Conservatives Triumph in Border Bill Victory

My article from today's FrontPage magazine:

Conservatives Triumph in Border Bill Victory

By Matthew Vadum

Conservatives in Congress scored a major triumph last week as the House approved emergency legislation that strengthens border security and attempts to rein in a lawless president.

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a conservative champion, took a well-deserved victory lap in an interview with the WND news website.

The “legislative miracle” approved by the House represents a “stunning turnaround” and “a huge victory for the conservatives in Congress.” Its approval is also a big win for the American people who, Bachmann said, “saved Congress from itself” by jamming the congressional switchboard to state their opposition to President Obama’s planned immigration amnesty.

Bachmann noted the legislation pays states to place National Guard troops on the border, doubling funding for that program. It also responds to the president’s threat that “he would act alone, lawlessly, to grant work permits to 5- to 6 million illegal foreign nationals.”

“We have taken the strongest possible action, legislatively, to stop him,” Bachmann said. “We’ve put the president on notice by saying, ‘You better not issue these work permits because we’ve said no. You better not try it, Mr. President.’”

The bill also provides funding to immigration agencies to house illegal alien children and also amends a 2008 law that was created to block the sex trafficking of young people but which has been used to provide asylum to illegals coming from Central American countries.

Bachmann also marveled at the fact that the bill was even tougher in her view than what anti-amnesty stalwarts Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had thought was politically possible to achieve.

She also rejected President Obama‘s mischievous comment Friday afternoon in which he attacked conservatives for supposedly preventing the House from approving a border-fix measure.

That comment was “infantile,” Bachmann said, noting that the Democrat-controlled Senate is the chamber that has yet to approve a border bill. Republicans hope Senate Democrats take a public relations drubbing in coming weeks for failing to act.

Victory came a day after a conservative-led uprising among House Republicans scuttled Speaker John Boehner’s worse-than-useless border crisis and immigration legislation. “The bill as it was had more loopholes than a knitted afghan,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) told FrontPage on Thursday.

Conservatives Kill Amnesty Bill —- For Now

My article from the Aug. 1, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Conservatives Kill Amnesty Bill —- For Now

By Matthew Vadum

A conservative-led uprising among House Republicans scuttled Speaker John Boehner’s worse-than-useless border crisis and immigration legislation yesterday but party leaders vowed to try again today to pass the emergency funding bill.

“The bill as it was had more loopholes than a knitted afghan,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said in a statement released exclusively to FrontPage late yesterday.

Tonight, many members were able to come together and hammer out many of those problems so that we could live with the result. Whether the final product gets the needed 218 votes will depend on how the final product looks once it is typed and printed.

Conservatives are apparently doing the people’s will. A new poll suggests Republican voters side with conservative lawmakers over House GOP leadership. Breitbart News reports:

Polling data compiled by Tea Party Patriots and provided exclusively to Breitbart News shows that a majority of Republican voters think Republicans standing strong on immigration is more important than repealing Obamacare, getting to the bottom of the Benghazi or IRS scandals—or anything else for that matter.
When asked by TPP’s pollster which issue they think is the [most] important for Republicans in Congress to deal with, 34.6 percent of GOP voters said stopping the flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border. Stopping Obama’s ‘illegal overreach’ with executive power came in a distant second with 24 percent of GOP voters saying that’s the most important, while 23 percent saying repealing Obamacare is the most important and just 7.2 percent say the IRS scandal is the most important issue and 2.8 percent say the Benghazi scandal is most important. A total of 8.4 percent of GOP voters said they don’t know or refused to answer.
The poll was conduc[t]ed with 1,000 likely GOP voters on Thursday, July 24 via a combination of cell phones and landlines nationwide, with a margin of error of 3.2 percent.

The showdown between rank-and-file Republicans and their leaders in the House comes as Americans grow increasingly angry over the border crisis that has been staged and carefully choreographed by the far-left levelers of the Obama administration.

President Obama threatens to plunge the nation into a grave constitutional crisis after Labor Day by using executive orders to grant a huge amnesty to millions of illegal aliens now in the United States. Of course, in the American system of government, Congress, not the president, is supposed to make laws. Congress has repeatedly refused to grant the amnesties that Obama seeks, but the president refuses to take no for an answer, pressing on regardless of how much damage he does to the country.

Lawmakers in the nation’s capital had been racing to wrap up legislative business and leave Washington for a five-week summer recess yesterday but Boehner put their vacation plans on hold after a revolt forced him to temporarily shelve his border bill that conservatives say is really amnesty legislation.

Some House members were already at the airport preparing to fly back to their congressional districts but “a sudden and fierce backlash forced Boehner to rescind the decision” to put the bill on the back burner, Breitbart News reports.

Down to the Wire

My article from the July 31, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Down to the Wire

By Matthew Vadum

Republican lawmakers in the nation’s capital are racing against the legislative clock to approve measures aimed at cleaning up the border mess that President Obama created and preventing him from issuing unilateral decrees making it much, much worse.

The Obama administration is threatening to plunge the nation into a dire constitutional crisis after Labor Day by using executive orders to grant a huge amnesty to millions of illegal aliens now in the United States. Of course, in the American system of government, Congress, not the president, is supposed to make laws. Congress has repeatedly refused to grant the amnesties that Obama seeks, but the president refuses to take no for an answer, pressing on regardless of the casualties he inflicts on the country.

There is no indication Obama is backing off.

After meeting with Obama at the White House, leftist congressman Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) again predicted the president would go forward with a massive immigration amnesty.

“I believe the president of the United States is going to act broadly and generously,” Gutiérrez said Tuesday on MSNBC when describing the White House visit that took place Friday. “That’s my belief. He didn’t say that to me but that’s what I believe he’s going to do.”

A giddy Gutiérrez said last week that the Obama administration could unilaterally provide legal status to as many as 5 million illegals.

But an amnesty fiat by the president would violate the U.S. Constitution and the separation of powers doctrine and is clearly “an impeachable offense,” according to commentator Charles Krauthammer.

Although Krauthammer doesn’t support efforts to impeach Obama which he refers to as “political suicide,” he said that unilaterally granting work permits and legal status to millions of illegal aliens would be “clearly lawless and it would be biggest domestic overreach of a president in memory.”

Time is running out for Congress to act to protect its constitutionally guaranteed legislative prerogatives from Obama’s tyrannical encroachments. On Friday the House of Representatives is set to adjourn for five weeks for summer vacation.

Bracing for Amnesty

My article from the July 28, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Bracing for Amnesty

By Matthew Vadum

Amnesty is coming — big time.

Americans need to brace themselves for a huge new wave of Obama-led lawlessness because the president is planning what a top schemer in the White House calls a “very significant” executive action on immigration after the summer.

Undoubtedly this means some kind of amnesty for illegal aliens is in the works over and above what Obama has already done, the Constitution and public fury notwithstanding.

Obama’s “planned executive orders” would give legal status “to another 5–6 million illegal immigrants,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, (R-Alabama). “This would effectively end immigration enforcement in America.”

Leftist congressman Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) boasted Friday that the Obama administration could unilaterally provide legal status to as many as 5 million illegals. The lawmaker said he planned to meet with White House officials “to negotiate additional terms and avenues the president can use” through executive action.

“I think we can get 3 or 4, maybe even 5 million people,” Gutiérrez said.

The news comes as Americans grow increasingly angry over the border crisis that has been staged and carefully choreographed by the far-left levelers of the Obama administration. Flames of discontent are flickering even in places like Lynn, Massachusetts, long a Democratic Party bastion, as local residents grow weary of the seemingly unending influx of illegal aliens that they are hard-pressed to feed, house, and clothe. As many as an estimated 10,000 people protested illegal immigration outside the Massachusetts legislature in Boston over the weekend.

Because a U.S. Senate-approved immigration package has very little chance of passing the House, Obama has decided yet again to usurp the power of the Congress and make law, a clear violation of the Constitution and an impeachable offense.

But instead of getting serious about border security, the Obama administration views the ongoing invasion by gang members, criminals, and other illegal immigrants from Central America as an opportunity to dynamite what remains of the nation’s southern border. He doesn’t care that plenty of illegal aliens, many of them children, are dying in the act of crossing the border. They are mere collateral damage in the pursuit of so-called social justice.

Americans Say Obamacare Is Hurting Families

My article from the July 25, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Americans Say Obamacare Is Hurting Families

By Matthew Vadum

The American people hate Obamacare and recognize the lasting damage it is inflicting, according to a new national poll.

Americans seem to recognize that the Obamacare law will boot people out of their health care plans, encourage idleness, drive wages down, increase the government’s tax take, and fail to put a dent in the number of Americans without health insurance coverage.

“Obamacare is helping some people; mostly Americans with preexisting conditions and those who are eligible for very generous subsidies,” Townhall’s Guy Benson observes. “But it’s hurting far more people. And a substantial majority oppose the law.”

Indeed, after but a wee taste of the deadly horrors of government-run health care, Americans now say by a 2-to-1 margin that it has hurt their families, according to a new CNN/ORC International poll.

When asked what impact the Obamacare law has had, 18 percent of respondents said their families were better off as a result of the law, compared to 35 percent who said Obamacare has made them worse off.

Americans continue to hate Obamacare overall, disapproving of the program by a dramatic margin of 59 percent to 40 percent.

Many Americans are finding that guaranteed access to health care insurance doesn’t actually translate to getting health care in the real world. This “access shock” is spreading, according to a surprisingly honest assessment in Politico:

Anger over limited choice of doctors and hospitals in Obamacare plans is prompting some states to require broader networks — and boiling up as yet another election year headache for the health law … It’s not just a political problem. It’s a policy conundrum. Narrow networks help contain health care costs. If state or federal regulators — or politicians — force insurers to expand the range of providers, premiums could spike. And that could create a whole new wave of political and affordability problems that can shape perceptions of Obamacare.

And to the continuing amazement of our enlightened progressive betters, Americans are stubbornly immune to the relentless onslaughts of socialist propaganda from Obama mandarins and the media that sing the praises of government-run health care.

“Obamacare was pitched as a win/win for everyone, with no trade-offs and no losers,” said Benson. “That has not been the case.”

The Obama Administration’s Homeland Security Hypocrisy

My article from the July 15, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

The Obama Administration’s Homeland Security Hypocrisy

By Matthew Vadum

After years of working hard to comfort America’s terrorist enemies and erase U.S. borders, the nation’s perpetually embattled attorney general is suddenly concerned that Middle Eastern jihadists are working together to create undetectable explosives that could be used to blow up U.S. airliners.

Intelligence reports suggest Islamic terrorists in Yemen and Syria have joined forces to make the stealthy bombs and this development is “more frightening than anything I think I’ve seen as attorney general,” Eric Holder said on ABC’s “This Week.”

The collaboration between Islamist militants in the two Muslim countries is a “deadly combination” of those who have technical skills and “people who have this kind of fervor to give their lives in support of a cause that is directed at the United States and directed at its allies.”

“It’s something that gives us really extreme, extreme concern,” Holder said.

Holder’s comments come as the U.S.Department of Homeland Security announced it was ratcheting up security measures at international airports. Individuals will now be made to demonstrate that their electronic devices such as cellphones and laptop computers are not bombs by turning them on at security checkpoints.

Such measures are “prudent steps that are necessary to protect the flying public,” Holder said.

Yet while Holder pretends to be a responsible adult, at the same time evidence has surfaced that security measures have been all but suspended at U.S. airports for newly arrived illegal immigrants in the southern states.

Breitbart Texas reports that illegals are being allowed to board commercial airliners without valid ID. “The aliens who are getting released on their own recognizance are being allowed to board and travel commercial airliners by simply showing their Notice to Appear forms,” said Hector Garza, a spokesman for Local 2455 of the National Border Patrol Council. (NBPC is the labor union representing about 17,000 Border Patrol agents and support personnel assigned to that law enforcement organization.)

Soros Network Ready to Boost Radical Groups

My article from the July 11, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Soros Network Ready to Boost Radical Groups

By Matthew Vadum

Amidst internal dissent, George Soros’s shadowy political funding powerhouse is planning to execute a $200 million fundraising campaign this election cycle in order to benefit key groups pushing for a permanent radical left-wing Democrat majority.

The billionaire members of the elite fundraising empire known as the Democracy Alliance have reportedly funneled $500 million or more into leftist and pro-Democrat organizations. The goal of the Alliance is to foster a permanent political infrastructure of left-wing nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups.

Among the groups benefiting from the Alliance’s largesse are the John Podesta-founded Center for American Progress, Media Matters for America, America Votes, and Organizing for Action (an outfit that grew out of the Obama campaign and used to be known as Organizing for America).

Much of the money being spent by groups that enjoy support from the Democracy Alliance is being devoted to class warfare and the vilification of right-leaning billionaires Charles and David Koch in order to distract from President Obama’s failed policies. Members of the Alliance are “obsessed with” the Kochs’ funding network, according to Politico‘s Ken Vogel.

“Conservatives, particularly the Koch Brothers, are playing for keeps with an even more pronounced financial advantages [sic] than in recent election cycles,” according to a 62-page briefing book Democracy Alliance donors received before the annual spring of the group at Chicago’s luxurious Ritz-Carlton hotel.

“The briefing book reveals a sort of DA-funded extra-party political machine,” Vogel writes, “that includes sophisticated voter databases and plans to mobilize pivotal Democratic voting blocs, air ads boosting Democratic candidates, while also — perhaps ironically — working to reduce the influence of money in politics.”

As Vogel reports, the Democracy Alliance is embracing a series of projects its leadership believes help to advance the leftist cause.

According to internal documents, at the Chicago meeting the Alliance recommended increasing annual funding of the alleged “conservative misinformation” watchdog Media Matters for America from last year’s level of $2.4 million to $3 million in order to back the group’s “Metis” software for “tracking conservative smears.”

The Alliance also supports training for “acts of civil disobedience” by groups such as the New Organizing Institute, and funding for the Progressive Leaders Network, which has been described as the left-wing counterpart to the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC, which writes model legislation that it promotes in state legislatures, suffered mightily in past years as a result of false accusations of racism that the Van Jones-founded group Color of Change level at it based on ALEC’s previous support for voter ID laws.

Supreme Court: Obama is Out of Order

My article from the July 3, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Supreme Court: Obama is Out of Order

By Matthew Vadum

The Supreme Court has wrapped up its 2013-2014 term by handing stinging defeats to the increasingly unpopular President Obama.

Doing its job for a change, the high court reined in the power of the Executive Branch of the federal government, striking down a forced unionization scheme, an abortifacient mandate, and improper recess appointments. The Court also rejected the Obama administration’s contention that police be allowed to search Americans’ cellphones without warrants.

In the nearly five and a half years Obama has been president, the Supreme Court has now ruled against the government 9-0 an astonishing 20 times, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) points out. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton lost on unanimous votes 15 times and 23 times, during their respective eight years in the Oval Office.

This means that as measured by judicial losses, the Obama administration is on track to surpass its two immediate predecessors.

“The importance of the unanimous cases is that you can’t say, ‘Well, there are five Republican appointees on the court and four Democrats,’” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute.

“These cases where they haven’t gotten the votes of either of the two Obama nominees means the arguments being presented by the Justice Department to the court are just out of left field,” he said.

Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor were appointed by Obama. Kagan served as Obama’s solicitor general, arguing cases before the Supreme Court.

In a ruling that has sent shock waves through Big Labor, the Supreme Court struck down a scam that was being run by the grifters at the president’s favorite labor union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

The Court ruled 5-4 in Harris v. Quinn (full text of decision) that SEIU cannot compel people who care for their loved ones to become union members. Nor can SEIU deduct member dues from the government checks of the people for whom they care.

Supreme Court Rebukes Obama Lawlessness

My article from the June 27, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Supreme Court Rebukes Obama Lawlessness

By Matthew Vadum

In a humiliating rebuke to President Obama, the Supreme Court affirmed in a labor relations case yesterday that there continue to be constitutionally prescribed limits to the powers of the nation’s Chief Executive.

The Court invalidated three recess appointments the president made in an attempt to unconstitutionally manipulate federal labor relations policy.

Justices held unanimously in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning Thursday that Obama overreached on Jan. 4, 2012 when he recess-appointed three members to the NLRB without bothering to wait for the U.S. Senate to recess. Obama’s goal was to pack the under-staffed NLRB with likeminded leftists and give the board the quorum it previously lacked to conduct official business.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) lauded the Court’s clampdown on “President Obama’s unlawful abuse of the president’s recess appointments power.”

“This marks the 12th time since January 2012 that the Supreme Court has unanimously rejected the Obama administration’s calls for greater federal executive power,” Cruz said.

A delighted Michael Savage said on his radio show: “America just won a 9-to-0 victory over an emerging dictatorship.” (The full opinion is available at the Supreme Court’s website.)

In this post-constitutional era in which the Supreme Court gave its imprimatur to the nonsensical ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius, the vile pro-Obamacare decision that has been aptly compared to an infamous slavery-reinforcing ruling that helped to precipitate civil war, it remains to be seen what, if any, other limits to governmental power the Court will see fit to recognize. Ben Shapiro correctly characterized the tortuously reasoned Obamacare decision as “the greatest single judicial limitation on American liberty since Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Supreme Court ruled that under the Constitution, blacks were not human beings.”

The lawsuit disposed of yesterday was brought by Noel Canning of Washington state, the owner of a soft drink bottling and distribution company who was displeased by a ruling the board made against him after its quorum was restored by the purported recess appointments. The NLRB found that Canning’s firm engaged in unfair labor practices by declining to sign a collective bargaining agreement. Canning argued the board had no legal authority to render the decision because the president’s recess appointments, made when the U.S. Senate did not consider itself to be in recess, were improper.

The Mounting Proof of an IRS Cover-Up

My article from the June 25, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

The Mounting Proof of an IRS Cover-Up

By Matthew Vadum

More proof the Obama administration is covering up the political persecution it inflicted on its conservative political enemies through the Internal Revenue Service emerged yesterday as a federal official accused the White House of breaking the law by hiding emails.

Whenever the records, including emails, of federal agencies are destroyed — whether intentional or inadvertent — the law requires that the National Archives be notified. But that did not happen when the computer hard drives of a former IRS official and six of her IRS subordinates allegedly crashed in 2011, destroying records of emails now at the heart of a congressional corruption probe.

“They did not follow the law,” Archivist of the United States David Ferriero said of the IRS during testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

It has also been revealed that the IRS suspiciously backed out of a circa 2005 contract with an email storage contractor named Sonasoft mere weeks after Lerner reported losing personal files and before other IRS officials allegedly experienced hard drive crashes as the Tea Party-targeting investigations got underway.

As Investor’s Business Daily explains,

Timing is everything, the saying goes, and sometimes the timing of events is also very curious, as in the case of the lost emails of Lerner and at least six other officials at the very same time the IRS canceled its contract to back up and preserve those emails as required by federal law.
Lerner’s computer supposedly crashed in June 2011, an alleged event the IRS concealed from the American public and congressional investigators for two years.
This event, which cannot be verified because her hard drive has since been destroyed and recycled, occurred just 10 days after House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups.

Sonasoft runs ads stating the company provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” In a 2009 tweet it bragged: “The IRS uses Sonasoft to back up their servers, why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

Why not — indeed.

Under hyper-partisan, left-wing Democrat Lois Lerner, the tax-exempt organizations branch singled out for harassment the heroic Catherine Engelbrecht, leader of the Houston-based good government group True the Vote. Earlier this year the IRS revoked the charitable status of Manassas, Va.-based Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, because it disseminated criticism of Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry a decade ago. In recent years the federal agency also subjected conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status to heightened scrutiny, harassment, and extended processing delays that may have hindered their activities during the previous election cycle.

It is the latest outrage from the Obama administration which has been on a vindictive rampage in recent years, using the feared tax collection agency to vex and annoy its political enemies, especially those associated with the Tea Party movement.

Republicans say the White House has been less than helpful in efforts to investigate the IRS scandal. “They haven’t done a damn thing to get to the truth of what happened,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said yesterday.

The hearing yesterday followed a previous hearing the night before at which lawmakers unloaded on the increasingly arrogant IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, questioning him aggressively. The normally mild-mannered Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) excoriated Koskinen for his bad attitude in testifying before the congressional panel. On Friday Koskinen set the stage for conflict. He angered lawmakers when he told them at that hearing that the IRS had nothing to apologize for in the missing Lerner emails scandal.

Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told Koskinen a Monday hearing: “We have a problem with you and you have a problem with credibility.”

At a hearing yesterday, Koskinen told Issa that he had honored his vow to the panel to give it all of Lerner’s emails, adding it is impossible to recover the emails lost in 2011.

“If you have a magical way for me to do that, I’d be happy to hear about it,” a sarcastic Koskinen told Issa.

“I’ve lost my patience with you,” Issa shot back.