by digby
From the looks of it, the conservatives are working themselves into Lewinsky level hysteria over the president's plan to allow some Hispanic people to stay in the country. Apparently they don't know or care that St Reagan and Poppy used exactly the same executive power in exactly the same way.
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."
But you see, when the Republicans did it it was on a Tuesday and Obama wants to do it on a Wednesday so it's completely different:
But a lawyer who worked on the 1986 law and the 1990 follow-up as an aide to then-Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., said Bush's action wasn't controversial because it came after lawmakers had made it clear they were going to tackle the issue.
That's not the case now.
"Bush Sr. took the action that he did but it wasn't as if Congress was legislating anything to the contrary," said Carl Hampe of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy. "What's different now is that there is no clear path to legislative relief for the class of beneficiaries for which the president's order would provide relief."
Sure there is. It's the same path that existed then. The congress can pass a law that does what the president is doing with his order. Now it's true that they will not do it because their racist base is having a fit over Mexicans and Central Americans "destroying our way of life" but that doesn't mean that the same path the congress chose after Reagan and Bush took their executive actions is not available in exactly the same way today. It is. The GOP is just intent upon making sure that every Latino in America knows how much they are loathed and despised by Republicans.
And here's a perfect example, from the same article, of a Republican getting so worked up he ends up speaking gibberish.
"There's always some precedent for prosecutorial discretion," said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz. "But this president would call tearing the Constitution into tiny little pieces in the White House prosecutorial discretion."
Whatever you say Senator ....
Meanwhile John "Godfather" Boehner offers up a little bit of advice for the president:
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, is stopping short of threatening to use Congress' power of the purse to thwart any executive action by Obama. Boehner's priority is to avoid a government shutdown. But he made it clear that Republicans will make Obama pay a price if he carries out his threat.
"Every administration needs this and needs that, needs all kinds of things," Boehner said Thursday. "You know, if he wants to go off on his own, there are things that he's just not going to get."
Every president needs "this and that." And now he's not going to get it. I don't know what he's talking about but whatever it is Joe Biden ought to pull a Cheney and tell him to go fuck himself.
I think that one of the lesser understood stories of this election is that it marks the end of the Rush Limbaugh era. It's now officially the Laura Ingraham era. She is the Joan of Arc of xenophobia and has led the charge on this issue. Viva Ingraham.
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