no commander in chief he ....
Charles Krauthammer says:
On President Obama’s speech on Iraq:
The withdrawal of the troops, the drawdown, was something negotiated by the Bush administration, incidentally, in response to Iraqi demands, not as a concession to the American left. He made his decisions on what he thought were the American national interests.
Also, the surge was something that Obama had opposed, and the success of the surge is the only reason why we’re now in a position that we can draw down.
However, what’s really disturbing is that in Obama’s speech he spoke about ending the war four times. He didn’t use the word “success” or anything of the sort, and he did not speak about a vision for a future of America and Iraq together.
The Iraqis only hear the words “end the war” from the president. A president who has not given a single speech on Iraq. A president who’s essentially washed his hands of the war. All he’s ever spoken about is ending it and getting out.
The only influence he‘s exerted is by sending Biden over into the region. That is not exactly exerting his authority. The warring parties — the five who are disputing who’s going to rule Iraq now — are not taking any orders or influence from Washington.
The problem is this: The Saudis are exerting influence on the parties, the Iranians are exerting influence, and the Turks are, the Americans have not. Because the Iraqis understand all this administration wants is out rather than shaping a future. …
Obama had one task. [It was] not succeeding in the surge — that already happened. [It was] not announcing a timetable — that was already established. He had one task — getting elections done and having a stable government established. On that he has not succeeded — it’s not all his fault, the majority of the fault lies with the Iraqis themselves – but … as a result, the entire enterprise, with all the blood and the suffering involved, is now in jeopardy.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Immigration Enforcement - Arrogance, Hypocrisy & Stupidity part II
Obama’s Immigration Nightmare
August 03, 2010 1:28 PM
By Mark Krikorian
Apart from general abhorrence of immigration enforcement, I continue to believe that one of the concrete reasons the administration doesn’t want local police asking about immigration status and then informing ICE about illegal aliens is that those illegals whom the feds tell cops to release will go on to commit other crimes, much to the administration’s embarrassment.
A case in point:
The Virginia man suspected in a drunken-driving crash that killed a Catholic nun in Prince William County this weekend is an illegal immigrant and repeat offender who was awaiting deportation and who federal immigration authorities had released pending further proceedings, police said Monday.
Okay, so here’s a nun-killing, drunk-driving illegal alien whom federal authorities released on his own recognizance pending a deportation hearing. Hard to spin that. Little wonder that “messages left with ICE and the Homeland Security Department were not returned.”
August 03, 2010 1:28 PM
By Mark Krikorian
Apart from general abhorrence of immigration enforcement, I continue to believe that one of the concrete reasons the administration doesn’t want local police asking about immigration status and then informing ICE about illegal aliens is that those illegals whom the feds tell cops to release will go on to commit other crimes, much to the administration’s embarrassment.
A case in point:
The Virginia man suspected in a drunken-driving crash that killed a Catholic nun in Prince William County this weekend is an illegal immigrant and repeat offender who was awaiting deportation and who federal immigration authorities had released pending further proceedings, police said Monday.
Okay, so here’s a nun-killing, drunk-driving illegal alien whom federal authorities released on his own recognizance pending a deportation hearing. Hard to spin that. Little wonder that “messages left with ICE and the Homeland Security Department were not returned.”
Arizona, Immigration Enforcement, and the Constitution
Andrew McCarthy is one smart bad-ass dude !
Preemption & Prosecutorial Discretion: Response to Heather Mac Donald
August 03, 2010 3:42 PM
By Andy McCarthy
I appreciate Heather’s kind words and her thoughtful response to the points I raised in challenging one argument she made in the course of dismantling Judge Susan Bolton’s ruling on the Arizona immigration law. Heather has good cause to be unsure of how today’s federal courts will resolve the preemption question she posits — in a nutshell: Can a state, consistent with the Constitution, enforce a state-law immigration penalty that is consonant with federal statutory law but contravenes a presidential policy of non-enforcement? My confident assertion that a state can do so is based on my understanding of the Constitution’s division of federal and state power, rather than on how the whimsical federal courts may choose to “evolve” that division.
As Heather suggests, I do draw a bright line between executive enforcement policy (which is politics) and congressional statutes (which are law). On this point, the foundational disagreement I have with Heather is about the Constitution. Heather writes: ”In so exercising his discretion, a president has not entered into some extra-constitutional ‘political’ territory, as Andy seems to suggest; he is operating within his constitutional legal powers.” Respectfully, I think this misinterprets the Constitution, which is foremost a political document, not a legal one.
The Constitution enumerates and divides the political powers of the federal government, reserving to the sovereign states and the people all rights and powers not expressly vested. The fact that the president’s powers stem from the Constitution does not, as Heather infers, mean his exercise of them is a “legal” act; nor does that exercise’s political nature make it “extra-constitutional.”
When, for example, a president commits U.S. armed forces, as the Constitution empowers him to do, in contravention of a statute (e.g., the War Powers Resolution), the federal courts refrain from deciding the dispute because it is a “political question.” Yes, I suppose it can be said that the president is legally the commander-in-chief, and that Congress has followed its legal procedure for passing a law, but the controversy does not therefore become a legal one fit for judicial resolution. It remains a political one to be decided at the ballot box. And, to take another example, one of the main checks given Congress on abuses of executive power is impeachment, which is a political remedy, not a legal one — even though there is a legal process for carrying it out.
The fact that law has no existence absent the discretionary decisions that attend its enforcement does not make those decisions any less political or any more legal. Law defines what we can do; within those parameters, what we choose to do is a political call involving resources and policy priorities. Heather asserts that a law-enforcement decision to refrain from enforcing a law is “as much a part of the law” as the enactment of the law by the legislative process. I don’t agree. After all, try running that in reverse: If there is no statute, law enforcement has no decision to make — if it tries to enforce that which Congress has not enacted, that is a violation of law. Moreover, if the public is unhappy that the cops are pouring out the Colt 45s instead of arresting the loiterers, that can be a major political issue even though there is no legal recourse over the failure to enforce the law. Mayor Rudy Giuliani won reelection going away largely because New Yorkers liked his stepped-up enforcement policy on petty offenses, which reduced overall crime and improved quality of life.
Perhaps because I see the Arizona situation more as a political one than a legal one, I come at it from a different angle. The nation is built on a political power-sharing arrangement in which the states maintained their sovereignty while surrendering certain powers to the national government. Two important things flow from this.
First, the states are sovereign. That is not just a slogan, it is a concept that has real meaning. Inherent in sovereignty is the natural right of self-defense. If states are no longer at liberty to protect their territories and defend their citizens, they are no longer sovereign, and the social compact on which the nation is based is broken.
Second, the presumption in our system is against the forfeiture of rights and powers. The Constitution expressly provides that unless a power has been delegated to the federal government, it is retained by the states. Our law holds that individuals are not deemed to forfeit their fundamental rights unless there has been a waiver that is clear, knowing, and voluntary. I don’t see why sovereign states would rate any less deference. This is critical because (a) the Constitution does not delegate the power of immigration enforcement to the national government (the power to set terms for naturalization, which is federal, is not a power over immigration enforcement), (b) the power to regulate immigration was understood to be retained by the states, as a core part of their police power, for the first century-plus of our nation’s history, and (c) the states have continued to exercise this power and have never forfeited it. In point of fact, until the turn of the 19th century, the pertinent question was whether the national government had any power over immigration enforcement (Jefferson, for example, was quite certain it did not). It was federal power that was dubious; state power was unquestioned. See, e.g., Joseph Baldacchino, “Regulation of Immigration Historically a State Function” (National Humanities Institute, July 19, 2010).
To me, this is the necessary context for any consideration of a federal attempt to prohibit the exercise of state police power within a state’s sovereign territory. Such a prohibition should not happen unless there is a clear constitutional mandate — i.e., an unambiguous indication that the states delegated the power in question to the federal government or that the state’s exercise of the power interferes with some federal right clearly protected by the Constitution. This is what the Supremacy Clause stands for.
Like most judicial inventions, the preemption doctrine, which is the root of my narrow disagreement with Heather, started out harmless enough: holding that where there is a clear delegation of power to the federal government the states either may not act at all (as in the power to coin money or establish a uniform rule of naturalization), or may not act in a manner contradictory to federal law. But here is the problem: judge-made federal law, particularly in constitutional jurisprudence, often becomes nothing more than a gussied up power-grab: either the judiciary usurps the powers of the other federal branches, or the judiciary is the means by which the federal government usurps the power of the states — with the federal courts becoming more powerful because they get the last word. (Heather’s insightful discussion of De Canas v. Bica testifies to the unpredictable willfulness and shifting politics of judicial decision-making.)
I don’t see how it could be credibly disputed that federal immigration enforcement is the result of a judicially led power-grab. Have a look, for example, at this paper on federal immigration regulation from the (sympathetic) University of Minnesota’s “Human Rights Library.” In the course of trying to overwhelm the reader with the purported plethora of sources of federal power in this area, the authors unintentionally undermine their case. They are forced to concede that ”in the early immigration cases the Supreme Court faced the problem of identifying the source of the federal government’s exclusive and plenary power over immigration.” Well, yeah, it’s not easy to identify something that isn’t there.
So what happened? What usually happens: the Supreme Court began rationalizing — umm, maybe we can find it in the naturalization power; or the power to regulate foreign commerce; or the power to conduct foreign affairs; or the war power; or the power to maintain armies and navies; or the power to punish piracy and crimes on the high seas; or to impose import duties; or to codify offenses against the law of nations; or to appoint foreign diplomats; or the Migration and Imporation Caluse (art. I, sec. 9, cl. 1). If none of that sounds too compelling, there’s always the “necessary and proper clause” — a convenient catch-all: When a court can’t directly justify federal action by some enumeration of authority, it contends the action is derivatively justified as necessary to the exercise of some purportedly related enumerated power (often without a very convincing explanation of why power A not only implies power B but that the states understood this and thus clearly delegated power B).
Over time (in this case, over more than a century), this dizzying exercise devolves into judicial ipse dixit. So it was, the UMinn authors conclude, that in 1899 the Supreme Court, in the so-called Chinese Exclusion Case (Chae Chan Ping v. U.S.), “eventually found the source of the federal power to regulate immigration in a combination of international and constitutional legal principles.” The concept of national sovereignty suddenly made the federal government preeminent — and never you mind that (a) in our system, the states are also sovereign, (b) the states had been regulating immigration since the Constitution’s adoption, and (c) most things that are clear, “absolute and unqualified” don’t take 110 years to discover.
Which is to say, this was a fabrication — and one, it’s worth pointing out, that Arizona did not challenge. In the case before Judge Bolton, the state did not contest federal supremacy over immigration enforcement within Arizona’s borders. That calls into question whether the issue would properly be before the Supreme Court if the state fails to raise it as the litigation goes forward. (In my mind, it’s strictly a legal question that doesn’t require development of a factual record, so the state should be permitted to raise it in the Ninth Circuit.) Heather is quite right that where the courts will come out on preemption is an unknown. After all, those same courts, having started with a situation in which state enforcement was a given and federal enforcement was questionable, have willed us to our current straits, where we are to believe that the opposite is true.
But that’s not the way it should be. In 1837, the Supreme Court (in New York v. Miln) upheld a state law that allowed New York City to expel arriving aliens it “deemed” likely to become a public burden. As Justice Philip Barbour explained, the state had acted
to prevent her citizens from being oppressed by the support of multitudes of poor persons who come from foreign countries without possessing the means of supporting themselves. There can be no mode in which the power to regulate internal police could be more appropriately exercised. New York, from her particular situation, is perhaps more than any other city in the Union exposed to the evil of thousands of foreign emigrants arriving there, and the consequent danger of her citizens being subjected to a heavy charge in the maintenance of those who are poor. It is the duty of the state to protect its citizens from this evil; they have endeavored to do so by passing, amongst other things, the section of the law in question. We should upon principle, say that it had a right to do so. [Emphasis added.]
There is no good reason why what was true in 1837 should not be true today. Even if we accept, for argument’s sake, that the courts have discovered and justified federal powers to enact and enforce immigration laws, there is no reason that should vitiate concurrent, sovereign state authority — authority that existed before the putative federal authority, that the states have never delegated (and therefore retain), and that, in the Arizona instance, is actually consistent with pertinent federal law.
A couple of final points. Heather assumes there is a “federal interest in speaking with a single, national voice when it comes to immigration matters.” As a matter of law, if there is such an interest, I’d argue that this is a recent development in our jurisprudence. As a matter of fact, I’d contend that there may be a federal interest (i.e., the interest of the federal government, which wants to control the area) but there is no national interest. The country is divided on immigration, as we are divided on many things, and that’s fine as long as every state is not burdened by the choice of individual states not to enforce the law.
While Heather is troubled by the prospect of different states having different prosecutorial regimes for immigration, that is the way it is on many issues (drugs, guns, etc.) and it is the way it has always been on immigration. As related in the Baldacchino paper I cite above, in the so-called Passenger Cases (1849), the Court discussed the distinction between the naturalization power, which is federal, and immigration enforcement, which was a state matter. Chief Justice Roger Taney (in a dissenting opinion) argued that it was obvious that the naturalization power had been delegated to the feds because otherwise, under the privileges and immunities clause, a single state could determine for every state “what foreigner should become one of its citizens, and be entitled to hold lands, and to vote at its elections.” The court clearly assumed that different states would continue to enforce different enforcement standards.
Finally, the Supreme Court has recently been deferential to the power of states to enact and enforce law in the face of a claim that this power was trumped by the president’s capacious authority to conduct foreign affairs.
In Medellin v. Texas (2008), President Bush attempted to force Texas to vacate a Mexican national’s capital murder conviction because the state had failed to comply with the Vienna Convention obligation to allow the defendant to contact his consulate — even though the defendant had failed to make a timely Vienna Convention claim under state law. The Supreme Court held that the state’s power to enforce its valid laws was not overcome by the president’s foreign-affairs authority or his power to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Congress had not enacted any statute that contravened state law, and the justices were not persuaded by claims that the state law frustrated the president’s ability to enforce a uniform national standard in an arena — foreign policy — where presidential power is immense.
There is a colorable argument that our jurisprudence has created a federal immigration-enforcement role that the Constitution did not make entirely clear. There should not be a credible argument that the states are precluded from enacting immigration laws that are consistent with congressional statutes.
Preemption & Prosecutorial Discretion: Response to Heather Mac Donald
August 03, 2010 3:42 PM
By Andy McCarthy
I appreciate Heather’s kind words and her thoughtful response to the points I raised in challenging one argument she made in the course of dismantling Judge Susan Bolton’s ruling on the Arizona immigration law. Heather has good cause to be unsure of how today’s federal courts will resolve the preemption question she posits — in a nutshell: Can a state, consistent with the Constitution, enforce a state-law immigration penalty that is consonant with federal statutory law but contravenes a presidential policy of non-enforcement? My confident assertion that a state can do so is based on my understanding of the Constitution’s division of federal and state power, rather than on how the whimsical federal courts may choose to “evolve” that division.
As Heather suggests, I do draw a bright line between executive enforcement policy (which is politics) and congressional statutes (which are law). On this point, the foundational disagreement I have with Heather is about the Constitution. Heather writes: ”In so exercising his discretion, a president has not entered into some extra-constitutional ‘political’ territory, as Andy seems to suggest; he is operating within his constitutional legal powers.” Respectfully, I think this misinterprets the Constitution, which is foremost a political document, not a legal one.
The Constitution enumerates and divides the political powers of the federal government, reserving to the sovereign states and the people all rights and powers not expressly vested. The fact that the president’s powers stem from the Constitution does not, as Heather infers, mean his exercise of them is a “legal” act; nor does that exercise’s political nature make it “extra-constitutional.”
When, for example, a president commits U.S. armed forces, as the Constitution empowers him to do, in contravention of a statute (e.g., the War Powers Resolution), the federal courts refrain from deciding the dispute because it is a “political question.” Yes, I suppose it can be said that the president is legally the commander-in-chief, and that Congress has followed its legal procedure for passing a law, but the controversy does not therefore become a legal one fit for judicial resolution. It remains a political one to be decided at the ballot box. And, to take another example, one of the main checks given Congress on abuses of executive power is impeachment, which is a political remedy, not a legal one — even though there is a legal process for carrying it out.
The fact that law has no existence absent the discretionary decisions that attend its enforcement does not make those decisions any less political or any more legal. Law defines what we can do; within those parameters, what we choose to do is a political call involving resources and policy priorities. Heather asserts that a law-enforcement decision to refrain from enforcing a law is “as much a part of the law” as the enactment of the law by the legislative process. I don’t agree. After all, try running that in reverse: If there is no statute, law enforcement has no decision to make — if it tries to enforce that which Congress has not enacted, that is a violation of law. Moreover, if the public is unhappy that the cops are pouring out the Colt 45s instead of arresting the loiterers, that can be a major political issue even though there is no legal recourse over the failure to enforce the law. Mayor Rudy Giuliani won reelection going away largely because New Yorkers liked his stepped-up enforcement policy on petty offenses, which reduced overall crime and improved quality of life.
Perhaps because I see the Arizona situation more as a political one than a legal one, I come at it from a different angle. The nation is built on a political power-sharing arrangement in which the states maintained their sovereignty while surrendering certain powers to the national government. Two important things flow from this.
First, the states are sovereign. That is not just a slogan, it is a concept that has real meaning. Inherent in sovereignty is the natural right of self-defense. If states are no longer at liberty to protect their territories and defend their citizens, they are no longer sovereign, and the social compact on which the nation is based is broken.
Second, the presumption in our system is against the forfeiture of rights and powers. The Constitution expressly provides that unless a power has been delegated to the federal government, it is retained by the states. Our law holds that individuals are not deemed to forfeit their fundamental rights unless there has been a waiver that is clear, knowing, and voluntary. I don’t see why sovereign states would rate any less deference. This is critical because (a) the Constitution does not delegate the power of immigration enforcement to the national government (the power to set terms for naturalization, which is federal, is not a power over immigration enforcement), (b) the power to regulate immigration was understood to be retained by the states, as a core part of their police power, for the first century-plus of our nation’s history, and (c) the states have continued to exercise this power and have never forfeited it. In point of fact, until the turn of the 19th century, the pertinent question was whether the national government had any power over immigration enforcement (Jefferson, for example, was quite certain it did not). It was federal power that was dubious; state power was unquestioned. See, e.g., Joseph Baldacchino, “Regulation of Immigration Historically a State Function” (National Humanities Institute, July 19, 2010).
To me, this is the necessary context for any consideration of a federal attempt to prohibit the exercise of state police power within a state’s sovereign territory. Such a prohibition should not happen unless there is a clear constitutional mandate — i.e., an unambiguous indication that the states delegated the power in question to the federal government or that the state’s exercise of the power interferes with some federal right clearly protected by the Constitution. This is what the Supremacy Clause stands for.
Like most judicial inventions, the preemption doctrine, which is the root of my narrow disagreement with Heather, started out harmless enough: holding that where there is a clear delegation of power to the federal government the states either may not act at all (as in the power to coin money or establish a uniform rule of naturalization), or may not act in a manner contradictory to federal law. But here is the problem: judge-made federal law, particularly in constitutional jurisprudence, often becomes nothing more than a gussied up power-grab: either the judiciary usurps the powers of the other federal branches, or the judiciary is the means by which the federal government usurps the power of the states — with the federal courts becoming more powerful because they get the last word. (Heather’s insightful discussion of De Canas v. Bica testifies to the unpredictable willfulness and shifting politics of judicial decision-making.)
I don’t see how it could be credibly disputed that federal immigration enforcement is the result of a judicially led power-grab. Have a look, for example, at this paper on federal immigration regulation from the (sympathetic) University of Minnesota’s “Human Rights Library.” In the course of trying to overwhelm the reader with the purported plethora of sources of federal power in this area, the authors unintentionally undermine their case. They are forced to concede that ”in the early immigration cases the Supreme Court faced the problem of identifying the source of the federal government’s exclusive and plenary power over immigration.” Well, yeah, it’s not easy to identify something that isn’t there.
So what happened? What usually happens: the Supreme Court began rationalizing — umm, maybe we can find it in the naturalization power; or the power to regulate foreign commerce; or the power to conduct foreign affairs; or the war power; or the power to maintain armies and navies; or the power to punish piracy and crimes on the high seas; or to impose import duties; or to codify offenses against the law of nations; or to appoint foreign diplomats; or the Migration and Imporation Caluse (art. I, sec. 9, cl. 1). If none of that sounds too compelling, there’s always the “necessary and proper clause” — a convenient catch-all: When a court can’t directly justify federal action by some enumeration of authority, it contends the action is derivatively justified as necessary to the exercise of some purportedly related enumerated power (often without a very convincing explanation of why power A not only implies power B but that the states understood this and thus clearly delegated power B).
Over time (in this case, over more than a century), this dizzying exercise devolves into judicial ipse dixit. So it was, the UMinn authors conclude, that in 1899 the Supreme Court, in the so-called Chinese Exclusion Case (Chae Chan Ping v. U.S.), “eventually found the source of the federal power to regulate immigration in a combination of international and constitutional legal principles.” The concept of national sovereignty suddenly made the federal government preeminent — and never you mind that (a) in our system, the states are also sovereign, (b) the states had been regulating immigration since the Constitution’s adoption, and (c) most things that are clear, “absolute and unqualified” don’t take 110 years to discover.
Which is to say, this was a fabrication — and one, it’s worth pointing out, that Arizona did not challenge. In the case before Judge Bolton, the state did not contest federal supremacy over immigration enforcement within Arizona’s borders. That calls into question whether the issue would properly be before the Supreme Court if the state fails to raise it as the litigation goes forward. (In my mind, it’s strictly a legal question that doesn’t require development of a factual record, so the state should be permitted to raise it in the Ninth Circuit.) Heather is quite right that where the courts will come out on preemption is an unknown. After all, those same courts, having started with a situation in which state enforcement was a given and federal enforcement was questionable, have willed us to our current straits, where we are to believe that the opposite is true.
But that’s not the way it should be. In 1837, the Supreme Court (in New York v. Miln) upheld a state law that allowed New York City to expel arriving aliens it “deemed” likely to become a public burden. As Justice Philip Barbour explained, the state had acted
to prevent her citizens from being oppressed by the support of multitudes of poor persons who come from foreign countries without possessing the means of supporting themselves. There can be no mode in which the power to regulate internal police could be more appropriately exercised. New York, from her particular situation, is perhaps more than any other city in the Union exposed to the evil of thousands of foreign emigrants arriving there, and the consequent danger of her citizens being subjected to a heavy charge in the maintenance of those who are poor. It is the duty of the state to protect its citizens from this evil; they have endeavored to do so by passing, amongst other things, the section of the law in question. We should upon principle, say that it had a right to do so. [Emphasis added.]
There is no good reason why what was true in 1837 should not be true today. Even if we accept, for argument’s sake, that the courts have discovered and justified federal powers to enact and enforce immigration laws, there is no reason that should vitiate concurrent, sovereign state authority — authority that existed before the putative federal authority, that the states have never delegated (and therefore retain), and that, in the Arizona instance, is actually consistent with pertinent federal law.
A couple of final points. Heather assumes there is a “federal interest in speaking with a single, national voice when it comes to immigration matters.” As a matter of law, if there is such an interest, I’d argue that this is a recent development in our jurisprudence. As a matter of fact, I’d contend that there may be a federal interest (i.e., the interest of the federal government, which wants to control the area) but there is no national interest. The country is divided on immigration, as we are divided on many things, and that’s fine as long as every state is not burdened by the choice of individual states not to enforce the law.
While Heather is troubled by the prospect of different states having different prosecutorial regimes for immigration, that is the way it is on many issues (drugs, guns, etc.) and it is the way it has always been on immigration. As related in the Baldacchino paper I cite above, in the so-called Passenger Cases (1849), the Court discussed the distinction between the naturalization power, which is federal, and immigration enforcement, which was a state matter. Chief Justice Roger Taney (in a dissenting opinion) argued that it was obvious that the naturalization power had been delegated to the feds because otherwise, under the privileges and immunities clause, a single state could determine for every state “what foreigner should become one of its citizens, and be entitled to hold lands, and to vote at its elections.” The court clearly assumed that different states would continue to enforce different enforcement standards.
Finally, the Supreme Court has recently been deferential to the power of states to enact and enforce law in the face of a claim that this power was trumped by the president’s capacious authority to conduct foreign affairs.
In Medellin v. Texas (2008), President Bush attempted to force Texas to vacate a Mexican national’s capital murder conviction because the state had failed to comply with the Vienna Convention obligation to allow the defendant to contact his consulate — even though the defendant had failed to make a timely Vienna Convention claim under state law. The Supreme Court held that the state’s power to enforce its valid laws was not overcome by the president’s foreign-affairs authority or his power to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Congress had not enacted any statute that contravened state law, and the justices were not persuaded by claims that the state law frustrated the president’s ability to enforce a uniform national standard in an arena — foreign policy — where presidential power is immense.
There is a colorable argument that our jurisprudence has created a federal immigration-enforcement role that the Constitution did not make entirely clear. There should not be a credible argument that the states are precluded from enacting immigration laws that are consistent with congressional statutes.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Obama The Tax Cutter [NOT]
Subject: New Taxes Coming Jan 1 2011 thanks to Obama
New Taxes Coming Jan 1 2011
thanks to Obama In just six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011:
First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families. These will all expire on January 1, 2011: Personal income tax rates will rise. The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed). The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent. All the rates in between will also rise. Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates.
The full list of marginal rate hikes is below:
- The 10% bracket rises to an expanded 15%
- The 25% bracket rises to 28%
- The 28% bracket rises to 31%
- The 33% bracket rises to 36%
- The 35% bracket rises to 39.6%
Higher taxes on marriage and family. The “marriage penalty” (narrower tax brackets for married couples) will return from the first dollar of income. The child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child. The standard deduction will no longer be doubled for married couples relative to the single level. The dependent care and adoption tax credits will be cut.
The return of the Death Tax. This year, there is no death tax. For those dying on or after January 1 2011, there is a 55 percent top death tax rate on estates over $1 million. A person leaving behind two homes and a retirement account could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones. Higher tax rates on savers and investors. The capital gains tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 20 percent in 2011. The dividends tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 39.6 percent in 2011. These rates will rise another 3.8 percent in 2013.
Second Wave: Obamacare There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. Several will first go into effect on January 1, 2011. They include: The “Medicine Cabinet Tax” Thanks to Obamacare, Americans will no longer be able to use health savings account (HSA), flexible spending account (FSA), or health reimbursement (HRA) pre-tax dollars to purchase non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin).
The “Special Needs Kids Tax” This provision of Obamacare imposes a cap on flexible spending accounts (FSAs) of $2500 (Currently, there is no federal government limit). There is one group of FSA owners for whom this new cap will be particularly cruel and onerous: parents of special needs children. There are thousands of families with special needs children in the United States, and many of them use FSAs to pay for special needs education. Tuition rates at one leading school that teaches special needs children in Washington, D.C. (National Child Research Center) can easily exceed $14,000 per year. Under tax rules, FSA dollars can be used to pay for this type of special needs education.
The HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike. This provision of Obamacare increases the additional tax on non-medical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10 to 20 percent, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10 percent.
Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes
When Americans prepare to file their tax returns in January of 2011, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise—the AMT won’t be held harmless, and many tax relief provisions will have expired. The major items include: The AMT will ensnare over 28 million families, up from 4 million last year. According to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, Congress’ failure to index the AMT will lead to an explosion of AMT taxpaying families—rising from 4 million last year to 28.5 million. These families will have to calculate their tax burdens twice, and pay taxes at the higher level. The AMT was created in 1969 to ensnare a handful of taxpayers.
Small business expensing will be slashed and 50% expensing will disappear. Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly-deduct, or “depreciate”) equipment purchases up to $250,000. This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. In January of 2011, all of it will have to be “depreciated.”
Taxes will be raised on all types of businesses. There are literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place. The biggest is the loss of the “research and experimentation tax credit,” but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs.
Tax Benefits for Education and Teaching Reduced. The deduction for tuition and fees will not be available. Tax credits for education will be limited. Teachers will no longer be able to deduct classroom expenses. Coverdell Education Savings Accounts will be cut. Employer-provided educational assistance is curtailed. The student loan interest deduction will be disallowed for hundreds of thousands of families.
Charitable Contributions from IRAs no longer allowed. Under current law, a retired person with an IRA can contribute up to $100,000 per year directly to a charity from their IRA. This contribution also counts toward an annual “required minimum distribution.” This ability will no longer be there.
Read more: http://www.atr.org/sixmonths.html?content=5171#ixzz0saAHMP4G
New Taxes Coming Jan 1 2011
thanks to Obama In just six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011:
First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families. These will all expire on January 1, 2011: Personal income tax rates will rise. The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed). The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent. All the rates in between will also rise. Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates.
The full list of marginal rate hikes is below:
- The 10% bracket rises to an expanded 15%
- The 25% bracket rises to 28%
- The 28% bracket rises to 31%
- The 33% bracket rises to 36%
- The 35% bracket rises to 39.6%
Higher taxes on marriage and family. The “marriage penalty” (narrower tax brackets for married couples) will return from the first dollar of income. The child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child. The standard deduction will no longer be doubled for married couples relative to the single level. The dependent care and adoption tax credits will be cut.
The return of the Death Tax. This year, there is no death tax. For those dying on or after January 1 2011, there is a 55 percent top death tax rate on estates over $1 million. A person leaving behind two homes and a retirement account could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones. Higher tax rates on savers and investors. The capital gains tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 20 percent in 2011. The dividends tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 39.6 percent in 2011. These rates will rise another 3.8 percent in 2013.
Second Wave: Obamacare There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. Several will first go into effect on January 1, 2011. They include: The “Medicine Cabinet Tax” Thanks to Obamacare, Americans will no longer be able to use health savings account (HSA), flexible spending account (FSA), or health reimbursement (HRA) pre-tax dollars to purchase non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin).
The “Special Needs Kids Tax” This provision of Obamacare imposes a cap on flexible spending accounts (FSAs) of $2500 (Currently, there is no federal government limit). There is one group of FSA owners for whom this new cap will be particularly cruel and onerous: parents of special needs children. There are thousands of families with special needs children in the United States, and many of them use FSAs to pay for special needs education. Tuition rates at one leading school that teaches special needs children in Washington, D.C. (National Child Research Center) can easily exceed $14,000 per year. Under tax rules, FSA dollars can be used to pay for this type of special needs education.
The HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike. This provision of Obamacare increases the additional tax on non-medical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10 to 20 percent, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10 percent.
Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes
When Americans prepare to file their tax returns in January of 2011, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise—the AMT won’t be held harmless, and many tax relief provisions will have expired. The major items include: The AMT will ensnare over 28 million families, up from 4 million last year. According to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, Congress’ failure to index the AMT will lead to an explosion of AMT taxpaying families—rising from 4 million last year to 28.5 million. These families will have to calculate their tax burdens twice, and pay taxes at the higher level. The AMT was created in 1969 to ensnare a handful of taxpayers.
Small business expensing will be slashed and 50% expensing will disappear. Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly-deduct, or “depreciate”) equipment purchases up to $250,000. This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. In January of 2011, all of it will have to be “depreciated.”
Taxes will be raised on all types of businesses. There are literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place. The biggest is the loss of the “research and experimentation tax credit,” but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs.
Tax Benefits for Education and Teaching Reduced. The deduction for tuition and fees will not be available. Tax credits for education will be limited. Teachers will no longer be able to deduct classroom expenses. Coverdell Education Savings Accounts will be cut. Employer-provided educational assistance is curtailed. The student loan interest deduction will be disallowed for hundreds of thousands of families.
Charitable Contributions from IRAs no longer allowed. Under current law, a retired person with an IRA can contribute up to $100,000 per year directly to a charity from their IRA. This contribution also counts toward an annual “required minimum distribution.” This ability will no longer be there.
Read more: http://www.atr.org/sixmonths.html?content=5171#ixzz0saAHMP4G
John Kerry evades (er, avoids) taxes on Yacht
It's perfectly legal of course, for Sen. Kerry to save hundreds of thousands of $$ by docking his yacht in Rhode Island to avoid steep taxes in his home state of Taxachussets.
But its also a perfect example of the blatant HYPOCRISY of the Do As I Say, Not As I Do, Liberal Tax and Spend Left.
Of which Kerry is a poster boy.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/sen_kerry_docks_yacht_in_ri_saving_S3W0Kg39mJJwMnPuLUgyqL
Shame on you Sen. Kerry !
But its also a perfect example of the blatant HYPOCRISY of the Do As I Say, Not As I Do, Liberal Tax and Spend Left.
Of which Kerry is a poster boy.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/sen_kerry_docks_yacht_in_ri_saving_S3W0Kg39mJJwMnPuLUgyqL
Shame on you Sen. Kerry !
The Ethics of Charlie Rangel
No need to link any articles. What more is there to say about this Corrupto-Crat ?
How about: Prosecute Him !?!
How about: Prosecute Him !?!
The JournoList Follies
Lefty "Journalists" run amok for Obama:
JournoList e-mails reveal how the liberal media shaped the 2008 election
John Podhoretz: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/steering_the_press_sj9bQWFBjX7YnDzxnP1z2J
"Proof that its a game for the Left"
The latest revelation from the database of private e-mails circulated among the left-liberals of JournoList should end once and for all the preposterous fantasy that right-wing forces have great sway over the way the mainstream media do business. They show how these writers, thinkers and activists managed to help prevent the potential 2008 media inferno over Barack Obama's history with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Jonah Goldberg: Checking in with the Mothership
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/checking_in_with_the_mother_ship_8q3vlFiCLxwXGMl4eQ7rJK
The JournoList is leaking like an overripe diaper.
They spoke freely about their political and personal biases -- including their hatred of Fox and Rush Limbaugh, and their utter loyalty to the progressive cause and Democratic success.
That off-the-record intellectual bacchanalia has started to haunt the participants like an inexplicable rash after a wild party during fleet week. The diaper is coming off entirely.
Perhaps stretching the diaper metaphor too far, what's inside JournoList may stink, but it's no surprise that it does.
JournoList e-mails obtained by The Daily Caller reveal what anybody with two neurons to rub together already knew: Professional liberals don't like Republicans and do like Democrats. They can be awfully smug and condescending in their sense of intellectual and moral superiority.
Jonathan Strong: The Fix Was In
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_fix_was_in_gImIPWyKJdEWhZasJmFIUO
JournoList e-mails reveal how the liberal media shaped the 2008 election
John Podhoretz: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/steering_the_press_sj9bQWFBjX7YnDzxnP1z2J
"Proof that its a game for the Left"
The latest revelation from the database of private e-mails circulated among the left-liberals of JournoList should end once and for all the preposterous fantasy that right-wing forces have great sway over the way the mainstream media do business. They show how these writers, thinkers and activists managed to help prevent the potential 2008 media inferno over Barack Obama's history with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Jonah Goldberg: Checking in with the Mothership
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/checking_in_with_the_mother_ship_8q3vlFiCLxwXGMl4eQ7rJK
The JournoList is leaking like an overripe diaper.
They spoke freely about their political and personal biases -- including their hatred of Fox and Rush Limbaugh, and their utter loyalty to the progressive cause and Democratic success.
That off-the-record intellectual bacchanalia has started to haunt the participants like an inexplicable rash after a wild party during fleet week. The diaper is coming off entirely.
Perhaps stretching the diaper metaphor too far, what's inside JournoList may stink, but it's no surprise that it does.
JournoList e-mails obtained by The Daily Caller reveal what anybody with two neurons to rub together already knew: Professional liberals don't like Republicans and do like Democrats. They can be awfully smug and condescending in their sense of intellectual and moral superiority.
Jonathan Strong: The Fix Was In
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_fix_was_in_gImIPWyKJdEWhZasJmFIUO
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