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Posts tagged ‘lawless executive orders’

No religious exemption in Obama executive order on discriminating against LGBT workers

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/07/no_religious_exemption_in_obama_executive_order_on_discriminating_against_lgbt_workers.html

By Rick Moran

President Obama will sign an executive order on Monday barring federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT workers. There will be no exemption for companies with religious objections to hiring gays.

New York Times:

The order will also, for the first time, explicitly protect federal employees from discrimination on the basis of gender identity, officials said. Federal workers are already protected based on their sexual orientation.

Gay groups stepped up their already intense campaign to persuade Mr. Obama to sign the order after the Supreme Court’s decision last month in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores case. In that ruling, the court said that family-run corporations with religious objections could be exempted from providing employees with insurance coverage for contraception, and there were fears that the case would have repercussions for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people.

“With the strokes of a pen, the president will have a very real and immediate impact on the lives of millions of L.G.B.T. people across the country,” Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement on Friday. “These actions from the president have the potential to be a keystone in the arch of his administration’s progress, and they send a powerful message to future administrations and to Congress that anti-L.G.B.T. discrimination must not be tolerated.”

Religious groups had sought the exemption to ensure that they would not lose federal money or contracts if they could not meet the new guidelines because of their beliefs.

Galen Carey, the vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals, said he expected the president’s executive order would lead to a lengthy and expensive legal fight.

“It would be better if the president could provide leadership that promotes tolerance all the way around,” Mr. Carey said, “rather than use the force of the state.”

He said the exemption would have protected the groups’ freedom and “social harmony as our nation is working through these issues, on which there’s a lot of disagreement.”

The directive is the latest example of Mr. Obama acting unilaterally after legislation on a domestic priority was stymied by Republican opposition on Capitol Hill. His executive orders have angered Republicans, and Speaker John A. Boehner is preparing a lawsuit to protest the president’s moves.

Mr. Obama warned last month that he was prepared to act on his own to extend the protections because the drive in Congress for a national anti-bias law to cover nearly all employers, a bill known as the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, had stalled.

The “gender identify” crowd will be pleased. You probably haven’t noticed but we’ve gone far beyond simple male-female designations of gender. The gender identity movement is redefining the male-female “binary” gender by creating other genders – or pushing the idea that you can be no gender at all. The president is about to sign an executive order that says biology doesn’t mean anything – that people get to choose their gender based on whatever criteria they see fit to use.

There is a scientific basis for transgenderism – babies born biologically female with the brain of a male and vice versa. But it is incredibly rare – perhaps one live birth for every 50,000 babies born. It may even be rarer than that. Protecting the notion that someone can choose their gender will open a legal can of worms we will be decades sorting out.

Not being able to discriminate against someone so addled and confused they don’t know what gender they are is only the beginning. Next comes the transgender bathrooms – or gender confused people getting the legal right to use whatever bathroom they feel like. Other accommodations to follow.

Social change does not come at the stroke of a pen. All this executive order will do is muddy the waters – both for people of faith and the LGBT community.

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CHILLING Video: Famous Liberal Law Professor Warns of Obama Dictatorship; Urges Congress to Act

http://www.tpnn.com/2014/07/16/chilling-video-famous-liberal-law-professor-warns-of-obama-dictatorship-urges-congress-to-act/

July 16, 2014 By Matthew Burke

Respected liberal George Washington University Law School Professor, Jonathan Turley, speaking regarding the House GOP’s lawsuit against Obama for unconstitutionally using executive orders, issued a chilling statement on Wednesday, saying that “this could be a historic moment.”

Professor Turley said that the current Congress is losing its powers “to a kind of uber presidency.”
(WATCH VIDEO BELOW)

“Our system is changing, and this body [Congress] is the one branch that must act, if we are to reverse those changes,” Turley urged.

Turley said that there is a new model of government emerging, one in which our Founding Fathers thoroughly rejected, and pointed out that when Obama announced his unconstitutional dictatorial powers, Democrats in Congress cheered him on.

“A dominant presidency has occurred with very little opposition. Indeed, when President Obama pledged to circumvent Congress, he received rapturous applause from the very body that he was proposing to make practically irrelevent.” Referring to Congress bending over to give Obama its constitutional legislative powers, Turley said the Congress is moving from “self-loathing to self-destruction in a system that is in crisis.”

“The president’s pledge to effectively govern alone is alarming,” Turley told Congress. “And what is most alarming is his ability to

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fulfill that pledge.”

“When a president can govern alone, he can become a government unto himself, which is precisely the danger the Framers sought to avoid,” Turley warned.

Turley, who in earlier interviews has admitted that he agrees with Obama on many of his policies, said that the problem of the executive branch usurping power it hasn’t been given, didn’t start with Obama, or even George W. Bush, who he was also critical of during the Bush years. However, he asserted that it has now reached “tipping point,” while urging Congress to “aggressively seek to regain the ground” that it has lost.

Quoting Dorothy Boyd from the movie “Jerry McGuire,” Turley said, “You had me at hello,” when Congress asked him if the House GOP lawsuit against Obama was a good idea. “I do,” said Turley. “I do think it is a good idea,” he affirmed.

Turley proclaimed that the Constitution’s “Separation of Powers,” established by the Framer’s, wasn’t there to protect each of the three branches, but was there to “protect individual liberty,” so that any one branch wouldn’t get so powerful as to attack individual liberty.

Turley went on to compare Obama’s reasons for changing laws on his own, without congressional approval [see: Obamacare], as almost identical to those reasons given by King James I.

Turley admitted that he voted for Obama in 2008. He didn’t say whether or not he voted for him in 2012.

“There’s no license in the Madisonian system to ‘go it alone,’” Turley said. James Madison is considered the main author of the U.S. Constitution.

Turley said that Obama was attempting to be a “majority of one,” by “ordering changes on his own terms,” a dangerous proposition.

Turley then chastised Democrats (while not saying the word “Democrat”) who remain “silent” in the face of Obama’s unconstitutional dictates, saying that their silence could very easily backfire under a future presidency.

“This is not going to be our last president,” Turley warned, while saying that the next president of a different political ideology could change environmental or labor laws at his or her whim, if Obama is not stopped.

WATCH BELOW:

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EXCLUSIVE – Sessions Warns All of Congress: Obama’s New Immigration Strategy ‘Threatens Foundation of Our Constitutional Republic’

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/07/14/EXCLUSIVE-Sessions-Warns-All-Of-Congress-Obama-s-New-Immigration-Strategy-Threatens-Foundation-Of-Our-Constitutional-Republic

by Matthew Boyle 15 Jul 2014, 5:58 AM PDT

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has warned all of his colleagues in Congress that President Barack Obama’s new immigration strategy—his plans to legalize millions of illegal alien adults through executive power—could destroy America as we know it.

“I write to inform you of a development that threatens the foundation of our constitutional Republic,” Sessions, Congress’s top immigration hawk, wrote in a letter that was hand-delivered to all 535 members of Congress on Monday and provided exclusively to Breitbart News.

Sessions cites a recent report from the National Journal, in which reporter Major Garrett detailed how, despite the ongoing crisis at the border, Obama plans to legalize anywhere from five to six million illegal alien adults in much the same way he did for illegal alien minors through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in summer 2012.

“Obama made it clear he would press his executive powers to the limit,” Garrett wrote on July 3, as cited by Sessions. “He gave quiet credence to recommendations from La Raza and other immigration groups that between 5 million to 6 million adult illegal immigrants could be spared deportation under a similar form of deferred adjudication he ordered for the so-called Dreamers in June 2012.”

Sessions cites another paragraph from that National Journal piece as well, in which Garrett reported that President Obama has “now ordered the Homeland Security and Justice departments to find executive authorities that could enlarge that non-prosecutorial umbrella by a factor of 10.”

“Senior officials also tell me Obama wants to see what he can do with executive power to provide temporary legal status to undocumented adults,” Garrett wrote. “And he will shift Immigration Control and Enforcement resources from the interior to the border to reduce deportations of those already here and to beef up defenses along the border.”

Sessions, whose office hand-delivered the letter to every member of Congress Monday, wrote that this development from the Obama administration is “breathtaking.” The letter continued:

“The action the President is reportedly contemplating would be a nullification of the Immigration and National Act by the Executive Branch of government. Indeed, it would be an executive nullification of our borders as an enforceable national boundary. By declaring whole classes of illegal immigrants beyond the reach of the law, it would remove the moral authority needed to enforce any immigration law, creating the very open-borders policy explicitly rejected by Congress and the people. And it would guarantee that the current illegal immigration disaster would only further worsen and destabilize.”

Sessions’ letter to colleagues comes as some in both Republican and Democratic circles consider various plans they say would fix the problem of the border crisis. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John McCain (R-AZ), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are reportedly working together to develop a broad comprehensive immigration legislative strategy similar to their “Gang of Eight” bill last year.

House GOP leadership is mulling a plan that would appropriate billions of dollars to the administration for use because of the crisis, packaged together with a version of the border bill offered by House Homeland Security Committee chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX). All those plans come as President Obama has asked Congress for $3.7 billion in new funding for use in dealing with the illegal aliens here. House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) suggested in an op-ed at Breitbart News the president doesn’t need any more money.

PLEASE READ THAT ARTICLE HERE: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/07/10/Goodlatte-How-Obama-Can-Stop-Border-Crisis

But Sessions argues that all of this bickering in Washington is a façade that doesn’t address the real problem. To really fix the issue, he argues, politicians need to be willing to enforce immigration laws in America and stop dealing with special interests who want the border to remain unsecured and seek continually high levels of immigration, legal or illegal, given how it benefits them in the form of cheap labor.

“As you know, over the last five and a half years, the President has routinely bypassed Congress in order to suspend enforcement of our immigration laws,” Sessions wrote. “The most dramatic of these lawless directives was the President’s 2012 Deferred Action Program for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), in which the president implemented by executive fiat legislation that Congress has three times rejected.”

Sessions wrote that the president’s DACA program “has led to catastrophic results,” because it was “declaring to the entire world that America will not enforce its immigration laws against those who enter the country as minors” and that the U.S. will “freely grant them access to work permits and taxpayer resources.” Sessions wrote that Obama’s DACA policy and other policies “unleashed a flood of new illegal immigration into the country” and that this is “the disaster that he created.” As such, Sessions argues that politicians should not just pass new legislation or throw money at the problem; they should work to reverse the president’s executive overreaches.

Sessions told his colleagues that “there is a clear path forward” from this problem in order to “prevent the continued dissolution of America’s borders.”

READ SEN. SESSIONS’ LETTER TO CONGRESS: Sen. Sessions Dear Colleague Letter

“Certainly, DACA and the President’s other numerous unlawful policies must be terminated,” Sessions wrote. “But as a first step, Congress must not acquiesce to spending more taxpayer dollars until the President unequivocally rescinds his threat of more illegal executive action.”

Sessions echoed a call from Goodlatte that Congress should pressure Obama to use “his lawful powers to begin enforcing the law now” rather than “passing legislation on the promise of future enforcement” like the Gang of Eight bill did or like some forthcoming spending packages are likely to.

“If Congress simply passes a supplemental spending bill without these preconditions, it is not a question of if the President will suspend more immigration laws, but only how many he will suspend,” Sessions wrote. “Congress cannot surrender to this lawlessness. Acting in defense of Congress, our constituents, and their communities, we must stand firm. This transcends politics. It is about our duty as constitutional officeholders. It is about the solemn oath we all took as Members of Congress.”