http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/06/26/Obama-Working-With-DHS-For-Executive-Action-On-Illegal-Immigration

by CHARLIE SPIERING 26 Jun 2014, 8:26 AM PDT 3886POST A COMMENT

President Obama, tired of waiting for Congress to act on immigration reform, is currently exploring ways to address issues with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.

During an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained that the Obama administration was getting impatient with Congress.

“[W]e’re not just going to sit around and wait interminably for Congress,” he explained. “We’ve been waiting a year already. The president has tasked his Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson with reviewing what options are available to the president, what is at his disposal using his executive authority to try to address some of the problems that have been created by our broken immigration system.”

Earnest added that, although Obama was exploring executive action, it was “not a substitute for robust Congressional action” on immigration reform.

“That’s why we’re trying to focus on getting that done,” he concluded.

Obama has been heavily criticized after his 2012 executive decision to defer the deportations of some young illegal immigrants, which critics argue was a key incentive for more children to cross the border illegally.

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/25/report-boehner-may-announce-that-house-is-suing-obama-for-executive-overreach-as-early-as-this-week/

Report: Boehner may announce that House is suing Obama for executive overreach as early as this week; Update: Announcement made

POSTED AT 11:21 AM ON JUNE 25, 2014 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

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It’s been in the works for awhile. Tom Rice introduced a resolution back in December that would allow the House as a body to sue O for failing to faithfully execute the laws. By January, he had at least a dozen colleagues pushing the leadership on it. By February, there were 43 co-sponsors. I wrote about it at the time, noting that Rice claimed he had met resistance from at least one member of the House leadership who thought his bill seemed “radical.”

I wonder what changed.

Boehner told the House Republican Conference during a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning that he has been consulting with legal scholars and plans to unveil his next steps this week or next, according to sources in the room.

Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said further action is necessary because the Senate has not taken up bills passed by the House targeting executive actions. The House has passed a bill expediting court consideration of House resolutions starting lawsuits targeting executive overreach and another mandating that the attorney general notify Congress when the administration decides to take executive action outside of what has been authorized by Congress.

“The president has a clear record of ignoring the American people’s elected representatives and exceeding his constitutional authority, which has dangerous implications for both our system of government and our economy,” Steel said. “The House has passed legislation to address this, but it has gone nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate, so we are examining other options.”

Maybe Boehner figures that after all the sturm and drang of primary season, and with so much upset among the base over an amnesty that may or may not be looming, slapping Obama with a constitutional suit over his autocratic excesses on ObamaCare, DACA, etc, is just the trick to unify Republicans before the midterms. The mechanism for how they’ll bring the suit on behalf of the House isn’t quite clear yet: It might involve a vote of the House’s “Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group,” which consists of three Republicans and two Democrats, and/or a vote of the entire House, but either way the GOP has the numbers. The “legal scholars” Boehner’s been consulting with, incidentally, are almost certainly David Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley, who wrote an influential op-ed a few months ago about how the House might be able to use the courts to rein Obama in. George Will summarized their argument this way in his recent column about “stopping a lawless president”:

Courts, understandably fearful of being inundated by lawsuits from small factions of disgruntled legislators, have been wary of granting legislative standing. However, David Rivkin, a Washington lawyer, and Elizabeth Price Foley of Florida International University have studied the case law and believe that standing can be obtained conditional on four things:

That a majority of one congressional chamber explicitly authorizes a lawsuit. That the lawsuit concern the president’s “benevolent” suspension of an unambiguous provision of law that, by pleasing a private faction, precludes the appearance of a private plaintiff. That Congress cannot administer political self-help by remedying the presidential action by simply repealing the law. And that the injury amounts to nullification of Congress’s power.

No problem on the first and second steps. No real problem on the fourth either: By unilaterally suspending major provisions of O-Care like the employer mandate, for instance, Obama’s obviously nullifying duly enacted federal statutes. The sticking point, I think, will be the third step. Congress could, in theory, undo all of Obama’s executive orders by overriding them with a two-thirds veto-proof vote of both chambers. The fact that there’s no chance of that happening because the Senate is controlled by Democrats might be cited by courts as proof that this is really a political question, something to be settled by voters rather than by judges. Will pushes back hard against that in his piece, arguing that it can’t be the case that courts will bless repeated separation-of-powers violations simply because one party and a comatose electorate are happy to look the other way at them. Hopefully not, but if the Rivkin/Foley approach is adopted by SCOTUS, it might lead to one or both chambers of Congress routinely suing the president for all but the most pedestrian executive actions. That’s not a bad outcome if you’re a fan of redistributing a little power from the executive branch to the legislative, but federal judges might get fidgety at the thought of being sucked into the middle of it.

The hard thing here for the GOP, though, isn’t the legal battle but the political battle. Like I said when I wrote about this in January, they’re essentially betting that there’s enough of a civic reservoir among the public that Republicans won’t be punished if they win this suit and Obama is forced to cancel his executive DREAM amnesty or to apply the nastier provisions of ObamaCare that he’s suspended so far. O’s going to go to voters and say, “I tried to help you by protecting you from bad laws. Republicans wouldn’t let me.” The GOP’s going to then turn around and say, “What he was doing was unconstitutional. Case closed.” Knowing American voters as you do, which approach do you think they’ll be more receptive to, the bottom-line one or the constitutional one? This is why Boehner held off until now on suing, of course — because he has a sneaking suspicion he wouldn’t win that public opinion battle, even though he should. By filing this suit only a few months before the midterms, maybe he’s counting on it being tied up in court long enough that he won’t have to worry about the outcome until after the votes are in.

Update: That didn’t take long.

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/26/ted-cruz-if-holder-wont-appoint-a-special-prosecutor-for-the-irs-scandal-he-should-be-impeached/

Ted Cruz: If Holder won’t appoint a special prosecutor for the IRS scandal, he should be impeached

POSTED AT 6:01 PM ON JUNE 26, 2014 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

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Via the Free Beacon. Alternate headline: “He’s running.”

His staff tipped NRO earlier this afternoon to the fact that he’d be introducing this resolution, and now here it is:

“When an Attorney General mocks the rule of law, when an Attorney General corrupts the Department of Justice by conducting a nakedly partisan investigation to cover up political wrongdoing that conduct by any reasonable measure constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors,” said Cruz. “Attorney General Eric Holder has the opportunity to do the right thing. He could appoint a special prosecutor with meaningful independence who is not a major Obama donor.”

The donor Cruz is referring to is Justice Department prosecutor Barbara Bosserman, who has given $6,750 to the Democratic Party and President Obama over the past ten years, according to the Washington Post. Bosserman has been chosen to lead the Justice Department probe into the IRS.

Why impeach Holder instead of Obama? Because, I guess, it’s more politically salable. Impeach O and the electorate will blow up, with unpredictable results in November. That’s not a move you make if your party’s cruising towards some big wins. Impeaching Holder, or the IRS officials responsible for the apparent cover up, is less risky. Liberals will get mad but conservatives will be happy and people in the middle won’t care much, so maybe it’s a wash at the polls. He’ll be acquitted by the Democratic majority in the Senate too, of course, so there’s no chance of him actually being removed from office. Best-case scenario is that he decides he’s tired of fighting with Republicans and decides to step down voluntarily so that Dems aren’t forced to spend two months defending the IRS on camera. But that’s not Holder’s style. He’d fight and he’d win, his hackish incuriosity about the conveniently missing IRS e-mails (despite a $4.4 billion IT budget!) notwithstanding. What then?

This reminds me a little of the “defund” effort, actually, insofar as Cruz is encouraging the House to do something bold knowing he hasn’t a prayer of getting the Democratic Senate to play along. If they take his advice and impeach Holder, great. He can take credit among righties for having introduced the idea, regardless of what happens in the Senate. If they decline to impeach Holder, great. That just proves his point that Congress needs more principled conservatives in charge of both chambers. I assume it’s no coincidence that he’s introducing this the day after Boehner announced that the House will sue Obama for executive overreach. Lawsuits are all well and good, but only a squish would run to the courts for relief when he has it in his institutional power to remove an offending executive branch official himself. Republicans want bold colors, as Cruz is fond of saying, not pale pastels.

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/26/breaking-supreme-court-unanimously-rejects-obama-recess-appointments/

Breaking: Supreme Court unanimously rejects Obama recess appointments

POSTED AT 10:22 AM ON JUNE 26, 2014 BY ED MORRISSEY

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The Supreme Court dropped a huge bomb on the Obama administration,unanimously rebuking the President for arrogating to himself the determination of when Congress is in session for the purpose of making recess appointments. According to reports on the opinion, the court may have taken a middle path on what a recess actually is, toning down one appellate court ruling that only allowed for recess appointments between formal sessions:

The US Supreme Court today limited a president’s power to make recess appointments when the White House and the Senate are controlled by opposite parties, scaling back a presidential authority as old as the republic.

The case arose from a political dispute between President Obama and Senate Republicans, who claimed he had no authority to put three people on the National Labor Relations Board in January 2012 when the Senate was out of town.

He used a president’s power, granted by the Constitution, to “fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate.” But the Republicans said the Senate was not in recess at the time the appointments were made, because every three days a senator went into the chamber, gaveled it to order, and then immediately called a recess.

By a unanimous vote, the Supreme Court agreed that the Senate was not in recess, holding that it’s up to both houses of Congress to define when they’re in session or in recess. As a result of the decision, the Senate can frustrate a president’s ability to make recess appointments simply by holding periodic pro forma sessions, a tactic used in recent years by both political parties.

According to NBC’s Pete Williams, the opinion provides a timeframe for Congress and the White House to follow in the future:

Per @PeteWilliamsNBC, SCOTUS ruled that a recess must be at least 10 days long to be considered a recess

10:10 AM - 26 Jun 2014

That will certainly make it easier to play keep-away from the President. A minority on the court wanted to limit the recess power to strictly the period between sessions, as did one appellate court, but in the end a 5-4 majority decided to allow for a looser interpretation of “recess.” Certainly, if Congress wants to stop recess appointments from being made, it will be fairly easy to gavel into session every nine days.

The question will now be what happens to the NLRB rulings during the period when recess appointments provided a quorum. The answer appears to be that they can be successfully challenged and set aside. That was the context of the challenge to the recess appointments in the first place — lawsuits against regulation created in that period that alleged they were illegitimate. This ruling means that the Supreme Court unanimously agrees on that point, a severe rebuke to the “constitutional scholar” President and his abuse of power. More practically, though, the recent appointments to the NLRB can reconstitute that regulation if they wish, so the victory may be short lived for the plaintiffs.

Info Wars.....

MEMO ON DRONE KILLINGS OF US CITIZENS MAKES CASE FOR PRESIDENTIAL DICTATORSHIP

Memo constitutes prima facie evidence of crimes against Constitution

by BARRY GREY | CYRANO'S JOURNAL TODAY | JUNE 26, 2014

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Monday released a redacted version of the hitherto secret Obama administration memo arguing for the legality of presidential assassinations, without charges or trial, of US citizens (pdf version of memo).

The 47-page memo, dating from July 2010, was drafted and signed by then head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, David Barron, and addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder.

The memo constitutes prima facie evidence of crimes against international law, the US Constitution, and the democratic rights of the American people. It could serve as a key exhibit in impeachment proceedings and criminal prosecutions against high-level American officials, beginning with President Barack Obama, Attorney General Holder, US intelligence and military leaders and the author of the memo, Barron.

The document is a travesty of legal and constitutional analysis. It begins with the desired aim—to justify the negation of the Bill of Rights’ guarantee of “due process” and sanction the arrogation of quasidictatorial powers by the executive branch—and employs a grab bag of sophistic and cynical arguments to arrive at the desired conclusion.

The memo was written specifically to provide legal cover for the state murder of Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born US citizen and Muslim cleric. He was branded an “operational leader” of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and assassinated by a drone-fired missile in Yemen on September 30, 2011. Three others were killed in the attack, including a second US citizen, Samir Khan.

One month later, another drone strike in Yemen ordered by Obama and his military/intelligence accomplices killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, along with six other people. The US government has acknowledged terminating a fourth US citizen in its campaign of drone killings, which have killed many thousands in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries.

The context in which the memo was released underscores the wholesale repudiation of the US Constitution and democratic rights by the political establishment. The New York-based Second Circuit ruled in April in support of a lawsuit filed by the New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) under Freedom of Information laws demanding the publication of the Barron memo, which the administration had refused to provide.

In the meantime, Obama had nominated Barron to become a judge on the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. Senate Democrats who have postured as opponents of National Security Agency spying and drone assassinations of Americans demanded the release of the Awlaki memo as a condition for voting to confirm Barron. In a cynical quid pro quo, the administration agreed not to appeal the appeals court ruling on the memo, and the court agreed to give the administration several months to purge the document of any content it wanted to conceal.

Last month, the Senate confirmed the promotion of Barron to the First Circuit, with all but two Democrats voting in favor, including supposed NSA critics Mark Udall, Martin Heinrich and Ron Wyden.

It is notable that the document deals only cursorily with the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which states: “Nor shall any person…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” (These words are not cited in the memo). It is also striking that most of the redactions in the released document occur in the section dealing with the constitutional rights of US citizens.

Instead, the memo restates the now standard pseudolegal argument that in prosecuting the “war on terror” against Al Qaeda and “associated forces,” the president and his unelected military/intelligence aides have virtually unlimited powers, including the power to wage war and carry out killings, kidnappings and indefinite detention anywhere in the world, including within the US itself. It ignores the fact that the so-called “war on terror” was never declared by Congress and has no geographical or temporal limit.

The memo repeatedly cites the congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed three days after the 9/11 attacks, as legal support for any and all actions taken in the name of fighting terrorists, including the assassination of US citizens and other repressive measures against Americans. At the time it was passed, the AUMF was presented as a narrowly defined sanction for retaliation against those responsible for the attacks.

It also cites the 2004 Supreme Court ruling in Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, even though the court ruled 8 to 1 against the Bush administration’s asserted right to detain people without trial or due process.

Barron accepts uncritically all of the assertions of the government about Awlaki, his role as an “operational leader” of Al Qaeda and involvement in previous terror plots against the US, the “imminent” threat to Americans he supposedly represents, the “infeasibility” of capturing him, etc. in order to declare that the government can kill him without any independent trial of the facts or any opportunity for the victim to defend himself in a court of law. The presumption of innocence is a dead letter.

On this basis, the memo concludes: “We do not believe that al-Aulaqi’s US citizenship imposes constitutional limitations that would preclude the contemplated lethal action under the facts represented to us by DoD [Department of Defense], the CIA and the Intelligence Community.”

The document is carefully worded so as not to limit the president’s asserted power to order the murder of Americans to the specific circumstances surrounding Awlaki. It states, for example, that the use of lethal forces is acceptable “at least” where government officials have determined capture is not feasible.

And it defines “imminent” in such as way as to render the term meaningless, declaring that the government does not need to know “precisely when such attacks will occur.”

Since the murder of Awlaki, the Obama administration has expanded the scope of its asserted power to act as judge, jury and executioner. Attorney General Holder has put forward the novel and unconstitutional theory that there is a difference between “due process,” which is guaranteed under the Constitution, and “judicial process,” which is not. According to Holder, discussions between Obama and his top military and intelligence aides over whether or not a particular citizen should be eliminated constitutes “due process.”

Following the February 2013 leaking of a “white paper” from Holder to Congress putting forward the administration’s legal justifications for extrajudicial assassinations of US citizens abroad, Holder asserted that the president has the right to order the killing of citizens within the borders of the United States. He did so in a letter to Republican Senator Rand Paul, and reiterated the position in subsequent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And in testimony last month before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Defense Department and State Department lawyers argued that the president has unlimited war powers and does not require even the fig leaf of congressional authorization. The lawyers declared that the White House had the power to authorize the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the air war against Libya, indefinite detention, drone assassinations and all of the other illegal actions of the Bush and Obama administrations without reference to the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which up to now has served as the catch-all pseudolegal basis for such policies.

“The US has the authority to target individuals, including Americans, who pose an imminent threat to attack our country,” State Department Deputy Legal Adviser Mary McLeod told the committee. [Emphasis added].

The Barron memo has been released within the context of discussions within the political establishment over whether to amend or simply terminate the Authorization for Use of Military Force in order to more firmly institutionalize the quasidictatorial war powers of the president. There are those who want to put it aside in order to establish more firmly the right of the executive to wage war without any legal restraint.

The confirmation of Barron to a top federal court and the line-up of both parties behind presidential assassinations and unilateral military actions underscore the absence of any significant support for democratic rights within the ruling class.

The arguments put forward in the memo released Monday—justifying the abrogation of basic rights, state murder of citizens and dictatorial powers on the grounds of national security and the requirements of war—are identical to those put forward by every military and fascist regime, from Pinochet to Hitler.

The preparations for dictatorship can be halted only by the independent political mobilization of the American and international working class against militarism, social inequality and the assault on democratic rights.

Daily Caller......

Opinion

Pentagon Official: The Obama Drone Kill Memo Is Out And Libertarians Were Right — It’s Murder

10:39 PM 06/24/2014

Joseph Miller

Instead of taking the U.S. citizens the administration accused of conspiring against the U.S. and her interests to court, the administration was looking for an easier way to solve the problem: They sought to kill them, and wanted the legal backing to do so. But here’s an issue: Even if a U.S. citizen were to be tried in absentia and found guilty of conspiring to commit terrorism by a federal court, the punishment for doing so is not death, and certainly not from a missile fired by a Predator drone.

That has not stopped the Obama administration from doing just that. To date, Anwar al-Awlaki is one of three U.S. citizens to have been killed abroad by the Obama administration without having received due process in a court of law. Another of those was his 14-year-old son, who by all accounts was innocent and was not accused of conspiring to commit terrorism.

None of those killed were in the midst of an act of terrorism, nor were they actively engaged in fighting U.S. troops in a war zone. At the time of his death, al-Awlaki was riding in a vehicle in the Yemeni desert. We made no attempt to capture him or arrest him, despite assurances made to the Justice Department. No one was been made to answer for these deaths, especially that of al-Awlaki’s son.

The signatory for the memo was then-Assistant U.S. Attorney General David J. Barron. In the memo, the administration contends that a U.S. citizen’s alleged leadership role in al-Qaida, and the infeasibility of capturing them, provides sufficient legal justification for either the CIA or the Department of Defense to use lethal force and deny that citizen their right to due process — all based on the authorization of force passed by the Congress after 9/11, and another memo also written by Barron that remains classified.

The problem is that the administration is making the accusations against a U.S. citizen, rendering a judgment of guilt or innocence outside of the court system, and then carrying out an extrajudicial killing of American citizens in complete and utter violation of the Constitution. The part of the memo that addresses the right to due process is redacted.

At no point in the extralegal process outlined in the memo is the U.S. citizen in question tried or convicted in a court of law for the crimes the administration alleges the individual is guilty of. The administration is making that determination, and exactly who within the administration is still unclear. This is a scary usurpation of power from the judicial branch — and an amazing power grab by the executive.

Finally, under the legal reasoning outlined in the memo, there is nothing to prevent the president from ordering a lethal operation against U.S. citizens inside the United States, as the memo does not stipulate that there is a geographic limitation to these operations — only a test of feasibility. Nor is there a single requirement for a federal court of judge to make the determination that a person is a member or leader of a terrorist organization.

When this country was created, the Founders may not have anticipated the dangers posed by a terrorist cell capable of killing thousands or more. But they knew well, and carefully guarded against, the dangers of a government gone wild. In this memo, finally made public, we have proof of a White House that considers itself judge, jury and executioner. And that, America, is a clear and present danger.

Joseph Miller is the pen name for a ranking Department of Defense official with a background in U.S. special operations and combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has worked in strategic planning.

Catharsis Ours

Thursday, June 26, 2014

US: LOOKING AT ALL OPTIONS IN IMMIGRATION...