Just another day in ObamaWorld: ObamaCare; Radical Appointments and Immigration

Violation of Senate Rules this Afternoon [Veronique de Rugy]

Today Sen. Tom Coburn forced the reading of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s entire 767-page amendment to provide single-payer health care. This process would have taken some twelve hours at least. The Senate rule is that once the clerk starts reading the bill, no senator can stop the reading of that bill unless every senator agrees.

Somehow, though, the chair allowed Bernie Sanders to interrupt the reading and withdraw his amendment, which, under the rules, he should not have been allowed to do without unanimous consent. The reason the parliamentarian allowed the interruption was that he was relying on a similar incident in 1982 when the chair wrongly allowed an amendment to be withdrawn. Yet, as we know, two wrongs have never made a right.

This is a huge boon to Democrats who did not relish spending an entire day (or possibly two) reading the Sanders amendment to the American people.

The real story here, this miscarriage of justice in the Senate may just end up helping the Democrats squeeze passage of the health-care-reform bill before Christmas.
Read more here and here.


You Can't Make It Up — Or Si, Se Puede! [Andy McCarthy]

The White House has announced that Mari Del Carmen Aponte will be nominated by the president to become the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador. Aponte is a former director of the radical Mexican organization La Raza and of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education fund. (More from Judicial Watch, here.)

This is the second time she's been proposed for an ambassadorship. The first didn't go so well. President Clinton nominated her to be ambassador to the Dominican Republic but, as detailed on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government, it turned out that she had "co-habited" with an agent of the Cuban intelligence service. In fact, and a confidential U.S. intelligence memo alleged that she had been recruited to become a Cuban spy in her own right. The revelations caused her nomination to be quietly withdrawn . . . whereupon she reportedly refused to answer questions from the FBI (saying that since she was no longer seeking an executive branch slot, she no longer needed to cooperate in a background security check). Now, despite that debacle, and heedless of the controversies stoked by Van Jones, Kevin Jennings, et al., Obama wants to press ahead with Aponte.

Maybe you don't buy my theory that the president is an Alinskyite radical, but I still think annointing him a neocon based on his Oslo performance may be a tad premature.


The Persecution of Sheriff Joe Arpaio [Hans A. von Spakovsky]

The Washington Times has a good editorial today about the “ideological vendetta” being waged by the Holder Justice Department against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. The vendetta was prompted by Arpaio’s participation in the 287(g) program, which allows local police to help enforce our immigration laws by detaining illegal aliens. This is a program the Left wants ended, and since they have not been able to persuade Congress to get rid of the authorizing legislation, they are prodding the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to do it for them. I wrote about this investigation for National Review this past summer, pointing out the unethical and unprofessional behavior by the lead lawyer in the Civil Rights Division who is (mis)conducting this abusive investigation. It should be no surprise to anyone that there is no sign that the Inspector General or the Office of Professional Responsibility is looking into these ethical violations, and that the lawyer has not been removed from the case.

Now the Washington Times points out that Arpaio is being sued by the Civil Rights Division’s allies in the ACLU (the number-two lawyer at the division is a former ACLU lawyer) for setting up an anonymous telephone tip line for immigration violations, purportedly because it will generate “false, inaccurate and racially motivated reports.” Interestingly, the division has set up its own anonymous tip line to solicit complaints from illegal immigrants about Arpaio. It’s a good thing that this tip line will not generate any “false, inaccurate and racially motivated” calls.This is a real sign of the desperation by the Civil Rights Division. They have been harassing Arpaio for the past year and even generated a DHS audit of him (despite having had no complaints that he was not complying with the rules of the 287(g) program), trying to scrape up enough evidence to justify a civil-rights lawsuit against him. That effort appears to have come up short — necessitating an anonymous tip line nine months after the witch-hunt was initiated. As the Washington Times correctly points out, it seems pretty clear that this is intended to “find a crime to pin” on Arpaio.