I already did hours ago.
I see it as my Christian duty to do whatever I can, even if just an email, in the stewardship of this country while I’m alive.
By the grace of God I was born in the USofA.
He put each of us here on purpose at this time for a reason.
Thank you. This is what I said:
Dear Mr President: R E A D the Bill — don’t SIGN it, pls.
He’ll just be overridden. They have the votes easily.
(Attributed to Winston Churchill.)
A combination of malevolent Democrats and pusillanimous Republicans have produced a predicament which I foresaw LINK
Now the president is confronted with a Hobson's choice, either abandon any hope of properly policing the border or shut down the government.
As I understand it, the president will choose to sign this bill. I think he will be making a very grave mistake. Fox news is playing it about half right, the Republicans let the president down. One commentator quite rightly suggests that the Republicans who negotiated this travesty as well as those Republicans who voted to sustain it were motivated to protect institutional turf. They were also victims of the Mitch McConnell syndrome, to avoid government shutdown at virtually any cost.
This legislation codifies the triumph of the legislative branch over the executive branch in defining how the border shall be policed. Heretofore, much of the discretion about enforcement on the border was in the hands of the executive, now many of those decisions have been codified by law and they are always on the side of open immigration. For example, the extended family provisions which say that those credibly claiming some sort of relationship to infants may not be deported.
Mayors are given veto power over the placement of the wall. National parks and federal property are declared tierra prohibida.
What is the upside for this loss of ability of the executive to police the border and to build the wall where it might really count? A trifling sum somewhat in excess of $1 billion, most or all of which may not be used to construct a new wall. Yet some say these trifling amounts are needed to commence border construction especially with onrushing caravans of illegal immigrants. Even if this money were available for that purpose, there is not enough time to build a wall to stop caravans already en route.
Well some say, the president is going to declare an emergency and scrape together up to $8 billion for his wall. This legislation has absolutely nothing to do with that. His vulnerabilities before the ninth circuit to enjoin his national emergency or his diversion of funds for being illegal is not affected. Or on the other hand perhaps it is affected, with a Ninth Circuit judge declaring that Congress has spoken that Congress has considered whether I'm an emergency exists and has made provisions for that emergency which the president himself has signed. Now the government is limited to its own law. Whether that is a meritorious legal argument or not, the point is a Ninth Circuit judge is likely to find that it is.
So at the end of the day, the president is likely to lose in the Ninth Circuit, likely to lose in the appellate level of the Ninth Circuit, and not at all assured of victory in the Supreme Court if he can get there in a timely manner, which is also not certain. Worse, it is not even certain that the president could get to the supreme court at all. In the event the case is heard, consider the proclivities of one justice, the Chief Justice, he is an institutionalist who twice upheld Obamacare, saving it. He Is entirely unreliable from a conservative point of view. We already know that there is no chance of a honest hearing from any of the four leftist justices, who are ideologically committed without regard for the Constitution. Thus, we are betting the eight billion precious border wall dollars on Chief Justice John Roberts.
Good luck with that.
So the Republicans in the House and the Senate have served up to this president an impossible predicament. We really ought to think long and hard about who these people are actually serving. Clearly it is not their conservative constituents. Please see the link above.
Why has the president decided to sign this? Not because it makes sense from immigration point of view but only because to veto it means that he will have shut down the government. This is the nice predicament that the Democrats and the Republicans have maneuvered the president into.
It is understandable that the president refrains from shutting down the government by veto but it is also to be noted that this is being done by a continuing resolution, in this case a double-barreled disaster. It is a terrible border immigration law and it is yet another continuing resolution which the president vowed to veto.
Whether Trump bears any responsibility for this, I cannot consider in this forum for fear of being banned as a never Trumper. I leave that to others. I merely offer the idea that the president should have declared the emergency first and then vetoed the continuing resolution and had the Republicans in the Senate (evidently it is okay for spending bills now to be originated in the Senate -witness the continuing resolution which the president is about to sign) or the House offer up a continuing resolution for a short time to keep the government open.
So this is a win-win for Nancy Pelosi and a lose-lose for conservatives. Nancy Pelosi won but the president was rolled by his own party.
STAND TALL, MR. PRESIDENT!
The Comment line is either turned off or blown .
What’s missing from the bill are the rest of the enforcement provisions from the ONE TIME amnesty of 32 years ago. The list goes like this -
1) the southern border barrier
2) eVerify permanence
3) birthright citizenship per Minor v Happersett (plural citizen parents)
4) end all chain migration
5) end H1b, F1, and visa lottery
6) moratorium on new applications for citizenship for 10 years (40 years to allow assimilation and downsize automated work force).
Anything less is a threat to We the People. No border + no voter id = ?? (if you can’t figure it out you shouldn’t be voting)