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The New York Times posted an article titled, Republicans Try to Balance Immigration Action While Avoiding a Shutdown, in which clearly stymied Republicans are depicted as exercising the full extent of their wit cells to bring about a solution, any solution, to the problem of Obama's recent immigration announcement:
WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans returning to Washington on Monday found themselves facing a treacherous 10 days as they try to balance their desire to fight President Obama’s executive action on immigration with the political imperative not to shut down the government.
Congress must pass a broad spending bill before Dec. 11 to prevent a government shutdown. But Mr. Obama’s executive action last month, which could allow up to five million people now in the country illegally to live and work without threat of deportation, has inflamed Republicans and complicated their calculation over what has often been a routine spending fight.
Republicans who can't do political math? Expending over-time brain cells to find
some way to get in the way? Really? Unheard of.
But this is the part at which things get truly sweet:
A complicating factor, however, is that the primary agency responsible for carrying out the president’s executive action is the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is financed entirely through fees collected from immigration applications and therefore cannot be defunded in the appropriations process.
Bahahaa! Do you think Obama huddled for months
secretly poring over reams of legal documents with fellow lawyer Jeh Johnson without considering your silly, plebeian Republican ploys to undermine such a big immigration initiative with so pedestrian a maneuver? Heh. The man may not always play chess, but he sure does know
how to play politics.
Stymied, the sore-loser Republicans are considering suing the lawyer:
House Republicans also are considering taking legal action, either adding an immigration component to a lawsuit Speaker John A. Boehner filed last month against the Obama administration over the Affordable Care Act, or filing a new suit challenging the president’s executive action.
Which of you geniuses out-geniused the other geniuses by cooking up this idea? Not only is it an incredibly stupid precedent of Congress to sue a sitting president, something that has
never before happened in all of U.S. history, but also it is
crumbling spectacularly and slated to go down in history as the pathetic stunt built on a faulty premise that it is.
My #3 problem with Republicans, right behind its well-established historical and modern racist roots and its insistence on protecting a world-view that nourishes the longevity of those roots, is that it tries really, really hard to do things that hurt people, don't help people, or help companies do things that in turn hurt people. Instead of helping the sick, the young, the elderly, the ailing, and the poor, Republicans go to every length possible to do wrong by the people and to do right by its party roots. Republicans don't do a single thing that steps in the direction of anti-racism or populism. The very meaning of conservativism--the retention of traditional social institutions in the context of the culture and civilization--presupposes that those traditional social institutions are good and right and just to begin with, when we can all here at Daily Kos agree, whether we disagree on Obama or Gitmo or drones or trees or Hillary or whatever else it is that gets us to sling pies at one another in one stupid internal imbroglio after another, that the past was not better than the present for women, for persons of color, for immigrants, for kids, for working people, for education, or for nearly anything of substance to the larger project for equality and fairness and all those other things we often forget comprise the very historical arc that we say bends slowly towards justice. I don't care that the world was greener fifty years ago, because 50 years ago our world shunned the Alan Turings for being gay and killed the Luther Kings for being black. I don't want that world; I want the one in which you can be gay or black or undocumented or poor or a woman but you sure as hell get to sit at the table of scientists and engineers and doctors and politicians trying to come up with solutions to the problems our less fair iterations as a society created in the first place.
And THAT, my friends, is why we need to unite around here to absolutely decimate the right in this coming election and every single one that ever follows it.
Update: H/T to DailyKos for posting my diary on its Facebook Page. The positivity in the comments is exquisite--unity against Republicans is always a good thing.