What Else Is New?

Regardless of whatever good points that may or may not be in the immigration bill passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate, my basic problem is that I don’t believe anything that this administration says or promises.  Immigration reform has been passed before, and there are plenty of existing laws on the books to reduce illegal immigration and to provide temporary workers.

I just don’t trust people who ignore the laws when they disagree with them..

It was good to find out that House Republicans may agree with me.

Morning Examiner: Immigration reform is dead and Obamacare implementation killed it

By CONN CARROLL | JULY 8, 2013 Washington Examiner (Excerpt)

“Let me tell you something else, David,” NBC News’s Chuck Todd told David Gregory on Meet the Press Sunday, “the White House had been so confident that they were going to sign immigration reform this year. But for the first time I am hearing that there is some doubt seeping in..... What changed this week is that Republicans lost all trust in President Obama’s ability to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.

Delayed mandates and invitation to fraud
On Tuesday of last week, news broke that the Treasury Department was about to announce it’s intention to delay implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate for a year. Nothing in the law gives the Obama administration authority to delay the mandate, but he did it anyway.

As bad as that blow to the rule of law was, the Department of Health and Human Services followed it up with 600 pages of regulations Friday, one of which also delayed a requirement that states verify the eligibility information submitted by applicants. Not only is this also not authorized in the statute, but, as National Review’s Yuval Levin notes, it is also an open invitation for those wanting health care subsidies to defraud taxpayers.

“They will simply ignore the parts they don’t like.”
“They have shown no respect for traditional Constitutional separation of powers,” Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., told National Review‘s John Fund about the impact of the Obamacare delays on the immigration debate, “and that makes it difficult to pass laws where the fear is that they will simply ignore the parts they don’t like.”

Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, who is on the House Judiciary Committee and had been a member of a bipartisan group working on immigration reform, echoed Roe’s concerns on Meet the Press. “In fact, if you look at this Obamacare debacle that they have right now, this administration is actually deciding when and where to actually enforce the law. And that’s what some of us in the House are concerned about. If you give to this administration the authority to decide when they’re going to enforce the law, how they’re going to enforce the law … what’s going to happen is that we’re going to give legalization to 11 million people and Janet Napolitano is going to come to Congress and tell us that the border is already secure and nothing else needs to happen.”

Moving on
House Republicans already have a full plate on their agenda this summer and fall. Not only will there be full investigations into the legal basis for all of the Obamacare delays, but Congress must also pass new spending authorization to keep the government running by the end of September, and they have to raise the debt limit some time before January. Considering the breach of trust Obamacare implementation has already created, just keeping the government running will keep Congress busy enough.