Cue obtuse denials (à la Republicans denying their own Benghazi report) and wailing tears. Republicans are wrong again, so say over 100 legal scholars. President Obama acted Constitutionally and within the powers of his office when he took immigration action.
Jim Kuhnehn reported for the AP, “More than 100 immigration professors and scholars declared Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s decision to make several million immigrants illegally in the United States eligible to be spared from deportation is constitutional and within his administrative powers.”
That’s 135 scholars for anyone who’s counting. And they all say that President Obama’s immigration actions are well within the legal authority of the executive branch.
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The lawyers published their conclusion in a letter, updated from a September 3, 2014 letter sent by 136 law professors to the White House on the role of executive action in immigration law.
Our conclusion is that the expansion of the DACA program and the establishment of Deferred Action for Parental Accountability are legal exercises of prosecutorial discretion. Both executive actions are well within the legal authority of the executive branch of the government of the United States.
It’s not as if this is news to those who operate in reality land, but this is news for those deeply entrenched in the alternative universe/contagious disease that is Republicanitis.
Seeing as every modern president since Eisenhower has done this including Republican former President Ronald Reagan, Republicans look foolish and petty the more they screech about Obama. They are really just upset that President Obama is acting like a president and using the powers given to him by the People in a landslide election (the second national election he won, by the way– a “referendum” on his policies if ever there were one, wake up media).
135 legal scholars V Republicans.
But wait. Republicans claim that it’s different when Obama does it because the scope is so broad. What say the scholars? They disagree. The broad scope does not impact prosecutorial discretion.
Oh.
Further, the scholars cited the fact that federal courts “also explicitly recognized prosecutorial discretion in general and deferred action in particular. Notably, the U.S. Supreme Court noted in its Arizona v. United States decision in 2012: ‘A principal feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials.'”
Keep in mind that Republicans also don’t “believe” in climate change, science, medicine, reality, and much more. They base monetary policy on a fictional character’s monologue in a book written for juvenile teenage boys. Reality is a stranger to Republicans these days. So it should come as no surprise that they are wrong again, because they once again denied reality.
The reality is, Barack Obama is the President of the U.S. He’s in his second term. The people wanted him a lot more than they wanted the Republican alternatives, in both elections. But we are six years in, and Republicans are still whining daily like perpetual sore losers who refuse to take responsibility for their own failures.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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