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Tag: executive actions
Boehner: Senate Democrats Need To ‘Get Off Their …’

Boehner: Senate Democrats Need To ‘Get Off Their …’

By Matt Fuller, CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

WASHINGTON — GOP House leaders emerged from a Republican Conference meeting Wednesday with a persistent refrain on Department of Homeland Security funding: The House has done its job; it’s time for the Senate to act.

During their weekly Republican leadership press conference, Speaker John Boehner repeatedly called on the Senate to take up the House-passed DHS funding bill, which Senate Democrats have repeatedly blocked the chamber from considering.

“You know, in the gift shop out here, they’ve got these little booklets on how a bill becomes a law,” a fired-up Boehner said, as camera shutters clicked away. “The House has done its job! Why don’t you go ask the Senate Democrats when they’re going to get off their ass and do something?!”

When Boehner was asked if this standoff with the Senate was how he planned for the DHS bill to play out — Senate Republicans now insist it’s on House Republicans to send over a new bill — Boehner said the process was working “exactly” the way he envisioned it.

“The House did its job,” Boehner said. “We won the fight to fund the Department of Homeland Security, and to stop the president’s unconstitutional actions. Now it’s time for the Senate to do their work.”

But if they don’t, does Boehner ever intend on throwing the Senate a lifeline?

“The House has done its job,” Boehner said. “It’s time for the Senate to do theirs.”

Time and again, Republican members trickling out of the Wednesday morning conference meeting stubbornly repeated some variation of Boehner’s new favorite line: The House did its job, now it’s the Senate’s turn.

During conference Wednesday, members heard from two of their former House colleagues now in the Senate: Cory Gardner of Colorado and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.

But instead of Gardner and Moore Capito quelling the House insistence that the Senate act, the two freshmen senators got an earful that they weren’t doing enough.

According to Rep. Ron DeSantis of Florida, one member in the conference meeting told the senators they shouldn’t be letting the Senate go home on the weekend.

DeSantis said there were ways Republicans could pressure Senate Democrats — simultaneously noting he’s “not an expert on kind of how the Senate’s run” — and he said the sense among the public was that Senate Republicans weren’t doing enough.

In a mocking tone, DeSantis said the Senate’s attitude was, “‘OK, have a vote, OK, you don’t have 60, OK, we got to move on to something else now.'”

House members simply aren’t satisfied with the Senate’s effort on the House-passed DHS bill, which would block President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration. And House Republicans aren’t moving off their position that the Senate take up their bill. That insistence was typified Wednesday in one particularly iron-willed exchange between Budget Chairman Tom Price and a reporter.

“The speaker’s position, and our position, is that the House has already acted; it’s time for the Senate to act,” the Georgia Republican said Wednesday morning.

Asked if the more likely option then was for a continuing resolution or for a shutdown, Price said the option was for the Senate to act.

Presented with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comments Tuesday that it was “obviously” up to the House to send over a new bill, Price was emphatic. “The House has acted,” he said, content to leave it at that.

But Rebecca Shabad, a reporter for The Hill, was not content to leave it at that. She asked if Price thought the House might have to act again. “It’s up to the Senate to act,” Price replied.

Asked again if a CR was more likely, given the short amount of time before a DHS shutdown on Feb. 28, Price resorted to a similar line. “The House has acted. It’s up to the Senate to act,” he said.

And that’s the official position from House Republicans: They’re not budging.

A similarly obstinate back-and-forth is playing out between Boehner and McConnell in the press. Boehner continues to insist the DHS funding bill is up to the Senate, while McConnell points to three failed votes to proceed to the legislation.

When Boehner was asked about the constantly evolving McConnell-Boehner relationship Wednesday, he didn’t say much.

“I love Mitch,” Boehner said. “He has a tough job to do, and so do I.”

And that was that.

Adam Jentleson, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) later issued the following statement on Boehner’s comments:

“We know Speaker Boehner is frustrated but cursing is not going to resolve the squabbling among Republicans that led to this impasse. Democrats have been clear from day one about the way out of this mess: take up the clean Homeland Security funding bill which Republicans signed off on in December – and which is ready to come to the Senate floor – pass it, and move on. If Republicans want to debate immigration policy next, Democrats are happy to have that debate.

“Neither Speaker Boehner nor Senator McConnell appears willing to do the right thing and stand up to the extremists in their caucus like Senator Ted Cruz who have led us here. As we speak, Senator McConnell is on the verge of wasting three entire weeks that could have been used to pass a clean Homeland Security bill simply because he is unwilling to stand up to Senator Cruz.

“The Republican Congress is a mess, pure and simple. Democrats are happy to help our Republican colleagues resolve their problems but the first step is for Republican leaders to do the right thing and pass a clean bill to fund Homeland Security.”

Photo: Talk Radio News Service via Flickr

Rollout Of Obama’s Immigration Plan Faces Enormous Challenges

Rollout Of Obama’s Immigration Plan Faces Enormous Challenges

By Joseph Tanfani, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will soon roll out one of the most ambitious and controversial programs of his presidency, an effort to grant a reprieve from deportation to millions of adult immigrants living in the country illegally.

With time short and stakes high, the Obama administration knows it cannot afford another debacle like 2013’s botched introduction of the Affordable Care Act.

The challenges posed by the new immigration program will be enormous. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office projects that 1.3 million people will apply in the first six months, starting in May. Anything close to that would be a giant new workload for the agency, which processes about 6.3 million other applications annually.

The cost of implementing the president’s executive actions will be $324 million to $484 million over the next three years, according to a draft of a letter from Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson obtained by The Los Angeles Times.

The money to pay for the program will come from application fees, the agency says. Because of that, the administration says it does not need Congress’ authority to spend money on the program. The fee for DAPA — Deferred Action for Parents of Americans — will be $465. But the department will have to spend millions of dollars before the fees start coming in.

In addition to the growing bureaucracy, other challenges, including defining who is eligible, await the agency.
One key difference from the health care rollout: no complicated website. The immigration services agency still does most of its business on paper and through the mail, and applicants will mail in their papers.

The applications will be handled at an office complex in suburban Washington, with a new staff of 1,000 government workers, supplemented by as many as 1,000 private contractors.

“It’s going to be a monumental effort,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an advocacy group that usually backs the administration. “It’s arguably the biggest (immigration) program they’ve ever had to implement, and with a population that has done everything possible to avoid contact with authorities.”

In November, Obama announced the executive action that would temporarily defer deportation for up to 5 million of the 11.2 million people living in the U.S. illegally.

An estimated 4 million people are thought to fit the criteria under DAPA: continuous residence in the U.S. since Jan. 1, 2010, no serious crimes on record and a child who is a U.S. citizen or legal resident.

Many Republicans consider Obama’s action to be an unconstitutional overreach and have been looking for ways to stop the program. The House voted to block any spending on the new programs in the $39.7 billion budget for the Homeland Security Department, which includes the immigration services agency. That measure has not passed the Senate.

Also, administration officials are watching a federal courthouse in Texas, where a judge is considering a challenge to Obama’s plan from 26 states, mostly led by Republican governors.

“Processing these illegal actions will obviously be very expensive,” said Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), a vociferous critic of the executive action and chairman of the Senate Immigration and the National Interest subcommittee. “To carry out his plan he will need to move money from lawful enforcement programs of DHS to unlawful policies that undermine enforcement.”

The administration isn’t waiting to see how the Republican efforts play out. It signed a $7.8-million lease for 246,000 square feet on 12 floors in a complex outside Washington and is planning a cost of about $40 million a year for new employees’ salaries and benefits.

The program will be modeled on the administration’s 2012 deferred deportation program for young people, the so-called Dreamers. In that program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the agency has handled more than 860,000 applications, with some backlogs and delays but no major problems.

The new rules expanded DACA, making about 300,000 more people eligible; immigration offices will begin accepting those applications Feb. 18.

The DAPA application process will be low-tech. Like a lot of federal agencies, USCIS has struggled with information technology. It has spent about $1 billion on an electronic immigration system, ELIS, that is still so clunky and limited that immigration officers can work twice as fast on paper, according to an inspector general’s report from July.

The agency will rely on contractors to move the paperwork mountain. It starts with the banking firm of J.P. Morgan Chase, which will be paid to open envelopes, scan applications and deposit checks at centers in Dallas and Phoenix.

A spokesman for the Treasury Department, which handles those contracts, said Saturday that the cost of those services was about $96 million last year.

The immigration services agency will hire another firm to do records work for DAPA, which may cost as much as $40 million for the first year, according to contractor estimates. In a bid document, the agency projects that half of the eligible population for DAPA — about 1.9 million people — will apply in the first 18 months.

The immigration agency anticipates more than 800,000 applications in the first 90 days.

Getting enough staff in place by May will be difficult, a former Homeland Security official told a Senate committee last week. The agency will probably have to divert workers from other jobs — possibly leading to delays in green card applications or other programs, said Luke Bellocchi, the agency’s former deputy ombudsman.

The agency says it will be ready.

“USCIS is on pace to have several hundred employees on board and trained by mid-May, which will ensure every case processed by USCIS receives a thorough, case-by-case review,” said agency spokesman Chris Bentley, acknowledging that it may have to pull workers from other tasks if there’s an early surge.

The agency is also trying to solve other challenges with the program — starting with settling questions about who’s eligible. A big one: How will the agency define a parent? Will step-parents be eligible? And what happens if those parents get divorced? What about common-law spouses?

Another question has come up about the kinds of documents applicants will need to produce. Many Dreamers relied on school records, even attaching year-by-year class portraits and report cards to their applications.

For adults, leases, paychecks, utility bills and bank records will be acceptable, but for people who’ve been living here illegally and trying to stay under the radar, proof might be thin.

“Documentation is going to be much harder for this population,” said Michelle Sardone, legalization program director for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. “You don’t want people to take advantage of the situation, but you don’t want to make it so difficult that people can’t get in.”

Advocates are planning a publicity campaign to coax people to step forward and apply. The political furor in Washington probably won’t scare people away, they say, but big delays and problems might.

“If it takes six months for anybody to get approved, that’s going to affect participation,” said Charles Kamasaki of the National Council of La Raza. “If they are getting approvals in two to three months, then the skeptics are more likely to come forward.”

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a meeting with a group of young undocumented immigrants in the Oval Office of the White House on Feb. 4, 2015 in Washington, D.C. The five immigrants, known as “dreamers,” who meet with the president have received protections from deportation under a program Obama implemented in 2012. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)

Two Years After Aurora, Where’s The Gun Reform?

Two Years After Aurora, Where’s The Gun Reform?

It’s been two years since the tragic Aurora, Colorado theater shooting, which killed 12 people and injured 70. But although many politicians, including President Obama, vowed that the nation would finally do something to strengthen gun regulations, Congress still hasn’t passed a single gun control law since. In fact, Congress hasn’t passed any major gun reform since 1994’s Assault Weapons Ban, which expired 10 years ago.

That doesn’t mean that nothing has changed, however. Months later, after the Newtown elementary school shooting in December 2012, the president set up a task force to address the issue. He promised to send Congress proposals for strengthening gun control, and he urged lawmakers to ban assault weapons, pass a universal background check law, and limit high-capacity ammunition clips.

He then signed 23 executive orders into law in January 2013. These included reducing barriers to background checks, researching the causes of gun violence, and improving mental health services. As Forbes explained at the time, “It does not appear that any of the executive orders would have any impact on the guns people currently own – or would like to purchase – and that all proposals regarding limiting the availability of assault weapons or large ammunition magazines will be proposed for congressional action.”

In other words, Congress still needed to act. In April 2013, the Senate voted to expand the background check system, a reform that 90 percent of Americans supported. But the amendment failed to to gain the 60 votes it needed to advance, due to pressure from the National Rifle Association and the lack of support from some red-state Democrats such as North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp.

President Obama called the vote “a shameful day in Washington.”

Obama took two more executive actions in August 2013. He banned military weapons that the United States had sold or given to allies from being imported back into the country. These weapons, however, are rarely used at crime scenes.

The president also attempted to close a loophole that allows felons and anyone else who can’t legally purchase a gun to register firearms to a corporation. The new rule requires anyone associated with that corporation to go through a background check. But that rule only applies to guns regulated under the National Firearms Act, which only regulates very deadly weapons such as machine guns.

Meanwhile, Congress still hasn’t passed any major gun legislation. The only step in the right direction was in May 2014, when the House passed an amendment that would increase funding for the country’s background check system.

In June, 163 House Democrats wrote an open letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), asking him to allow a vote on legislation to address gun violence. If he doesn’t allow a vote, it could resurface as a major issue in the midterms.

Even though there hasn’t been substantive national action to reduce gun violence, some states have taken gun control into their own hands.

Colorado’s state legislature passed laws that required universal background checks and limited gun magazines to 15 rounds of ammunition. Two Democratic state senators were recalled shortly thereafter, in an effort that was heavily supported by the NRA.

New York also passed new gun control and mental health laws. Other states have improved their background check systems, limited magazine capacity, and worked to prevent the mentally ill from accessing guns.

According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 64 laws have strengthened state gun regulations since the Newtown shootings, and 70 laws have weakened them.

Photo: Rob Bixby via Flickr

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