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.

Memo to Conservatives: Republicans Aren't Your Friends

My article from today's American Thinker:

Memo to Conservatives: Republicans Aren't Your Friends

By Matthew Vadum

One of the reasons the national Republican Party is such a mess is because Republicans are far too reluctant to criticize their own.

Republicans are nice people.  Too many Republicans think it's wrong to criticize other Republicans. This failure to be forthright has had consequences.  It has allowed the Republican Party to take up political space it has no business occupying as it embraces left-wing statist tyranny.  Much of the time, the GOP is merely Democrat-lite.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are so dangerously out of touch and out of control nowadays in part because other Republicans have allowed them to get that way.  Boehner and McConnell regard conservatives as a nuisance to be overcome, co-opted, subverted, and if necessary, eliminated.

A new way of thinking is required.

For a start, if you self-identify as a Republican and you are serious about restoring the Constitution, shrinking the government, and reducing government spending, it is wrong to think of other Republican Party members as necessarily being your friends.

A political party isn't a club or a sacred religious order.  It isn't a brotherhood or fraternity.  The other people in the party aren't necessarily your friends, or even people you'd feel comfortable lending your lawnmower.

Here is wisdom: if you, as a Republican, remain true to small-government principles, many of your worst enemies will be found in your own party, and they are likely to be much more vicious, petty, vindictive, and malicious than most of your adversaries on the left.  Intra-party squabbles and in-fighting are among the most brutal of all political conflicts in America.

No, Your Majesty, Congress Will Not Be Available Wednesday

Will Sergeant at Arms Wilson Livingood slam the doors of the House of Representatives shut in President Obama's face if he shows up uninvited Wednesday?

The president has asked to address a joint session of Congress that day in order to deliver for the umpteenth time another dreary, excuse-filled teleprompted oration on how he's going to magically create new jobs for Americans.

The Obama White House doesn't give a farthing's cuss that a high-stakes Republican presidential candidates' debate has been scheduled for the same evening at the Reagan Library.

Obama flak Jay Carney says the timing is a fluke. As the Washington Examiner reports

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says the timing of the speech is not aimed at overshadowing the next Republican debate, which is cosponsored by NBC News and Politico, and is scheduled to air at the same time as the planned presidential address. 

"It is coincidental," Carney said. "It is one debate of many [that will air] on one channel of many... [and] there are many other factors here" to consider when scheduling a major address from the president, he added.

Of course, anyone who believes the timing is coincidental hasn't been paying attention to our president for the last few years.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is having none of it. He sent a letter to the White House recommending another day for the speech. Good for him.

It is clear that President Obama may not dictate to Congress when he shall address it.

The tradition that the head of state must at least implicitly seek the permission of the legislature in order to appear in person and address it has a long and storied history in Anglo-American governance.

In England the House of Commons goes so far as to ceremonially slam the doors of the chamber in the face of the Queen's representative, the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, to remind all in that green and pleasant land that the Commons is independent of the monarch.

Perhaps it's time some doors get slammed in the face of America's would-be monarch.

* * * * *

America needs to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy my book Subversion Inc. at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

DNC-Sponsored Mob Violence Possible: ACORN, Obama Behind Plan To Dump Garbage On Speaker Boehner’s Home?

(originally posted at NewsReal)


The Democratic Party is officially encouraging supporters to go to Speaker John Boehner’s house and dump garbage on his lawn in order to intimidate him into rubber-stamping President Obama’s destructive spending spree. Such protests can easily turn violent, especially with the tense, hyper-partisan atmosphere on Capitol Hill right now.

Is it a coincidence that not long after longtime ACORN operative Patrick Gaspard took over as executive director of the Democratic National Committee the DNC is planning destructive ACORN-like protests?  Not bloody likely. As chief of the DNC’s day-to-day operations, Gaspard runs Organizing for America, the Saul Alinsky-inspired organization created to wage war on American democracy. Gaspard’s fingerprints are all over this. It’s what the former Obama White House political director does for a living.

But how do we actually know this is a DNC-approved event? Because the event advertised on Facebook is organized by longtime DNC employee Jonah Goodman.

Goodman is listed as a member of the DNC network on his Facebook page. According to Facebook rules (under the heading “How do I join a supported Facebook network?”) this means he is an employee of the DNC. Facebook instructs users as follows: “To join a work network, you need to have a work email address from a supported company. This will put you on a network with your coworkers.” If Goodman ceased to be an employee he was required to leave the Facebook network. The other organizer of the event is Nolan Treadway who is the political and logistics director for the leftist organization Nutroots Netroots Nation. (His Facebook profile is here.)

There is no limit to what these despicable Alinskyites will do. They don’t care how many people get hurt in the process of radically transforming America.


Follow me on Twitter and please buy my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.