Is there anyone on Earth who is surprised at this news?
President Obama’s temporary deportation amnesty will make it easier for illegal immigrants to improperly register and vote in elections, state elections officials testified to Congress on Thursday, saying that the driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers they will be granted create a major voting loophole.While stressing that it remains illegal for noncitizens to vote, secretaries of state from Ohio and Kansas said they won’t have the tools to sniff out illegal immigrants who register anyway, ignoring stiff penalties to fill out the registration forms that are easily available at shopping malls, motor vehicle bureaus and in curbside registration drives.
The article contains quotes from various Democrats with the usual disclaimers, such as the idea that no one will actually do this so there’s nothing to worry about. But it seems odd to assume that those who’ve already lived here illegally for years would all be so very loathe to risk breaking another law, especially if someone with an interest in their doing so were to offer them some cash for their troubles. Not to mention the fact that there are probably some amnesty recipients who might misunderstand the law and think that their new status confers on them the bona fide right to vote.
Is the chance to register to vote really an unintended “loophole” through which the purpose of the amnesty order can be evaded? It is certainly possible it’s a feature rather than a bug as far as Obama and the Democrats are concerned. In any event, there was and will be no effort by the Democratic Party or Obama to make it impossible for illegals with amnesty to vote, although this could have been done. The fact that the secretaries of state “don’t have the tools to sniff out illegal immigrants who register” is no accident; they’ve been kept from having them.
The following “loopholes” are also things that could probably have been ironed out if the law had been passed by Congress. But that was never going to happen, so Obama took up his pen and phone and didn’t bother with all those pesky little details:
…[There is] a perverse incentive created by Obamacare that would make newly legalized workers more attractive to some businesses than American workers and complications with the tax code.The newly legalized workers can apply for back refunds from the IRS even for years when they didn’t file their taxes, agency Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress on Wednesday.Mr. Koskinen [of the IRS] said the White House never spoke with him about potential consequences before Mr. Obama announced his policy changes. The secretaries of state who testified to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Thursday said they too never heard from Mr. Obama ahead of time.
So, what can Republicans do, and what will they do? Even if Republicans were united on what to do (which they are not), their options without a two-thirds majority in the Senate to override a veto (or to convict if Obama were to be impeached by the House) are limited, and involve government shutdowns or defunding Homeland Security or similar moves that remain highly unpopular with the American public although very popular with conservatives.
Obama has always been confident that the Republicans lack the will to stop him, and that even if they could muster the will the majority of the American people would back him in any sort of funding standoff. That is the real and very difficult dilemma the Republican members of Congress face, including those conservatives who would dearly like to stop Obama’s amnesty.
[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]
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