Beware of conservative posers - and talk radio

The immigration firestorm has begun - another faux scandal manipulated by the guileless conservatives in a GOP party that used to have statesmen but now just has reality show actors.

But there's a problem -- actually several: The "illegal amnesty" is neither illegal nor amnesty, and a 33-page Justice Department memo lays out the reasons a lawsuit would seem futile since President Barack Obama has virtually unfettered prosecutorial discretion to defer for three years the deportations of nearly 5 million undocumented immigrants. Those immigrants, during the three-year deportation deferral period, will have work cards and pay taxes -- but still not have a pathway to naturalization, cannot vote and will not have other perks of U.S. citizenship.

Secondly, Thursday's immediate Republican war cry to defund the agency that would carry out the president's executive action is also impossible because Congress doesn't fund the agency. It is entirely fee-funded.

And as for the president being an emperor or king? No on that, too. None of the previous presidential executive orders on immigration issues since 1952 -- actions by 10 presidents in all leading up to President Barack Obama's order -- were attacked as acting unconstitutionally or lawlessly.

There are some differences, of course: Those previous 10 presidents were never accused of being born in Kenya, and they were not dark complected, either. But most importantly, those presidents, for whatever reasons, were not so unrelentingly vilified by conservatives -- both political conservatives and the conservative Americans those GOP statesmen-posers mislead.

Now, the wild-eyed bulls on the Republican sides of congressional aisles are grasping at three other options: Impeachment of the president, continuing endless obstruction or government shut down. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said there will be no shut down, but House Speaker John Boehner last year showed the nation where a promise like that can go when a leader becomes powerless to stop the bulls of his own caucus from shutting down the government.

So this is where the GOP's prowess at acting comes to full focus -- and most notably to full focus with the nation's ultra right-wing talk radio and Fox News at its side. Why is that a factor? Because talk radio and Fox is where the majority of the American people get their news, according to polls. And, yes, we do use the word "news" here loosely. The reality is that talk radio and Fox don't offer news, they offer conservative propaganda. The trouble is that people who only listen to talk radio or watch Fox, probably don't know that.

No, we don't live in a glass house. We are continually amazed at the number of our own readers who don't understand the difference between our news pages and our editorial pages. The news pages are for stories of fact and occasional news analysis. The editorial pages hold opinion pieces. Talk radio -- especially Rush Limbaugh, et al, and Fox blur those lines.

That goes a long way toward explaining the results from a mid-November NBC and Wall Street Journal poll that touched among other things on immigration.

The poll found that a 57 percent majority of Americans favor a path to citizenship for immigrants, and that number jumped to an overwhelming 74 percent when the question included the specifics of the proposed immigration legislation supported by the president and passed by the Senate nearly 18 months ago.

But when these same respondents were asked if they favor what the president was about to do with an executive order on immigration -- an order that follows that same legislation but stops short of offering a path to citizenship because only Congress can OK that -- only 38 percent approved, while 48 percent did not.

What gives? Americans favor the plan, but not the president's action to help make it happen after the House of Representatives dithered away a year and a half and now even threatens another government shutdown!

So is this the takeaway? What has already happened 39 times through the actions of nearly a dozen presidents was perfectly OK with Americans -- until this president did it. The action is virtually the same. What is not the same is what Americans have been told over and over by mouthy tea party and conservative upstarts: This president is "lawless" and his action "unconstitutional."

Has it been unconstitutional for 39 times?

Americans, beware of these now cornered and exposed "conservative" posers. They've acted themselves into a corner. They can't successfully sue. They can't defund this action. And now they are blind with rage. Never mind that 74 percent of us think the policy of immigration reform set forth in the bill still languishing in the House is the right path: These frat boy politicians apparently believe that shutdown is a better way.

The true statesmen in the Republican Party (and, yes, there are some) will have their hands full trying to quell another Republican -- and national -- disaster. And with little or no GOP leadership in sight, we seem to be at these bulls' obstructive and self-destructive mercy.

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