Obama: I've got 'five years' left to solve immigration


Seriously?  No one has a problem with this?

In an interview with Univision Radio, President Barack Obama said that he has "five years" left in his presidency to figure out issues like comprehensive immigration reform. Striking a confident note about his reelection prospects, Obama assured a largely Hispanic audience that he has not given up on getting an immigration bill done — one that would provide a pathway to citizenship.

"My presidency is not over," Obama told Univision's Eddie “Piolin” Sotelo. "I’ve got another five years coming up. We’re going to get this done."

Obama also said that Hispanic voters would ultimately face an easy choice in deciding between him and the Republican nominee in November — emphasizing his support for comprehensive immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship.

"So far, ... we haven’t seen any of the Republican candidates even support immigration reform. In fact, their leading candidate said he would veto even the DREAM Act, much less comprehensive immigration reform," Obama said, in an apparent reference to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. "So the choice at the presidential level will not be that difficult."  He’s absolutely right – the choice will not be that difficult.  Why would I vote for a president who wants me to force me to pay for illegal immigrants to go to college (as if we had money to spare at the Federal level)?  If Romeny is the nominee, I want him to show this clip and then say into the camera – “I don’t believe you should have to pay for people who have broken the law to have advantages your own children do not enjoy.  In America, we don’t reward people who break our laws.  I am a strong supporter of legal immigration, and I will work to simplify the process so those who desire a better life can pursue their dreams in the land of opportunity.  However, we will never bestow gifts on individuals who flaunt our laws and then come to us for handouts.  Not on my watch.”  You’re telling me that won’t receive a positive response?  I find that hard to believe.

Obama also defended his administration's approach to immigration, which has been characterized by a high level of deportations, saying that the law needed to be changed and Congress needs to act.

"The only way we’re going to do this is to get something passed through Congress, and that’s why we have to keep the pressure up. Unfortunately, the Republican side, which used to at least give lip service to immigration reform, now they’ve gone completely to a different place, and have shown themselves unwilling to talk at all about any sensible solutions to this issue, and we’re going to have to just keep up the pressure until they act," Obama said.

Hispanic voters remain an important part of Obama's coalition, though his approval rating has dropped 30 points among Hispanics from a 2009 high of 86 percent approval. A more recent Univision/Latino Decisions poll, however, puts his approval back up to 72 percent. In 2008, Obama won the Latino vote by a 36-point spread, beating John McCain 67 percent to 31 percent, according to national exit polls.

Rent Control

George F. Will 

Supreme Court should take on New York City’s rent control laws

James and Jeanne Harmon reside in and supposedly own a five-story brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a building that has been in their family since 1949. But they have, so to speak, houseguests who have overstayed their welcome by, in cumulative years, more than a century. They are the tenants — the same tenants — who have been living in the three of the Harmons’ six apartments that are rent controlled.

The Harmons want the Supreme Court to rule that their home has been effectively, and unconstitutionally, taken from them by notably foolish laws that advance no legitimate state interest. The court should.

This “taking” has been accomplished by rent-control laws that cover almost 1 million — approximately half — of the city’s rental apartments. Such laws have existed, with several intervals of sanity, since the “emergency” declared because returning soldiers faced housing shortages caused by a building slowdown during World War I.

Most tenants in rent-controlled units can renew their leases forever. Tenants can bequeath their rent-controlled apartments — they have, essentially, a property right to their landlord’s property — to their children, or to a friend who lives with them for two years . This is not satire; it is the virtue of caring, as understood by liberal government.

The tenants in the Harmons’ three rent-controlled units are paying an average 59 percent below market rates. The Harmons would like to reclaim one apartment for a grandchild, but because occupants of two of the units are over 62, the Harmons would have to find the displaced tenant a comparable apartment, at the same or lower rent, in the same neighborhood.

In addition to rent control’s random dispersal of benefits — remember, half of the Harmons’ apartments are uncontrolled — rent control is destructive because it discourages construction of new apartments and maintenance of existing ones.

Thus it creates the “emergency” it supposedly cures.

It exemplifies what the late New York senator Pat Moynihan called “iatrogenic government.” In medicine, an iatrogenic illness is induced inadvertently by a physician’s treatment.

Rent control is unconstitutional because it is an egregious and uncompensated physical occupation of property. The Constitution says that private property shall not “be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The Harmons get no compensation for being coerced into privatized welfare: The state shows compassion to tenants — many of whom are not needy; one of the Harmons’ entitled tenants owns a house on Long Island — by compelling landlords to subsidize them.

A property right in a physical thing is a right to possess, use and dispose of this thing. Because government-compelled possession of property by a third party is an unambiguous taking, the Harmons’ property right has been nullified.

John Locke, an intellectual source of American freedom, said that property rights, which he defined to include rights to “lives, liberties and estates,” exist prior to, and independent of, government, and their preservation is “the great and chief end” for which governments are founded. Property rights provide a sphere of personal sovereignty, a zone of privacy into which government should be able to intrude only with difficulty and only so far. Because they are the basis of individual independence, America’s Founders considered property rights the foundation of all other liberties, including self-government — the governance of one’s self.

The Harmons’ case illustrates government’s steady and no longer stealthy desire to transform property from a fundamental right into an attenuated, conditional privilege. Government would like the right to be contingent on whatever agenda it has for ameliorating “emergencies” it causes.

The Supreme Court’s worst decision of this century, the 2005 Kelo ruling, held that government may take private property for the spurious “public use” of giving it to a third party that will pay the government higher taxes than the original owner would. The Harmons’ case is an occasion for the court to begin making amends for Kelo.

In the 1920s, even Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was excessively permissive regarding what governments could legislate, said rent-control laws were on the “verge” of being unconstitutional. Surely a substantial regulation — which a physical occupation is — of real property violates the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause if it does not substantially advance legitimate state interests. The court also has held that a regulation of real property violates the Takings and Due Process clauses if it serves no “public use” or is “arbitrary.”

Are the arbitrary distribution of unmerited benefits and the cultivation of an entitlement mentality among renters a “public use”? If not, rent control is unconstitutional.

How states are restricting political speech

George F. Will 

How states are restricting political speech

Dina Galassini does not seem to pose a threat to Arizona’s civic integrity. But the government of this desert community believes that you cannot be too careful. And state law empowers local governments to be vigilant against the lurking danger that political speech might occur before the speakers notify the government and comply with all the speech rules.

Last October, Galassini became annoyed — like many Ron Paul supporters, she is easily annoyed by government — about the city’s plan to augment its spending with a $29.6 million bond issue, to be voted on by mail by Nov. 8. On Oct. 6, she sent e-mails to 23 friends and acquaintances, urging them to write letters to newspapers and join her in two demonstrations against the bond measure. On Oct. 12, before she could organize the demonstrations, she received a stern letter from the town clerk: “I would strongly encourage you to cease any campaign-related activities until the requirements of the law have been met.”

State law — this is the state of John McCain, apostle of political purification through the regulation of political speech — says that anytime two or more people work together to influence a vote on a ballot measure, they instantly become a “political committee.” This transformation triggers various requirements — registering with the government, filing forms, establishing a bank account for the “committee” even if it has raised no money and does not intend to. This must be done before members of this fictitious “committee” may speak.

Galassini wrote to ask the clerk if it would be permissible for her to e-mail the 23 persons telling them the demonstrations were canceled — she got no response — and told the clerk, “This is all so confusing to me.” Confusion and inconvenience — Galassini could have made an appointment for tutoring by the clerk’s office concerning permissible speech — are probably intended consequences of laws designed to burden political speech that is potentially inconvenient for government. Galassini gave up trying to influence the vote.

The Supreme Court, in its splendid 2010 Citizens United decision, said that laws requiring licenses or other official permission to speak “function as the equivalent of prior restraint by giving the (government) power analogous to licensing laws implemented in 16th- and 17th-century England, laws and governmental practices of the sort that the First Amendment was drawn to prohibit.” Paul Avelar of the Institute for Justice, the nation’s only libertarian public-interest law firm, which is helping Galassini contest the constitutionality of Arizona’s law, says that such niggling nuisances are proliferating nationwide.

A Florida law requires disclosure, including the name and address of the contributor, of any contribution, no matter how small — a penny for your thoughts? Report it — to a political committee. A Washington state law is notably protective of the political class: There must be litigation before a campaign to recall a public official can start, and lawyers are essentially forbidden from volunteering their help with that litigation. In Mississippi, anyone can put up his or her own Web page about a ballot issue, but the Web page designer must disclose the time he or she took to do it. And anyone who spends more than $200 on political speech — say, a small ad in a local newspaper — is required to give the government monthly reports about his or her political activity.

Such pettifogging laws reflect, aside from the joy governments derive from bossing people around, the current rage for regulating political speech lest . . . what? Campaign regulations usually focus on money, supposedly to prevent quid pro quo corruption or the appearance thereof pertaining to candidates. But many laws cover activities involving ballot measures, which suggests that, for reformers, limiting political speech is itself the goal. Hence their obsession with political money, most of which funds the dissemination of speech.

Nationally, political hygienists are regretting their inadvertent creations, this year’s super PACs, entities run by supporters of presidential candidates but forbidden to “coordinate” with the candidates. Super PACs are spending money that the reformers, by imposing low limits on contributions to candidates and parties, have diverted away from campaigns that otherwise could be held directly accountable for, and judged in terms of, the speech they finance. We hear, yet again, the reformers’ cry: “There is too much money in politics.” This year, the presidential campaigns combined may spend almost $2 billion, which is almost as much as Americans will, in a few weeks, spend on Easter candy.