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Authors: David Limbaugh

The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (13 page)

BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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Continuing its assault on the states, in August 2011 the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Alabama over its new immigration law, alleging it impinges on the federal government’s constitutional authority over immigration. “Setting immigration policy and enforcing immigration laws is a national responsibility that cannot be addressed through a patchwork of state immigration laws,” claimed Eric Holder.
42
But why should the federal government mind if border states pass laws to aid the enforcement of existing federal laws, so long as they are not in conflict with them? The reason, as noted, is that the Obama administration doesn’t want any state to protect its borders more vigorously than is consistent with the administration’s lax policies, so it speciously invokes the Constitution, in an attempt to elevate a disagreement over policy into a constitutional issue.
House Oversight Committee ranking member Darrell Issa had previously exposed the flaws in the administration’s constitutional argument in discussing the Arizona law. “The administration can’t have it both ways,” he said. “They can’t have e-verify, they can’t have these programs where they’re supposed to take criminals and pass them over to the federal government if they’re illegally in the country and then say, ‘but if you do it wholesale where it actually works, we’re going to come after you.’” Issa also noted that Arizona (like other states with similar laws) “is not incarcerating people for being illegally in the country, they’re offering them up to the federal government to take their responsibility.”
43
The administration’s attacks on the Alabama immigration law provide a textbook example of false rhetoric and disingenuousness. For example, the DOJ claimed Alabama’s law would be “highly likely to expose persons lawfully in the United States, including school children, to new difficulties in routine dealings.”
44
To the contrary, in addition to permitting officials to check the immigration status of students in public schools, the law simply allows authorities to question people suspected of being in the country illegally, which is no different than the routine police procedure of detaining people they have probable cause to believe committed a crime. There is, of course, a chance that some innocents might be detained and later released, but that is the case in any enforcement action, and is hardly a good reason to forego enforcement altogether. The DOJ also blasted the law for “attempt[ing] to drive aliens off the grid,” which is rather like criticizing drug laws for forcing drug dealers to conceal their illegal activities.
45
The DOJ even argued that the Alabama law could impact U.S. diplomatic relations with foreign countries, warning that “Alabama is not in a position to answer to other nations for the consequences of its policy.” In the upside-down world of the Obama administration, a U.S. state must not take legal actions against illegal aliens if the actions risk offending the government of the illegals’ home country.
And in perhaps its most ludicrous assertion, the DOJ claimed the law’s requirement that officers report suspects to federal immigration officials “unnecessarily diverts resources from federal enforcement priorities and precludes state and local officials from working in true cooperation with federal officials.”
46
Of course, the “priority” the administration is really defending is its policy not to enforce federal immigration laws.
The DOJ train next pulled into South Carolina, which the administration sued in November 2011 to block its new immigration law. The law does not allow police to go hunting for immigration violators, but only to check the status of someone who the police have detained for another reason. The law specifically forbids officers from holding someone solely on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant, but that didn’t impress the DOJ, which claimed the law is unconstitutional. South Carolinian Rob Godfrey said, “If the feds were doing their job, we wouldn’t have had to address illegal immigration reform at the state level. But, until they do, we’re going to keep fighting in South Carolina to be able to enforce our laws.”
47
These state laws are widely popular; two Rasmussen surveys from 2011 found that 67 percent of Americans approve of states such as Alabama and Arizona passing immigration laws when the federal government fails to act, and that 60 percent of Americans think the federal government actually encourages illegal immigration.
48
But overturning these laws remains a major priority for Holder. “The department is committed to evaluating each state immigration law and making decisions based on the facts and the law,” he proclaimed. “To the extent we find state laws that interfere with the federal government’s enforcement of immigration law, we are prepared to bring suit, as we did in Arizona.”
49
A top DOJ official was even dispatched to Alabama to hunt for evidence the administration could use to strike down the state’s immigration law, thus betraying that the DOJ predetermines its position on these laws.
50
Perhaps Holder should have said that his DOJ was prepared to enjoin any state that interfered with the federal government’s
non-en forcement
of immigration law.
Aside from its ideological zeal, the administration, as noted, has a cynical political motivation for this campaign: it helps gin up support from the administration’s leftist base. The move is said to complement Obama’s 2012 campaign game plan to boost turnout among Hispanics in swing states like Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina. As Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies said, the administration “sees every Alabaman as having a Bull Connor on the inside waiting to come out…. They’re attacking Alabama to motivate leftwing voters in other states.”
51
Despite the administration’s hostility, some thirty states have adopted their own immigration enforcement laws since Arizona passed SB 1070 in April 2010. While Obama officials would have us believe this is all motivated by bigotry and other sinister factors, illegal immigration is a major law enforcement and public safety concern that drains state budgets nationwide in the areas of education, healthcare, and other public services. But none of this matters to the Obama administration.
We can surmise that a major reason the administration finds these laws so threatening is that they are working. Since Arizona approved SB 1070 in April 2010, even though some of its provisions were enjoined by a federal judge, crime in Phoenix plunged to a thirty-year low. Just two years ago the city ranked second only to Mexico City for incidents of kidnapping.
52
TARGETING RED STATES: “COULDN’T HE PRETEND HE’S PRESIDENT … OF ALL THE PEOPLE?”
Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration’s war against the states focuses disproportionately on red states—including its jealous approach to immigration enforcement. For example, people have asked why Holder hasn’t taken action against Rhode Island, which has reportedly undertaken local immigration enforcement for years. As the
Boston Globe
revealed, “From Woonsocket to Westerly, the troopers patrolling the nation’s smallest state are reporting all illegal immigrants they encounter, even on routine stops such as speeding, to US immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE.” The article also indicated that ICE agents, as opposed to their superiors in the Obama administration, actually appreciate state assistance in immigration enforcement: “ICE has repeatedly urged police departments to take advantage of its Law Enforcement Center in Vermont,” the
Globe
reported.
53
The administration also has a habit of denying requested federal aid to red states—a strange practice in light of Obama’s propensity toward budget-busting federal spending. The White House repeatedly denied requests from Texas for disaster relief for destructive wildfires, and it also refused Oklahoma’s request for disaster assistance for record flooding in 2010. As Edmond, Oklahoma resident Rick Machaceck remarked, “It’s not good. They spend money on everything else. Then, when somebody does need help, we don’t get it.” The White House declined to explain why it denied Oklahoma’s request.
54
Wisconsin may not be a red state per se, but with a Republican governor and Republican legislature, it drew Obama’s attention; specifically, he saw fit to take sides in the 2011 dispute between public sector unions and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker over the state’s collective bargaining practices. The legislature’s approval of Walker’s collective bargaining reform was a strictly intra-state issue in which the president had no reasonable grounds for intervening, but he just couldn’t refrain. Employing his familiar Alinskite tactics, Obama vigorously supported the unions as tens of thousands of union members flooded the state capitol in a failed effort to pressure legislators to reject Walker’s bill. The unions became increasingly militant, and the president refused to call for restraint even when they began threatening Republican officials and their families, some of whom stopped sleeping in their own houses due to safety concerns. As
National Review
‘s Jay Nordlinger wondered, “Couldn’t Obama say something? Couldn’t he pretend he’s president—president of all the people—and say, ‘We have political disagreements, but we’re going to work them out peacefully and democratically. For example, massing at lawmakers’ homes, to shout and threaten, is out of bounds.’”
55
Obama’s team apparently gave the Wisconsin unions more than just rhetorical support, bringing Obama’s experience at community organization from the streets of Chicago to Pennsylvania Avenue. When Wisconsin Democrats fled the state in a vain attempt to stop the legislature from approving collective bargaining reform, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said that people clearly believed state Democrats were engaged in a stalling tactic in order to give Obama’s Chicago team time to organize an effort to recall Republican legislators. Just four months earlier, the people of the state had democratically elected the Republican officials Obama and Wisconsin Democrats were seeking to recall.
56
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama portrayed himself as a transformative figure who would usher America—and the world—into a shining new future of international peace, racial harmony, and environmental improvement. With this immodest view of his own historical importance, it makes perfect sense that, as president, he and his team would show little tolerance for dissent or for those who won’t fall in line behind his agenda; after all, these recalcitrants are impeding his glorious vision where the oceans stop rising and the planet begins healing. Surely no one of good will could possibly want to delay that day’s arrival. No, in the Obama administration’s view, those who stand in Obama’s way cannot be reasoned with and certainly don’t deserve an audience. Whether local reporters or the president of Standard & Poor’s, they are the enemy, and are treated as such.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE WAR ON OUR CULTURE AND VALUES
P
resident Obama has sought to pass himself off as a social moderate since bursting onto the national scene. He downplayed his liberal views on abortion—even misrepresenting his opposition to a bill to protect babies born as a result of failed abortions—and pretended he opposed same-sex marriage. Why, he’s a married man with young children; he’s a traditional values guy.
In fact, President Obama is by far the most socially liberal president in the nation’s history, a man who has reignited the nation’s culture wars and brought them to a fever pitch. A fierce abortion advocate, he holds radical views on a full range of social and cultural issues. From same-sex marriage and gays in the military, to federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, to abstinence education, to racial preferences, his administration reliably sides with the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party.
Illustrating this administration’s broken moral compass, Vice President Joe Biden, on a trip to China, suggested he sympathized with that country’s authoritarian one-child policy. In prepared remarks, no less, he said, “Your policy has been one which I fully understand—I’m not second-guessing—of one child per family.” Biden was implying that our nation has no moral objection to a policy that involves forced abortions, sterilizations, and other major human rights abuses. Under this policy, according to Tom McCluskey of the Family Research Council, “hundreds of millions of Chinese women have been forced to have abortions. China’s unborn children who are tested and found to be female are at special risk. Nor is this heinous policy limited to the unborn. Female infanticide is routine in rural China.”
1
Amidst widespread criticism of Biden’s remarks, the White House issued a statement saying, “The Obama administration strongly opposes all aspects of China’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization.”
2
But does it really? Maybe Biden’s statement wasn’t out of school at all; perhaps he was speaking for President Obama too. Indeed, when Congressman Dana Rohrabacher pressed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to say whether Obama had confronted Chinese President Hu on the one-child policy during Hu’s visit to Washington, Clinton simply replied that “we” regularly raise the issue with the Chinese. She was unable to say whether Obama personally had discussed the issue with Hu—ever.
3
A SECRET, “OPEN EXCHANGE” ON GAY ISSUES
Under Obama, the Department of Education refused to allow reporters into break-out sessions at its first Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Youth Summit, even though it was a a taxpayer-funded event attended by teenagers. CNS News pressed Education Department public affairs specialist Jo Ann Webb to explain the secrecy, and she said, “Every summit we’ve had has been this way. It’s to promote an open exchange and that’s just the rule, okay?” When the reporter protested that it was a tax-sponsored event, Webb repeated her answer. CNS News also sought an explanation from Obama’s “Safe-Schools Czar,” Assistant Deputy Education Secretary Kevin Jennings, who claimed the media’s presence “has a silencing effect” on participants.
5
Speaking by video at the summit, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced that his Department would be warning school districts across the country against blocking students from forming gay-themed organizations in their schools.
6
In fact, the entire summit seemed tailored to identity politics, appealing to the attendees exclusively as gays. What’s more, many of the appeals were barely disguised pleas to support the Obama administration. For example, a homosexual staff member for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told students that Sebelius “gets us” and is “tireless” in her support of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender youth.” HHS administrator Pam Hyde declared, “Your federal government has finally come out of the closet in support of LGBT youth.” Sebelius herself said, “I want to tell you, you have a friend in this administration, who will stand beside you each and every step along the way.”
7
Sebelius also discussed statistics indicating that gay youths are more likely to experience depression, thoughts of suicide, have other emotional problems, or abuse drugs or alcohol—problems she and the administration presume are solely related to the students’ victimization by “homophobes.” As Sebelius said, “We know these behaviors are not the result of who these young people are. They are the result of what’s happening to them.”
8
During his term Obama also signed a hate crimes bill into law that adds “sexual orientation” as a protected class, and even extended his gay rights policy to America’s foreign affairs, introducing a gay rights declaration at the United Nations, marking the first time the U.S. had endorsed such policies in that forum.
9
He further mandated that U.S. foreign aid would be conditioned on the recipient country’s policy toward gay, lesbian, and transgender bias, and required all government agencies involved in foreign affairs to promote LGBT rights globally.
10
“EVOLVING”
Obviously, that means Obama supported same-sex marriage back then. But Carney defiantly said that what was important was that from the time of his presidential campaign to the present, Obama’s position has been consistent: he has opposed same-sex marriage, but his view “is evolving.”
12
Recently, Obama has continued claiming his views on the issue are “evolving,” saying there is “no doubt” his opinion is being affected by seeing friends, families, and children of gay couples “thriving.”
13
The upshot is that Obama was for gay marriage in 1996, though he later denied it, has been openly against it since 2008, and is now warming to it again, though he’s still opposed to it. That’s more like spinning than evolving. What we obviously have with Obama is a politician who supports same-sex marriage but is unwilling to pay the political price of admitting it (at least before the 2012 election), especially among his core black constituency, which strongly opposes same-sex marriage.
But the administration’s support for same-sex marriage on various legal fronts reveals Obama’s deceit. While still claiming to oppose gay marriage, Obama strongly supports the Respect for Marriage Act, which would repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA defines marriage for federal law purposes as being between one man and one woman; provides that states may refuse to recognize the validity of same-sex marriages sanctioned in other states or territories; and prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.
In fact, the administration broke normal constitutional procedures by denouncing DOMA as unconstitutional and by indicating it would not enforce the law or defend it in court.
14
House Speaker John Boehner responded, “In practice they can just look the other way. But this is not the way our government was intended to work. Our government is intended that Congress would pass the laws, the president would decide whether he wanted to sign them or veto them.”
15
Obama’s decision to shirk his constitutional obligation to enforce the law produced immediate consequences. Mere hours after Attorney General Eric Holder announced the new policy, litigants cited Holder’s position in a court filing in their case to strike down California’s statutory definition of traditional marriage.
16
The administration shrouded its decision-making process in its usual secrecy. When the Family Research Council sued the Justice Department for internal documents related to the decision, the DOJ withheld twenty-seven pages of emails, provoking Judicial Watch to file a Freedom of Information Request lawsuit. Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton commented, “Once again the Obama administration is playing politics with the Freedom of Information Act to avoid telling the American people the truth about one of its indefensible positions. The evidence suggests the nation’s highest law enforcement is refusing to enforce the law to appease another special interest group.”
17
Obama extended his assault on traditional marriage to the state level in March 2012, less than two months before North Carolina residents would vote on a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union of a man and a woman. Obama’s campaign spokesman Cameron French issued a statement saying the amendment “would single out and discriminate against committed gay and lesbian couples—and that’s why the president does not support it.” Bishops Michael Burbidge of Raleigh and Peter Jugis of Charlotte responded that Obama’s “stated opposition to the referendum… is a grave disappointment, as it is reported to be the first time that the President has entered into this issue on the state level, further escalating the increasing confusion on the part of some in our society to the very nature of marriage itself.”
18
All of this is troubling because the administration, by waging war against traditional marriage, is placing the imprimatur of government on the view that supporters of traditional marriage are somehow morally flawed and bigoted. As Archbishop Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said, “Our federal government should not be presuming ill intent or moral blindness on the part of the overwhelming majority of its citizens, millions of whom have gone to the polls to directly support DOMAs in their states and have thereby endorsed marriage as the union of man and woman.” Indeed, the DOJ argued in its brief in a recent lawsuit that federal courts should rule that treating same-sex couples differently from married heterosexual couples should be the legal equivalent of racial discrimination. Dolan observed that the federal government has no business treating a policy disagreement concerning the meaning of marriage as a federal offense, but that’s exactly where this is all headed.
19
Obama’s assault on traditional marriage is also reflected in federal administrative regulations. An official at the Department of Education’s LGBT summit announced that the administration is actively recruiting LGBT parents to adopt children and become foster parents, and a White House spokesman indicated Obama wants a federal mandate to guarantee adoption rights for same-sex couples.
20
Meanwhile, the Agriculture Department implemented a sensitivity training program on “heterosexism,” and the Office of Navy Chaplains issued, then rescinded, a directive requiring Navy chapels to allow same-sex wedding ceremonies.
21
A THREAT TO RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
Advocates of traditional marriage have long contended that the government has a compelling interest in protecting the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman because, among other reasons, men and women each make unique and important contributions to parenting. As Maggie Gallagher, president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, testified in a House Committee hearing on marriage, “Marriage is the union of a husband and wife for a reason. These are the only unions that can create new life and connect those children in love to their mother and father.”
22
Similarly, a recent action alert posted on the website for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said, “Protecting marriage as the faithful and lifelong union of one man and one woman is critical to the common good.” The bishops emphasized how critical DOMA is to protecting marriage.
23
Archbishop Dolan wrote a letter to Obama warning that unless he ended his administration’s “campaign against DOMA, the institution of marriage it protects, and religious freedom,” the president would “precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions.” According to CNS News, “Dolan indicated that the only ‘response’ he and his colleagues had received from their previous communications was a stepped up attack on marriage by the administration.”
24
As Dolan intimated, the assault on traditional marriage poses a threat to religious freedom. According to scholar Thomas Messner, if enough people come to believe that support for traditional marriage is tantamount to bigotry—which is the precise argument the Left often makes—then belief in traditional marriage could “come to be viewed as an unacceptable form of discrimination that should be purged from public life through legal, cultural, and economic pressure.”
25
This concern is neither imagined nor exaggerated. Messner describes three principal ways religious liberty could be suppressed:
1. Entities holding to the traditional marriage view could be denied equal access to various government benefits, and public sector employees could be subject to censorship, disciplinary action, and even termination.
2. Individuals could be subject to greater civil liability under nondiscrimination laws that include sexual orientation and marital status as protected categories.
3. Proponents of traditional marriage could be subject to private forms of discrimination and a climate of contempt for the expression of their views.
26
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