for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. to get jobs, leading them to “self-deport.” Party leaders legitimately fear a kind of demographic death for the GOP if it doesn’t find a way to appease the burgeoning Hispanic population, particularly since the 2010 census showed, for the first time, that white births are now a minority in the United States.

Some influential conservatives are outraged by what they see as the latest GOP retreat in Washington.

Tea Party Patriots, the conservative group that supported several challenges to Republican incumbents, has demanded that McConnell pledge to block every presidential nomination or appointment (save for the national security ones) in response to his executive action. The group has already blasted out fundraising appeals that hammer McConnell as soft on “amnesty.”

But it’s not just in Washington that the party seems more divided than ever on immigration. Speaking Wednesday in Boca Raton, Florida, at the Republican Governors Association meeting, Ohio Gov. John Kasich sounded to some like an apostate.

“My sense is: I don’t like the idea of citizenship when people jump the line, [but] we may have to do it,” he said. Maybe Kasich, like Nixon going to China, is that rare pol who’s confident that he — with his conservative pedigree dating to the Gingrich revolution — can move to the center on an issue that has much of the rest of the Republican Party in a barely contained uproar. But it’s also likely that Kasich, who is said to have presidential ambitions, is trying to look over the horizon to 2016, and prodding his still-confused party forward on immigration.

The GOP needs to show that it can govern.  Equally, it will need to decide between embracing objective reality or the lunacy of the Christofascists/Tea Party base.  The party leadership cannot have it both ways.

Obama Holds Upper Hand on Immigration

The Congressional Republicans, in slavish whore like obedience to the racists in the GOP base who hold open hatred for (i) Barack Obama because of his skin color and (ii) Hispanics  - and other racial minorities - , continue to threaten Obama with impeachment (even though there would be too few votes in the Senate to prevail), government shutdowns, law suits, and other spittle flecked reactions.  The irony is that among the GOP complaints is that Obama has indulged in excessive use of executive orders.  The chart above shows the lie to this claim with Obama having to date signed fewer executive orders than Chimperator George W. Bush, and every Republican President since Chester A. Arthur (who left the White House on March 4, 1885).  Sadly, with the rise of the Christofascists in the GOP truth and honesty went out the window.  Now, if a Republican member of Congress lips are moving, like the "godly Christian" crowd the safest assumption is that he/she is lying.  

A piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at the reality of where the GOP finds itself in terms of stopping President Obama's executive order on immigration.  It is noteworthy that a MAJORITY of Americans want immigration reform.  It's principally the racist GOP party base that opposes immigration reform.  I just wish that news outlets would call a spade a spade and stop using the term "conservatives" as a smoke screen for the racists in the GOP base.  Here are article highlights:

President Barack Obama has the upper hand in the fierce struggle over immigration now taking shape, with a veto pen ready to kill any Republican move to reverse his executive order, Democrats united behind him and GOP congressional leaders desperate to squelch talk of a government shutdown or even impeachment.

With the public favoring changes in the current immigration system, the Republicans' best short-term response appears to be purely rhetorical: that the president is granting amnesty to millions, and exceeding hisconstitutional authority in the process.   Beyond that, their hopes of reversing his policies appear to be either a years-long lawsuit or the 2016 presidential election.

Neither of those is likely to satisfy the tea party adherents in Congress - or the Republican presidential contenders vying for support among party activists who will play an outsized role in early primaries and caucuses just over a year away.

"We alone, I say it openly, we the Senate are waiting in our duty to stop this lawless administration and its unconstitutional amnesty," said one of them, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. In remarks on the Senate floor, according to his office, he was channeling Cicero, the ancient Roman orator.  In a portion of the oration that Cruz did not mention, Cicero referred to a Roman Senate decree calling for a conspirator against the Roman republic "to be put to death this instant."

More than 2,000 years later, impeachment in the House and a trial in the Senate stand as the sole established remedy against high crimes and misdemeanors by any president.

House Speaker John Boehner and Senate leader Mitch McConnell want none of that. Nor are they interested in provoking a government shutdown as a way to block spending needed to carry out Obama's order, viewing that as a poor way to embark on a new era of Republican control of Congress.

The political debate is well underway, although the two parties seem to be appealing to different segments of the electorate. Polls show that the country as a whole and especially Hispanics favor allowing immigrants to remain in the country and work even if here illegally. Conservatives tend to prefer deportation.

"The critics are going to call it amnesty," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., predicted correctly on Thursday in advance of Obama's speech. "But as Sen. Rubio has reminded us, doing nothing - leaving the current system in place - is amnesty."

Obama's order didn't go that far. It calls for suspending the threat of deportation for millions, but without the promise of a green card that bestows permanent legal status, much less citizenship.

I continue to be ashamed that I was ever a Republican.  I take honesty and integrity seriously - these are lost concepts in today's GOP.  

Obama Throws Down the Gauntlet to GOP on Immigration

As promised, President Obama took executive action on immigration to circumvent the deadlock in Congress on immigration reform - a deadlock due to GOP intransigence and a desire of far too many Republican legislators to prostitute themselves the the increasing racist GOP base.  Obama's action will shield some 5 million individuals from deportation and represents a dare to the GOP to pass a meaningful reform bill.  While there is the usual huffing and puffing from the usual folks in the GOP, some in the party fear that and overly strong reaction against Obama could cause lasting alienation of Hispanic Americans.  Here are excerpts from a piece in the New York Times on tonight's events (Note John Boehner's lie about what a majority of Americans support):

President Obama chose confrontation over conciliation on Thursday as he asserted the powers of the Oval Office to reshape the nation’s immigration system and dared members of next year’s Republican-controlled Congress to reverse his actions on behalf of millions of immigrants.

In an address from the East Room of the White House that sought to appeal to a nation’s compassion, Mr. Obama told Americans that deporting millions is “not who we are” and quoted scripture that said “We shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too.”

He displayed years of frustration with congressional gridlock and a desire to frame the last years of his presidency with far-reaching executive actions. Mr. Obama’s directive will shield up to five million people from deportation and allow many to work legally, although it offers no path to citizenship.

“The actions I’m taking are not only lawful, they’re the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican president and every Democratic president for the past half century,” Mr. Obama said. “To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.”

Conservative lawmakers accused the president of a gross abuse of authority and promised a legislative fight when they take full control of Congress next year. But even before Mr. Obama’s speech, Republicans appeared divided about how to stop him and unsure about how to express their anger without severely damaging their standing with Latinos.

Mr. Obama’s actions will sharpen the focus of government enforcement on criminals and foreigners who pose security threats, vastly reducing the specter that many immigrants would be detained by federal agents. High-tech workers will have an easier time coming to the United States, and security on the border will be increased.

The centerpiece of the president’s announcement is a new program for undocumented people who are the parents of United States citizens. Most of those people — estimated by officials to number slightly more than four million — would be eligible for a new legal status that would defer their deportations and allow them to work legally in the country. They must pass background checks and pay taxes, but they will get Social Security cards, officials said.

How Republicans choose to proceed in their opposition to the president’s directive will shape the final two years of Mr. Obama’s tenure and could help set the tone of the 2016 presidential campaign. Several Republicans on Thursday said they wanted to use a forthcoming spending bill and the threat of a government shutdown as leverage against Mr. Obama, while others in the party reached for ways that Congress might undercut the president’s actions by withholding money or threatening other priorities.

“By ignoring the will of the American people, President Obama has cemented his legacy of lawlessness and squandered what little credibility he had left,” House Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement after the speech.

John Boehner is such a lying sack of shit - a significant majority of Americans support immigration reform.  He makes a tawdry whore look like the Virginia Mary in comparison.  The man is despicable and a prime example of what is wrong with today's Republican Party. 

Reagan, Bush Also Used Executive Authority To Prevent Deportations

To listen to the anti-immigrant extremists of the GOP and the white supremacists of the party base one would think that Barack Obama's proposal to address immigration reform via executive order was something utterly new and down right treasonous.  But once again the selective memory of the Republicans stunning.  After all, these are the same folks who blame Obama for policies implemented by Chimperator Bush.  So on the issue of immigration reform, as Talking Points Memo reports, both Reagan and Bush used executive orders to address immigration issues.  Here are some article highlights:

President Barack Obama's anticipated order that would shield millions of immigrants now living illegally in the U.S. from deportation is not without precedent.

Two of the last three Republican presidents — Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — did the same thing in extending amnesty to family members who were not covered by the last major overhaul of immigration law in 1986.

There was no political explosion then comparable to the one Republicans are threatening now.
A tea party-influenced GOP is poised to erupt if and when Obama follows through on his promise.
He wants to extend protection from deportation to millions ofimmigrant parents and spouses of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, and expand his 2-year-old program that shields immigrants brought illegally to this country as children.

"The audacity of this president to think he can completely destroy the rule of law with the stroke of a pen is unfathomable to me," said GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa, an outspoken opponent of relaxing U.S. immigration law. "It is unconstitutional, it is cynical, and it violates the will of the American people."

Nearly three decades ago, there was barely a peep when Reagan and Bush used their authority to extend amnesty to the spouses and minor children of immigrantscovered by the 1986 law.

In 1986, Congress and Reagan enacted a sweeping overhaul that gave legal status to up to 3 million immigrants without authorization to be in the country, if they had come to the U.S. before 1982. Spouses and children who could not meet that test did not qualify, which incited protests that the new law was breaking up families.

Early efforts in Congress to amend the law to cover family members failed. In 1987, Reagan's Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner announced that minor children of parents granted amnesty by the law would get protection from deportation.

Spouses and children of couples in which one parent qualified for amnesty but the other did not remained subject to deportation, leading to efforts to amend the 1986 law.

In a parallel to today, the Senate acted in 1989 to broaden legal status to families but the House never took up the bill. Through the INS, Bush advanced a new "family fairness" policy that put in place the Senate measure. Congress passed the policy into law by the end of the year as part of broader immigration legislation.

"It's a striking parallel," said Mark Noferi of the pro-immigration American Immigration Council. "Bush Sr. went big at the time. He protected about 40 percent of the unauthorized population. Back then that was up to 1.5 million. Today that would be about 5 million."

Like Bush, Obama is expected to extend deportation protections to families of U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

"It's clear that it's fully within his legal authority to issue these orders," said Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas. He said Republicans 'didn't raise any objections in the past when Republican presidents issued similar orders. This is pure political theater."

Obama's anticipated action would not award legal status, but it would offer temporary protection from deportation and the possibility of obtaining a work permit.

So are the Republicans hypocrites, morons, or a mixture of both?  What do you think?

Will the GOP Self-Destruct Over Immigration?

With Barack Obama having thrown down the gauntlet on immigration reform and his promise that he will address immigration issues via executive order, the Republican Party seems headed towards possible self-destruction thanks to the Christofascist,Tea Party/white supremacist base of the party. The seething hatred of racial minorities, especially Hispanics, may be more than the so-called GOP leadership can control.  Now, the insanity and dysfunction which have racked the House of Representatives thanks to the GOP majority may well over take the Senate after January.  The talk of government shut downs and other spittle flecked lunacy may well prove that the GOP is in fact incapable of governing and force voters to realize the party belongs to vulture capitalists, corporate polluters, racists and religious fanatics.  Average Americans need not apply. The New York Times looks at the GOP quandary.  Here are highlights:

A rerun of the 2013 shutdown battles over the Affordable Care Act has the potential to drown out the new Republican message before the party even takes control of Congress. . . . “I think we need to go all the way,” said Representative Raúl R. Labrador, Republican of Idaho, referring to what steps Republicans should be prepared to take to prevent the president from acting unilaterally on immigration. “What I think is a mistake is for any Republican to take any option off the table.”

The president’s decision has broad support among members of his own party on Capitol Hill. While they have quibbled about the best moment for Mr. Obama to announce the plan — some are pushing him to delay until at least mid-December, in order to give the must-pass spending bill a better chance of success — Democrats appear eager for him to do it.

Democrats are already exploiting the divisions among Republicans by painting them as the leaders of government obstruction and gridlock.

“Just over one week after elections, Republicans are back to true form by talking about shutting down the government over an issue the vast majority of Americans support and 68 senators already passed — a comprehensive compromise on immigration,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

So far Republicans believe their best path to blocking the president’s immigration actions is a spending bill that must pass by Dec. 11 in order to fund the government through the next year. In the Senate, three Republicans — Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama — have taken the lead in urging their colleagues to oppose any spending bill unless it includes provisions to stop the president from acting on immigration.

If the spending bill does not contain their desired language, Republicans say another option would be to pass a short-term spending measure to fund the government into early next year, when Republicans will control both chambers and believe they will have more leverage.

[M]any Republican strategists worry about political damage if the party’s first action on Capitol Hill is a protracted budget battle that leads to a shutdown — much as occurred after the shutdown over Mr. Obama’s health care law in 2013. Even many Republicans who have been vocal opponents of the president over immigration say that such an outcome is not their goal.

Meanwhile, Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican who is an outspoken opponent of any immigration overhaul, said he was huddling with his conservative allies in “back-of-the-room, outside-the-room” conversations. He is also readying legislation that would be triggered by Mr. Obama’s unilateral immigration action, defunding that executive action, as well as the protected status Mr. Obama has already provided for undocumented immigrants who arrived here as children.

Note how the party of supposed Christian values is ready to target children yet again.   The GOP has become increasingly the antithesis of the Gospel message.   Hate, hypocrisy and extremism is now the GOP norm.

The GOP's Poisonous Choices on Immigration

Given the extreme animosity that the Christofascists/Tea Party base of the Republican Party holds for anyone not born with lily white skin (as well as those not born into Christian homes and heterosexual), Republicans face a difficult choice as to how to respond if President Obama signs an executive order on immigration.  Especially those Republicans planning to seek the 2016 presidential nomination which requires that they prostitute themselves to the racists and knuckle draggers of the Christofascists/Tea Party base in a way that would make a tawdry whore blush.  The result?  There may be no long term positive manner in how to respond.  Meanwhile, the issue will further rile the waring factions in the GOP.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the GOP dilemma.  Here are excerpts:

Congressional Republicans have split into competing factions over how to respond to President Obama’s expected moves to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, which are likely to include protecting millions from being deported.

The first, favored by the GOP leadership, would have Republicans denounce what House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has called “executive amnesty” and use the party’s new grip on Congress to contest changes to the law incrementally in the months ahead.

The second, which has become the rallying cry for conservatives, would seek to block the president’s decision by shutting down the government for an extended period until he relents.

“It’s a big test for the leadership. We cannot listen to the loudest, shrillest voices in our party,” said Rep. Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican who represents the Philadelphia suburbs. “At some point we have to fund the government, and we should not fight to attach some demand. I don’t want to stand by and watch as our party gets driven into a ditch.” 

Among the options under [Obama's] consideration are proposals that could potentially shield as many as 6 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, according to several people familiar with Obama’s plans.

In a nod to the business community that Republicans would be hard pressed to oppose, Obama is likely to expand visa programs for immigrants working for high-tech firms. Doing so would fulfill the wishes of Silicon Valley executives, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and many GOP lawmakers who have sought to make it easier for high-tech firms to recruit skilled workers from overseas.

Democrats reminded reporters Thursday that several of Obama’s predecessors have acted without congressional support.

“Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and there was much to be said about it at the time. But he led with executive action,” said Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.), adding later: “When Truman signed the order desegregating the military, there was much being said. But it desegregated the military.”

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), an advocate for an overhaul of immigration law, has been counseling House Republicans this week about the need to show empathy for undocumented workers as the party rails against the Obama administration, according to GOP aides familiar with his deliberations. He is concerned that too much vitriol could send the wrong message to Hispanic voters.

A group of centrist Republicans told Boehner and his leadership team at a conference meeting Thursday that they must avoid another fiscal impasse and that this is the moment to take on the more extreme elements in their party. They argued that unless Boehner confronts Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and other conservatives pushing for a hard-line response, he risks seeing his conference unravel, much as it did last year during the 16-day shutdown that was cheered by the tea party.

McConnell, who will lead the Senate starting next year, has made clear that he is not willing to hold up government funding to settle scores with the president on immigration. “We’ll not be shutting the government down or threatening to default on the national debt,” McConnell twice told reporters Thursday.

Expect a blood bath within the GOP.  I agree, however, that it is time for what few sane Republicans still exist to take a stand.  the Christofascist/Tea Party ranks must be defeated.  Better yet, they need to be kicked out of the GOP entirely.  Meanwhile, I hope Hispanic Americans watch the GOP closely so that they will see just how much the today's GOP is the party of hate and racists.

Will Obama Go It Alone on Immigration?

The Congressional Republicans have demonstrated time and time again that they have no concrete proposals for dealing with major problems facing the nation be it on the issue of the nation's still broken health care system or dealing with the desperate need for immigration reform.  All the GOP has to offer is obstructionism and attacks on whatever Barack Obama may propose.  The paralysis is so extreme that Obama is left with few options other than to proceed via executive order - something that he has done less frequently that his GOP predecessors despite the disingenuous shrieking for the far right media talking heads and buffoons like John Boehner.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at what may unfold on the immigration front which will send false Christian Republicans into apoplexy.  Here are highlights:

Inflammatory as it's been, the debate over unaccompanied Central-American children crossing the U.S. border is only the warm-up for an approaching immigration confrontation with even greater stakes.

Regardless of how Congress handles his request for more border resources, President Obama is moving toward a historic—and explosive—executive order that will provide legal status to a significant number of the estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. One senior White House official says that while "what's happening at the border will provide atmospherics for the [president's] decision," it won't stop him from acting on the undocumented—probably before the midterm elections. The resulting collision over Obama's expected action could lastingly define both the Democratic and Republican parties for the burgeoning Hispanic population.

During George W. Bush's two terms, the best estimate has it, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. jumped by about 3 million; under Obama, there's been no increase. But while the tougher enforcement has angered liberal groups, it has failed to move House Republicans, 80 percent of whom represent districts that are whiter than the national average. After the Senate passed bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform that included a pathway to citizenship in 2013, House Republicans shelved it—just as they did a similar bipartisan bill Bush helped shoulder through the Senate in 2006.

Polls consistently find broad support for such a package: In a Pew Research Center survey this week, 63 percent of whites, 71 percent of African-Americans, and 85 percent of Hispanics said those here illegally should be granted legal status after meeting certain requirements. But many House Republicans believe that in their right-leaning districts, the only voters who cast their ballots on the issue are those opposed to legalization.

Obama has indicated he wants to return more kids immediately and then devote additional legal resources to more quickly adjudicating the remaining cases. There's a humanitarian case for this: The lengthy delays may be encouraging more children to make the dangerous journey. But the approach also reflects the White House's recognition that controlling the border is the necessary political precondition to completing an executive order to legalize many of the immigrants here illegally.
 

The president can't provide them citizenship without action by Congress. But using the same theory of "deferred action" that he employed in 2012 for children brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents, he could apply prosecutorial discretion to allow some groups of the undocumented (such as adults here illegally with children who are U.S. citizens) to obtain work permits and function openly. Though the administration is still debating the reach of Obama's authority, some top immigration advocates hope he could legalize up to half of the undocumented population.

Such a move would infuriate Republicans, both because the border crisis has deepened their conviction that any move toward legalization inspires more illegal migration and because the president would be bypassing Congress. They would likely challenge an Obama order through both legislation and litigation. Every 2016 GOP presidential contender could feel compelled to promise to repeal the order.

Those would be momentous choices for a party already struggling to attract Hispanics and Asian-Americans. Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership initiative at the conservative American Principles Project, warns that if Republicans "again fall for the trap" and try to overturn an Obama legalization plan without offering an alternative path to legal status, the party will condemn itself to another lopsided deficit among Hispanics—and to a likely defeat—in 2016. David Ayon, senior adviser to the polling firm Latino Decisions, says that if Republicans erupt against an Obama legalization initiative, it "could turn the Latino vote as ruggedly anti-Republican as the black vote."

On many fronts, Obama seems to be only reacting to events. But on immigration, as on other social issues such as gay rights and contraception, he is driving decisions that could shape the two parties for years—and cement the Democratic hold on the coalition of growing demographic groups that powered his two victories.

 

Obama Will Not Exempt Religious Institutions On LGBT Employment Discrimination Rule

On Monday Barack Obama is to sign an ENDA executive order that bars federal contractors from discrimination against LGBT employees.  Thankfully, Obama seemingly has listened to his party's base and is rejecting calls from Republicans and, of course, Christofascists to allow special rights to those consumed with anti-gay animus to discriminate at will.  It goes without saying that the professional Christian class and leaders of hate groups such as Family Research Council and The Family Foundation here in Virginia will be launching into spittle flecked rants attacking Obama and claiming that anti-gay bigots are being persecuted.  The response to them is easy: if you want to discriminate, then don't put your hand out for federal money  It's really that simple.  These bigots do not get to have their cake and eat it too.  Here are highlights from Think Progress:

Federal contractors will not be able to discriminate against LGBT people in hiring even if they have a religious objection, the Obama Administration will announce on Monday. 

Last month, the administration announced it would amend two executive orders barring employers who rely on federal funds from discriminating against a series of traits. The current order includes race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Now, it will also include gender identity and sexual orientation. The move is a Band-Aid solution to the broader problem of Congress not passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that would bar all employers from discriminating against people based on their sexuality.

When the announcement came last month, though, there remained an open question as to whether religious objectors would be exempt. About 140 religious leaders requested broad exemptions, while more than 100 members of clergy specifically asked Obama not to include such an exemption. On Friday, Politico reported that the administration will not heed the former requests, and will instead make the rule apply more broadly to all federal contractors.

“This is a tremendous victory for those of us who believe that as people of faith we should be exemplary, not exempted,” said Rev. Fred Davie, Executive Vice President at Union Theological Seminary. Rev. Davie will be a guest when the President signs the executive order on Monday. “Religions of the world across the ages have engendered and supported discrimination and bigotry from deceptively genteel to utterly horrific. 

[T]he order will actually effect over a million LGBT workers in the United States, and will be the largest expansion of LGBT workers’ rights in the nation’s history. In 29 states, it is legal to fire someone for being gay. In 34, an employer can fire someone with no recourse if they are transgender. 

The executive order will keep in place an exemption established by President George W. Bush in 2002 that allows religious contractors to favor employees with the same religion for religious roles.

Douche Bag GOP Congressman Doubts LGBT Workplace Discrimination Exists

The batshitery - or is just plan unbridled bigotry - of some in the Republican Party sometimes defies belief.  A case in point is Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) (pictured above) who has stated that he doesn't believe that LGBT individuals face work place discrimination even as the Christofascists in the GOP base repeatedly state that they want to retain the right to fire LGBT employees at will.  It's difficult to tell whether Cramer is simply a complete idiot (a distinct possibility in today's GOP) or simply a craven political whore to the hate merchants of the GOP base.  Either way, Cramer's head is so far up his ass it's a wonder he hasn't suffocated!  Here are highlights from the Huffington Post:

A Republican congressman said he's not sure that workplace discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people exists -- because he's never gotten a phone call about it.

"I'm not even sure that this is a problem. I have to be honest, I don't get many, if any. I don't know that I've ever received a phone call in my office from somebody that says they've been discriminated against based on their sexual orientation," Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told Bismarck station KFYR on Tuesday.

Cramer is a first-term member of Congress who is facing a challenge from Democrat George Sinner. On Monday, the White House announced officials would draft an executive order that would bar federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Cramer added that he believes the White House's move was meant for political gain, and companies should be left to set their own policies. 

Studies have found that workplace discrimination is a persistent problem for many LGBT individuals. Roughly one in five LGBT adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2013 said that they had been unfairly treated by an employer.

Ninety percent of transgender people say that they have faced harassment in the workplace because of their gender identity, according to one study. In the same poll, 26 percent of transgender Americans surveyed said that they had lost a job because of their gender identity.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, 21 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and 18 states and D.C. also bar discrimination based on gender identity.

Like many in the GOP, to Cramer, facts do not matter.  As one who lost my job for being gay, I know first hand that Cramer is full of s*it.

McAuliffe Explores Medicaid Expansion Without Virginia Legislature

The Republican Party's war of the poor which is evidenced by things such as Paul Ryan's proposed budget which give trillions in tax cuts to the wealthy and business while destroying the social safety net is best exemplified here in Virginia by the Virginia GOP's refusal to sign onto Medicaid Expansion.  Indeed, the Virginia GOP would prefer a state government shutdown over expanding Medicaid to 400,000 currently uninsured Virginians.  Even though the funding would come from taxes Virginians have already paid to the federal government.   And even though the Virginia Senate plan -  the "Marketplace Virginia"  - is a private sector solution which has been endorsed by the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, the major newspapers in Virginia (including the conservative Richmond Times-Dispatch), and the Washington Post. Meanwhile, dripping hypocrisy, these Virginia Republicans pretend to honor "Christian values" while shredding the Gospel message of assisting the poor, the sick and the homeless.  Faced with such cold hearted, perhaps racist based obstructionism, Governor McAuliffe is exploring ways to expand Medicaid without the cooperation of the party of "No."  Here are highlights from a Washington Post piece that looks at the situation:

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe is considering expanding health coverage for the poor without the approval of the state legislature, a move that would muscle his top priority past Republican opponents but also throw his young administration into a partisan firestorm and uncertain legal territory.

McAuliffe and his top advisers have consulted lawyers, health-care experts and legislators on how to bypass the GOP-dominated House of Delegates, according to three people familiar with the discussions. A fourth, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal private strategy, said the office of Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) has been researching the matter.

The move would allow Virginia to take advantage of a key state option under the Affordable Care Act, and it could help break a budget stalemate and avert a looming government shutdown. But it would be a daring action; only two other governors have done anything similar to bulldoze Medicaid expansion past opponents.

If McAuliffe follows through, he would raise far-reaching constitutional questions about the chief executive’s power and the rule of law — issues cropping up with increasing frequency in the states and in Washington, as governors and President Obama seek to push past adversarial legislatures and Congress.

Expansion by executive action might be more difficult in Virginia, where the state constitution requires the legislature to approve all appropriations — even pass-through funding from Washington, which has promised to foot the full bill for Medicaid expansion for the first three years.

For months, while still pushing for expansion through the General Assembly, McAuliffe advisers have been searching for a solution even if the House won’t go along, the three people familiar with those discussions said. They’ve picked the brains of health-care advocates and assured expansion-minded legislators that they are “exploring their options,” as one person familiar with those discussions put it.

House Republicans have grown increasingly vocal about the possibility, particularly after Herring bucked the General Assembly’s wishes this week by declaring that some young illegal immigrants are eligible for in-state tuition. Three months earlier, Herring had announced that the state’s ban on gay marriage — something the legislature still supports — is unconstitutional.

Independent of the governor, some health-care experts have been looking for months for a way for McAuliffe to make expansion happen on his own, according to two people familiar with those discussions. They considered whether the governor could stack the state’s Medicaid board, which sets eligibility standards, with his own appointees. They wondered whether McAuliffe could expand Medicaid by claiming emergency powers, perhaps in the event of a looming hospital closure or the government shutdown.  

Where things will end is anyone's guess.  Sadly, the cynic in me suspects that if the Affordable Health Care Act and the attendant expansion of Medicaid had been backed by a white president rather than one who is black, we likely would not be having this controversy.  Today's Virginia GOP has become little more than a defacto white supremacist organization with a leavening of insane religious extremists for good measure.  The Virginia GOP may wrap itself in religion, but it has become the antithesis of true Christian values.

Barack Obama's Unmet Promise on Discrimination

As I have noted before in posts, securing  workplace non-discrimination protections for LGBT individuals is high on my priority list.  Especially since I experienced first hand what it is like to suddenly find oneself unemployed simply because you're gay.  From my experience, we cannot trust businesses to do the right thing and even where some of the business owners are "friends," too often they turn out to be fair weather friends at best and will stand by silently as careers are ruined due to religious based bigotry or the cowardice of those who could object but fear "rocking the boat." Sadly, despite his promises to address employment discrimination injustices, Barack Obama has done nothing on this front.  Yesterday, the New York Times called on Obama to sign an executive order ENDA.  Here are editorial highlights:

President Obama has made repeated use of executive orders to advance the administration’s goals when Republicans in Congress refused to act. Last week, he signed two orders requiring modest but important steps by federal contractors to narrow the wage gap between female and male employees.

These useful measures made even more glaring his failure to honor a 2008 campaign pledge to ban discrimination by federal contractors based on sexual orientation or gender identity. A long-delayed measure to outlaw such discrimination by all employers, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, cleared the Senate five months ago with Mr. Obama’s support, but House Republican leaders are in no hurry to follow suit. John Boehner, the House speaker, has said that a law against that sort of discrimination would be “frivolous.”

Mr. Obama said in November that workplace discrimination “needs to stop, because, in the United States of America, who you are and who you love should never be a fireable offense.” An executive order barring discrimination by federal contractors would extend badly needed job protections to more than 11 million employees who work in states that lack such protections and whose companies fail to provide them voluntarily, according to the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law.

What Mr. Obama needs to do is act on his principles and issue such an order, without the religious exemption that was put into the Senate bill to lure Republican votes.

[A]s the Human Rights Campaign rightly noted, an “executive order first issued by President Johnson still, today, provides important and unique protections for employees of federal contractors against discrimination based on race, sex, religion — despite the fact that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects against such discrimination in workplaces across the country.” The group argues that even if the Employment Non-Discrimination Act were enacted, an executive order would be needed to provide the same range of remedies currently available to other protected categories of federal workers.

The best way for Mr. Obama to advance the issue and prod the House to do the right thing is to lead by example, not by waiting.