Boehner to sue Obama for executive orders; Pelosi says speaker needs to be an ‘adult’

Speaker John A. Boehner said Wednesday that the House will vote later this year on whether to sue President Obama to try to force him to adhere more strictly to the law, in what could shape up as a major constitutional clash.

The outlines of the lawsuit were sketchy, but the move signaled the seething frustration many Republicans in Congress feel as they watch Mr. Obama issue executive orders and policies and make decisions on the environment, immigration, social issues and national security that the lawmakers say stretch his powers.

“The Constitution makes it clear that the president’s job is to faithfully execute the law and, in my view, the president has not faithfully executed the laws,” said Mr. Boehner, Ohio Republican.

Legal analysts debated over the likely scope and potential successes of a challenge, while the White House mocked the effort.

“The fact they are considering a taxpayer-funded lawsuit against the president of the United States for doing his job, I think, is the kind of step most Americans wouldn’t support,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.

In a memo to fellow lawmakers, Mr. Boehner said he will ask them to vote in July on a resolution that would authorize House lawyers to file suit.

Mr. Boehner said he has not yet decided which specific executive actions would be included in the lawsuit, though the memo suggests the House suit may instead be a broad grievance.

House Republicans have accused the president of overstepping on everything from overextending environmental regulations to bombing Libya without congressional approval, and from ignoring immigration laws to making bogus recess appointments.

Simon Lazarus, senior counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, said that until Republicans list what specifically they’ll sue over, Mr. Boehner’s push is going nowhere.

“He never once names a single act that he intends to challenge or believes is unconstitutional or illegal, so it’s impossible to give much credence to this,” Mr. Lazarus said. “It’s really quite difficult to see this as anything other than a transparent political stunt.”

Mr. Lazarus said a court would be unlikely to even take up a broad complaint and that courts typically don’t hear cases that they judge to be purely political disputes.

Congress and the executive branch regularly clash over the extent of their powers, but Mr. Obama has been more forthright than previous presidents in welcoming the chance to circumvent Congress.

When Congress has deadlocked on Mr. Obama’s priorities, he has issued executive orders or administrative policies that go at least part of the way. In one instance, after Congress wouldn’t raise the minimum wage nationwide, the president issued an order raising the wage for federal contractors.

But that’s an unlikely avenue for a challenge because if Congress wanted to stop the president, it already has tools to do so, said Louis Fisher, a scholar at the Constitution Project and former specialist on separation of powers for the Library of Congress.

“The House has plenty of its own institutional powers to control the president. That would be true with raising the minimum wages of federal contractors,” he said, since Congress could just not appropriate any money to the wage increase. “Any effort to litigate that, the court would throw it out. The court would say, ‘You have your own remedies; you don’t need us.’”

The deal that exchanged five Taliban guerrillas for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s return, however, could be a more ripe target, Mr. Fisher said, especially since both political parties have been critical of the president for not giving Congress the required 30 days notice to release prisoners from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“That to me would be action in court that has merit,” he said. “If both chambers are agreed, as with the 30 days notice, it’s a stronger case than when the two chambers are divided.”

Mr. Boehner, in his memo, said when he travels outside Washington, voters regularly ask him to stand up to Mr. Obama’s use of executive authority.

He said allowing a president to unilaterally reinterpret laws sets a dangerous precedent that shifts power from Congress and amounts to “giving the president kinglike authority.”

He demurred when asked Wednesday whether this was the first step toward impeaching Mr. Obama.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, said that Mr. Boehner is only pursuing the lawsuit to look like Congress is doing something and hopes he takes the more mature approach to drop the lawsuit.

“There really needs to be an adult in the room of the Republican caucus. I hope the speaker is that adult,” she said.

Mrs. Pelosi said that instead of suing the president, Republicans should be working to pass the legislation that she says is important to the American people, including the voting rights act, immigration reform and an extension to unemployment insurance.

However, Democratic fundraisers quickly moved to take advantage of the Boehner letter in appeals to their base. The House Majority PAC called the letter “a new low” in an online solicitation for funds that also accused Mr. Boehner of “caving in to pressure from the right and suing President Obama.”

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Pat Buchanan Was Right

Many of the people you now see on your television offering advice about what to do next in Iraq weren’t terribly prescient the first time around. They or their bosses thought the war likelier to last six days or six weeks than six months. They feared a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein.

“The United States overestimated the threat from Saddam Hussein in 2003,” David Frum acknowledges in 2014. “Without an active nuclear-weapons program, he was not a danger beyond his immediate vicinity. That war cost this country dearly.”

Perhaps the war pundits’ flawed track record is understandable. “Rarely do wars, once begun, work out as anticipated,” wrote Pat Buchanan on the eve of the Iraq war.

But some people anticipated more than others. Buchanan predicted the initial invasion would go well. “An Iraqi air defense, unable to shoot down a single U.S. plane in 40,000 sorties in ten years, cannot long withstand U.S. air power that can deliver 1,000 smart bombs and cruise missiles on target each day,” he observed. “And Iraqi ground forces cannot long resist Abrams tanks that can guarantee the kill of an Iraqi armored vehicle with every shell fired.”

The occupation, however, would be another story. And instead of washing in a tidal wave of liberal democracy across the region, Buchanan warned a prolonged campaign in Iraq might empower anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Israel political forces.

“What would it profit America to march to Baghdad,” he asked, “only to have Cairo fall to anti-American mobs?”

After the Muslim Brotherhood interlude in Egypt, it’s no longer an open question.

Of war with Iraq, Buchanan asked, “how can Iran not be the beneficiary?” He argued, “By eliminating the counterweight to Iranian domination, we guaranteed that either we become that counterweight, or there is none.”

Concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, for which we were warned the “smoking gun” might be a “mushroom cloud,” Buchanan maintained “there is serious doubt Saddam is close to a nuclear weapon.”

If Iraq was complicit in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, Buchanan reasoned, “Saddam’s regime should be destroyed and the pounding not stop until he is dead or gone.” In the absence of such evidence, however, the United States should stay out.

For saying things many Iraq war supporters would now concede were true, Buchanan was lumped in with the “Unpatriotic Conservatives.”

Nor did Buchanan play Pollyanna on the subject of withdrawal. He called U.S. troops “the most effective, if not the only reliable, units preventing all-out sectarian civil war and defending the government, the contractors, the aid workers and the Green Zone.”

“If we draw them down, how secure will the Americans left behind, and the friends of America, be in Iraq?” Buchanan asked, later inquiring, “how will ending the surge and pulling out those troops cool, rather than unleash, the passions for killing?”

Hard to argue with much of this now.

Buchanan is popularly known as a reactionary, a culture warrior who pines for the social mores of the 1950s. (He would likely plead guilty as charged.) So how is it that he is so often ahead of the curve — or at least ahead of his critics?

Does anyone now doubt, as Buchanan was among the first conservatives to argue, that mass immigration has made the electoral map much more difficult for the Republican Party than it was in the heyday of Nixon and Reagan?

After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, Real Clear Politics elections analyst Sean Trende suggested the Republican Party could potentially win again by “abandoning some of its more pro-corporate stances.”

Trende continued, “This GOP would have to be more ‘America first’ on trade, immigration and foreign policy; less pro-Wall Street and big business in its rhetoric; more Main Street/populist on economics.”

Who does that sound like?

Buchanan was also among the first conservatives to worry about the stagnant wages of working-class Americans. Among the sources of that stagnation, wrote David Frum in “The Vanishing Republican Voter,” “a great shift from a national to a planetary division of labor.”

“Less-skilled Americans now face hundreds of millions of wage competitors,” Frum continued, and “abundant low-skilled immigration hurts lower America by reducing wages.”

“I don’t think you can have a pro-middle-class conservatism while supporting an amnesty that will incentivize a flood of cheap labor into this country,” writes the Washington Free Beacon’s Matthew Continetti. “Nor do I think you can have a pro-middle-class conservatism that politely overlooks the issue of global trade and the economic and strategic and moral costs of our Most Favored Nation trading relationship with China.”

For making similar observations, Buchanan was once decried as “America’s last leftist.”

The Persian Gulf War certainly didn’t go as Buchanan predicted. George H.W. Bush went to war with a broad international coalition and stopped short of Baghdad. Buchanan was indisputably right that Desert Storm would be followed by more wars in the Middle East.

“In 1990,” Buchanan later wrote, “the U.S. had an open-and-shut case of naked aggression by Iraq that even the U.N. could recognize and our enemies could not deny.” Not so in 2003.

Some form of free-market populism is likely a preferable alternative to Wall Street Republicanism than full-scale Buchananite protectionism. One could also argue against restarting the Cold War without enlisting Vladimir Putin as an ally in the culture war.

When it comes to many of the challenges facing America since winning the Cold War, however, Buchanan was right from the beginning.

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Government Releases Memo Justifying Killing US Citizens With Drones

The United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals released a secret White House memo Monday explaining the legal justification for a lethal drone strike in Yemen against U.S. citizen and al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011.

Based on facts provided by the intelligence community and Department of Defense, as an “operational leader” of an “enemy force,” al-Awlaki is not excluded from “lethal action” on the part of the military simply by virtue of being born in the U.S.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) prepared the memorandum, which stated that employing a drone strike against al-Awlaki was legally justifiable ”as part of the United States’ ongoing non-international armed conflict with al-Qaeda.”

Further justification was cited under a U.S. military force authorization granted by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

The memo states that al-Awlaki was still entitled to his Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches, seizures and unfair due process while abroad, but that a ”decision-maker” such as the president could “reasonably conclude” that the terrorist leader represented a “continued” and “imminent” threat to U.S. national security.

“In addition to the nature of the threat posed by al-Awlaki’s activities, both agencies here have represented that they intend to capture rather than target al-Awlaki if feasible,” the memo reads. “Yet we also understand that an operation by either agency to capture al-Awlaki in Yemen would be infeasible at this time.”

Senators tasked with advice and consent authority over President Obama’s nomination of David Barron to the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals demanded to see the memo, which was written while Barron served as acting chief of OLC. Barron wrote numerous opinions justifying drone strikes on U.S. citizens.

“The realities of combat” validate such uses of force as ”necessary and appropriate” according to Barron, who cited the landmark Bush-era Supreme Court case Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which ruled that U.S. citizens could be considered and detained as “enemy combatants.” However the same ruling mandated such designated detainees receive some form of due process.

“Due process analysis need not blink at those realities,” Barron wrote.

“There are few questions more important than the question of when the government has the authority to kill its own citizens,” American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said in a Business Insider report. ”This memo’s release will allow the public to better understand the scope and implications of the authority the government is claiming.”

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Robocall Recruiting Dem Votes For GOP Sen. Cochran Bashes Tea Party, Claims Racism

The GOP Senate primary in Mississippi continues to intensify with the surfacing of a robocall aimed at potential voters that strongly criticizes the tea party and urges the listeners to vote against state Sen. Chris McDaniel in Tuesday’s runoff vote.

In the automated message appearing to target black Democrat voters in Mississippi, the female voice on the line claims that tea party challenger Chris McDaniel would lead to more obstruction in Washington and create more “disrespectful treatment” to the nation’s first African-American president.

“The time has come to take a stand and say NO to the tea party,” the message says. “NO to their obstruction. NO to their disrespectful treatment of the first African-American president.”

The robocall goes on to urge listeners to go to the next polls Tuesday and vote against McDaniel. The only option in voting against McDaniel is to vote for incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran as they will be the only two names on the ballot.

“If we do nothing, tea party candidate Chris McDaniel wins and causes even more problems for President Obama,” the message continues. “With your help we can stop this. Please commit to voting against tea party candidate Chris McDaniel next Tuesday and say NO to the tea party!”

Some experts have argued that it is technically illegal for voters affiliated with an opposing party to vote in another party’s primary in Mississippi.

The Cochran campaign is denying that they have any connection with the robocall and declared it to be a “stunt” coming from allies of McDaniel.

“It’s an obvious, transparent stunt by McDaniel and his allies,” Jordan Russell, a spokesman for Cochran, told The Daily Caller Sunday.

The McDaniel campaign is claiming otherwise.

“It is clear that Mississippi Republicans have rejected Thad Cochran’s liberal voting record and it’s sad to see Thad Cochran resort to courting Democrats simply to hold onto power,” McDaniel spokesman Noel Fritsch told TheDC.

This isn’t the first allegation that there are efforts to get out Democratic votes for Cochran in Tuesday’s vote.

This is only the latest incident in controversy surrounding efforts to get out Democratic votes for Cochran in the runoff that includes a black preacher — who is a strong supporter of the Democratic nominee for the Senate seat — actively trying to get members of his community to vote for the sitting senator.

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Darrell Issa Calls On White House Attorney to Testify On IRS Email Scandal

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa requested the testimony of White House Counsel’s Office lawyer Jennifer O’Connor at next Tuesday’s hearing on the IRS lost emails scandal.

Issa wrote a letter to O’Connor, who worked at the IRS in the first months of its conservative targeting scandal in 2013 and was promoted to the White House earlier this year, asking her to appear alongside IRS commissioner John Koskinen at Tuesday’s Oversight hearing. Issa made clear that he thinks O’Connor “knew or should have known” that ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails were missing.

The IRS claimed that it lost 24,000 of Lerner’s emails to and from other Obama administration agencies and the White House from 2009 to 2011, in addition to emails from six other IRS staffers. The emails are expected to be able to shed light on the IRS conservative targeting scandal that has plagued the Obama administration for more than a year.

“From May 2013 until November 2013, you served in a career position at the IRS as the Counselor to the Commissioner, with the primary task of ‘navigat[ing] the scandal over [the IRS’s] reviews of conservative organizations,’” Issa wrote.

“In this position, you had a direct and substantial role in the IRS’ response to congressional requests for documents, including documents sent or received by Ms. Lerner,” Issa wrote. “In fact, IRS Chief Counsel William Wilkins, when asked who was supervising the collection of, ‘documents relating to the committee’s requests for material,’ responded ‘Tom Kane and Jennifer [O’Connor] are the two I would identify as the key supervisors.’”

“Given your prominent role in supervising the IRS’s document review and production processes, you likely knew or should have known that the IRS was missing a portion of e-mails sent or received by Ms. Lerner responsive to the Committee’s subpoena,” Issa wrote.

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Darrell Issa: Records Like Lois Lerner's Emails 'Don't Just Disappear... Unless That Was the Intention'

Amid new reports claiming that Louis Lerner's emails sought by Congress pursuant to claims the IRS targeted Tea Party groups are lost forever, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa issued a blistering statement alleging that such federal records can only disappear like this through deliberate destruction.

If the IRS truly got rid of evidence in a way that violated the Federal Records Act and ensured the FBI never got a crack at recovering files from an official claiming a Fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination, this is proof their whole line about "losing" e-mails in the targeting scandal was just one more attempted deception. Old and useless binders of information are still stored and maintained on federal agency shelves; official records, like the e-mails of a prominent official, don't just disappear without a trace unless that was the intention.

Issa is responding to claims in this Politico story. The claims below are certain to give critics even more energy in their efforts to get to the bottom of the ongoing scandal. 

Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightening rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources. 

 “We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, in a brief hallway interview. 

Two additional sources told POLITICO the same late on Wednesday, citing IRS officials.

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Has the Dept. of Homeland Security become America’s standing army?

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”—James Madison 

“Here [in New Mexico], we are moving more toward a national police force. Homeland Security is involved with a lot of little things around town. Somebody in Washington needs to call a timeout.”—Dan Klein, retired Albuquerque Police Department sergeant

If the United States is a police state, then the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its national police force, with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies. In fact, although the DHS’ governmental bureaucracy may at times appear to be inept and bungling, it is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to building what the Founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.

The third largest federal agency behind the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, the DHS—with its 240,000 full-time workers, $61 billion budget and sub-agencies that include the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—has been aptly dubbed a “runaway train.”

In the 12 years since it was established to “prevent terrorist attacks within the United States,” the DHS has grown from a post-9/11 knee-jerk reaction to a leviathan with tentacles in every aspect of American life. With good reason, a bipartisan bill to provide greater oversight and accountability into the DHS’ purchasing process has been making its way through Congress.

A better plan would be to abolish the DHS altogether. In making the case for shutting down the de facto national police agency, analyst Charles Kenny offers the following six reasons: one, the agency lacks leadership; two, terrorism is far less of a threat than it is made out to be; three, the FBI has actually stopped more alleged terrorist attacks than DHS; four, the agency wastes exorbitant amounts of money with little to show for it; five, “An overweight DHS gets a free pass to infringe civil liberties without a shred of economic justification”; and six, the agency is just plain bloated.

To Kenny’s list, I will add the following: The menace of a national police force, a.k.a. a standing army, vested with so much power cannot be overstated, nor can its danger be ignored. Indeed, as the following list shows, just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to police agencies in the form of grants.

Militarizing police and SWAT teams. The DHS routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, “paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams.” The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war—and the citizenry are the enemy combatants.

Spying on activists, dissidents and veterans. In 2009, DHS released three infamous reports on Right-wing and Left-wing “Extremism,” and another entitled Operation Vigilant Eagle, outlining a surveillance program targeting veterans. The reports collectively and broadly define extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.” In 2013, it was revealed that DHS, the FBI, state and local law enforcement agencies, and the private sector were working together to conduct nationwide surveillance on protesters’ First Amendment activities.

Stockpiling ammunition. DHS, along with other government agencies, has been stockpiling an alarming amount of ammunition in recent years, which only adds to the discomfort of those already leery of the government. As of 2013, DHS had 260 million rounds of ammo in stock, which averages out to between 1,300 to 1,600 rounds per officer. The US Army, in contrast, has roughly 350 rounds per soldier. DHS has since requisitioned more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammo, “enough,” concludes Forbes magazine, “to sustain a hot war for 20+ years.”

Distributing license plate readers. DHS has already distributed more than $50 million in grants to enable local police agencies to acquire license plate readers, which rely on mobile cameras to photograph and identify cars, match them against a national database, and track their movements. Relying on private contractors to maintain a license plate database allows the DHS and its affiliates to access millions of records without much in the way of oversight.

Contracting to build detention camps. In 2006, DHS awarded a $385 million contract to a Halliburton subsidiary to build detention centers on American soil. Although the government and Halliburton were not forthcoming about where or when these domestic detention centers would be built, they rationalized the need for them in case of “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs” in the event of other emergencies such as “natural disasters.” Viewed in conjunction with the NDAA provision allowing the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone, including American citizens, it would seem the building blocks are already in place for such an eventuality.

Tracking cellphones with Stingray devices. Distributed to local police agencies as a result of grants from the DHS, these Stingray devices enable police to track individuals’ cell phones—and their owners—without a court warrant or court order. The amount of information conveyed by these devices about one’s activities, whereabouts and interactions is considerable. As one attorney explained: “Because we carry our cellphones with us virtually everywhere we go, Stingrays can paint a precise picture of where we are and who we spend time with, including our location in a lover’s house, in a psychologist’s office or at a political protest.”

Carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities. Each year, DHS funds military-style training drills in cities across the country. These Urban Shield exercises, elaborately staged with their own set of professionally trained Crisis Actors playing the parts of shooters, bystanders and victims, fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers, bystanders and the media into thinking it’s a real crisis.

Using the TSA as an advance guard. The TSA now searches a variety of government and private databases, including things like car registrations and employment information, in order to track travelers’ before they ever get near an airport. Other information collected includes “tax identification number, past travel itineraries, property records, physical characteristics, and law enforcement or intelligence information.”

Conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners. Under the direction of the TSA, American travelers have been subjected to all manner of searches ranging from whole-body scanners and enhanced pat-downs at airports to bag searches in train stations. In response to public outrage over what amounted to a virtual strip search, the TSA has begun replacing the scanners with equally costly yet less detailed models. The old scanners will be used by prisons for now.

Carrying out soft target checkpoints. VIPR task forces, comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams have laid the groundwork for the government’s effort to secure so-called “soft” targets such as malls, stadiums, bridges, etc. Some security experts predict that checkpoints and screening stations will eventually be established at all soft targets, such as department stores, restaurants, and schools. DHS’ Operation Shield, a program which seeks to check up on security protocols around the country with unannounced visits, conducted a surprise security exercise at the Social Security Administration building in Leesburg, Fla., when they subjected people who went to pick up their checks to random ID checks by federal agents armed with semi-automatic weapons.

Directing government workers to spy on Americans. Terrorism Liaison Officers are firefighters, police officers, and even corporate employees who have received training to spy on and report back to government entities on the day-to-day activities of their fellow citizens. These individuals are authorized to report “suspicious activity” which can include such innocuous activities as taking pictures with no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements and drawings, taking notes, conversing in code, espousing radical beliefs, and buying items in bulk.

Conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers. Data collecting agencies spread throughout the country, aided by the National Security Agency, fusions centers—of which there are at least 78 scattered around the U.S.—constantly monitor our communications, collecting and cataloguing everything from our Internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails. This data is then fed to government agencies, which are now interconnected: the CIA to the FBI, the FBI to local police. Despite a budget estimated to be somewhere between $289 million and $1.4 billion, these fusion centers have proven to be exercises in incompetence, often producing irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence, while spending millions of dollars on “flat-screen televisions, sport utility vehicles, hidden cameras and other gadgets.”

Carrying out Constitution-free border control searches. On orders from the DHS, the government’s efforts along the border have become little more than an exercise in police state power, ranging from aggressive checkpoints to the widespread use of drone technology, often used against American citizens traveling within the country. Border patrol operations occur within 100 miles of an international crossing, putting some 200 million Americans within the bounds of aggressive border patrol searches and seizures, as well as increasingly expansive drone surveillance. With 71 checkpoints found along the southwest border of the United States alone, suspicionless search and seizures on the border are rampant. Border patrol agents, without a warrant, also search the personal electronic devices of people crossing the border.

Funding citywide surveillance cameras. As Charlie Savage reports for the Boston Globe, the DHS has funneled “millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a ‘surveillance society’ in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost.” These camera systems, installed on city streets, in parks and transit systems, operating in conjunction with sophisticated computer systems that boast intelligent video analytics, digital biometric identification, military-pedigree software for analyzing and predicting crime and facial recognition software, create a vast surveillance network that can target millions of innocent individuals.

Utilizing drones and other spybots. The DHS has been at the forefront of funding and deploying surveillance robots and drones for land, sea and air, including robots that resemble fish and tunnel-bots that can travel underground. Despite repeated concerns over the danger surveillance drones used domestically pose to Americans’ privacy rights, the DHS has continued to expand its fleet of Predator drones, which come equipped with video cameras, infrared cameras, heat sensors, and radar. DHS also loans its drones out to local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies for a variety of tasks, although the agency refuses to divulge any details as to how, why and in what capacity these drones are being used by police. Incredibly, the DHS has also been handing out millions of dollars in grants to local police agencies to “accelerate the adoption” of drones in their localities.

It’s not difficult to see why the DHS has been described as a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.” If it is a beast, however, it is a beast that is accelerating our nation’s transformation into a police state through its establishment of a standing army, a.k.a. national police force.

This, too, is nothing new. Historically, as I show in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the establishment of a national police force has served as a fundamental and final building block for every totalitarian regime that has ever wreaked havoc on humanity, from Hitler’s all-too-real Nazi Germany to George Orwell’s fictional Oceania. Whether fictional or historical, however, the calling cards of these national police agencies remain the same: brutality, inhumanity, corruption, intolerance, rigidity, and bureaucracy—in other words, evil.

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White House To Welcome In, Honor Illegal Immigrants

President Obama’s White House will honor illegal immigrant activists at a ceremony Tuesday.

Two activists with the group Mi Familia Vota Education Fund will be honored as “Champions of Change” at a special White House ceremony.

Fernanda Zaragoza-Gomez, 19, a Colorado Mi Familia Vota canvasser, and Steven Arteaga Rodriguez, a Texas activist with the group, are both “DREAMers” who began their activism careers after applying for and gaining Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program established by Obama to provide living and working status for undocumented young immigrants.

The activist group, which has offices in six states, works for the goal of “expanding the electorate” through “direct, sustainable citizenship, voter registration, census education, GOTV and issue organizing in key states.”

Mi Familia Vota’s board of directors includes labor leader Eliseo Medina, who said in a 2010 speech that immigration reform will create a long-term progressive “governing coalition.”

“My father was deported and I never saw him again before he died,” honored activist Zaragoza-Gomez said in a statement. “I will keep working with Mi Familia Vota to grow Latino voter participation and push for commonsense immigration reform so that one day, other families won’t have to be separated, like I was from my father.”

While the White House is teaming with law enforcement officers, no arrests are expected to be made Tuesday.

The Daily Caller previously reported that Valerie Jarrett held a handful of secret meetings with illegal immigrant activists.

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GOP blasts IRS excuse for losing Lerner emails

The IRS last week sent a letter explaining how it lost some of former employee Lois G. Lerner’s emails from 2009 through 2011, including some from her communications with Democrats in Congress or with other federal agencies, drawing a stern rebuke from Republicans.

The agency blamed a computer crash for the mishap, saying it has tried to collect as many emails as possible.

But Rep. Dave Camp, Michigan Republican and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said it shouldn’t have taken a year for the IRS to tell Congress that it didn’t have all of Ms. Lerner’s emails.

“The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to congressional inquiries,” Mr. Camp said. “There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General.”

Ms. Lerner ran the division that gave unwarranted scrutiny into tea party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status. She retired from the agency last year while under scrutiny for her actions.

Republicans believe her emails will show the extent of the government’s efforts to target the tea party.

Ms. Lerner herself, in some emails that were turned over to Congress, describes some of the files lost in the 2011 hard drive crash as “irreplaceable.”

The IRS said it still has been able to collect 24,000 Lerner emails from the time period in question that it has turned over or will be providing, as part of a total production of 67,000 emails that Ms. Lerner either sent or received.

It’s part of a massive effort to get to the bottom of the tea party targeting.

“The IRS has made unprecedented efforts in connection with this effort, producing more than 750,000 pages of documents to help complete the investigations. In total, the IRS’s efforts to respond to Congress have involved more than 250 IRS employees working more than 120,000 hours at a direct cost of nearly $10 million,” the agency said in a statement.

But Mr. Camp said the emails lost were “critical years” from the beginning of the targeting of conservative groups.

He said the White House must now get involved and demand other federal departments and agencies scour their records for emails to or from Ms. Lerner, since those records will not be available from the IRS.

“Frankly, these are the critical years of the targeting of conservative groups that could explain who knew what when, and what, if any, coordination there was between agencies,” Mr. Camp said. “Instead, because of this loss of documents, we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone.”

The IRS said Ms. Lerner tried to have her hard drive recovered when it crashed in 2011, which was well before the tea party scandal broke and before her emails became a subject of controversy. But the technical staff was unable to recover the data, saying those sectors of the drive had gone bad.

In lieu of her hard drive, the agency went to other agency employees and had them search their files for any emails they might have been included on along with Ms. Lerner.

That’s how they managed to recover the 24,000 emails from that time period.

Still, those are only IRS emails and wouldn’t include messages solely between Ms. Lerner and those in other departments or in Congress.

In a letter Friday to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, House oversight committee Chairman Darrell Issa, who has issued a subpoena seeking IRS documents, said more than 1 million potentially responsive documents have yet to be produced.

“At this rate, the IRS‘ response to the committee’s subpoena will drag on for years,” Mr. Issa wrote.

He gave Mr. Koskinen until Wednesday to produce all of the documents still being withheld, and said if they aren’t turned over, his committee will look at ways to enforce the subpoena.

According to the agency, employees such as Ms. Lerner have some of their “active” emails stored on the IRS centralized network. The rest they can save in their email archive on their hard drive, but those are lost if the hard drive crashes.

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Rep. Steve King: Majority Leader Election Is Rigged For Establishment

Some conservative lawmakers are fuming that the short-time frame between Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s announced resignation yesterday and the election of his successor next week is unfairly “stacking the deck” for the two establishment Republicans vying to replace him.

“At a time when Republicans in Congress are fighting the Obama Administration to oppose snap elections for unions on American employers, Republican Leadership is trying to do the same in the United States House of Representatives,” Iowa Rep. Steve King said Thursday.

“This snap election has the effect of stacking the deck,” he said.

After his surprising lost in his Republican primary on Tuesday night, Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor announced on Wednesday afternoon that he plans to step down as majority leader next month though will serve out the rest of his congressional term.

The GOP leadership has scheduled the elections for next Thursday.

The short turn around, King argues, gives an unfair advantage to California Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, who are both already in the GOP leadership and can quickly consolidate support. King says the quick timeframe makes it too difficult for a conservative alternative to whip up support.

This is believed to have played a role in Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling — someone conservatives were hoping would run — to announce Thursday that he will not enter the race.

With Hensarling not running, conservatives do not have an alternative to run in the election yet. Several other names have been floated, including Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the former chairman of the Republican Study Committee.

“Let’s take more time to get our heads clear and elect a staunch conservative, anti-amnesty candidate to step up and lead the majority,” King said.

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Limbaugh: Cantor Lost Because ‘His Constituency Became Barack Obama And House Leadership’

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary Tuesday night because “his constituency became Barack Obama and the House leadership.”

Limbaugh claimed the Virginia Republican congressman — who had been widely expected to defeat tea party challenger Dave Brat by double digits — “forgot who his constituents are.” While Cantor and President Obama often butted heads, the Majority Leader was more sympathetic to immigration reform than many of his colleagues and may have been the White House’s best chance to push a bill through Congress.

“His constituents ceased to be the people that live in his district,” the radio host explained. “Eric Cantor became a creation of Washington, and his constituency became Barack Obama and the House leadership. That’s why he was doing what he was doing, that’s for whom he was doing what he was doing, and the people of his district finally figured it out, I think.”

“You don’t take pictures of yourself arm-in-arm with Barack Obama when the subject is immigration and expect there to be no kickback, or pushback, on that,” Limbaugh continued. “But the tone-deafness, and, I think, the willing disregard of public opinion on any number of issues, is unlike anything I’ve seen.”

The radio jock noted that it wasn’t always this way — at least with the Republican Party. “The Republicans have always been . . . distant, or not tied to that elitist, establishment existence,” Limbaugh said. “And I think that’s changed.”

“I think the pressures of that town is such — you know, the libs run it,” he noted. “They run it politically, they run it socially — which is crucial — they run it media-wise.”

“All these guys are caught up in this notion that they can’t be confrontational,” Limbaugh concluded. “That that’s going to kill them, it’s going to wipe them out. They’ve got to be agreeable, they’ve got to be bipartisan. Well look where it’s getting them!”

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The Top 8 Consequences of Cantor's Defeat

On Tuesday night, one of the most stunning upsets in Congressional primary history took place, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) losing his primary to economics professor Dave Brat. Brat campaigned on the platform that Cantor was a backer of amnesty legislation; heavy conservative media coverage of the thousands of illegal immigrant youths pouring across our inundated southern border contributed to a sense of urgency. 

So Cantor is out. 

And the landscape has radically shifted, both for the Republican Party, and for the 2014 election. Here are the biggest ramifications of Cantor’s defeat. 

Boehner Is Likely Done. The writing has been on the wall for Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) ever since a failed House insurgency in the aftermath of a coup attempt against his speakership in January 2013. Boehner had been under fire ever since his sequestration deal with President Obama in 2011; his “fiscal cliff” deal with President Obama at the end of 2012 only drove further pressure. Boehner’s repeated attempts to covertly push amnesty legislation have lost him his base. And the departure of many of his top allies in Congress leaves him vulnerable this year. Cantor’s ties to Boehner may signal that a successful insurgency is on the way. Aides are telling the National Journal, “We’re absolutely stunned. Honestly, we really can’t believe it.” 

The “Young Guns” Are Firing Blanks. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Cantor were considered the so-called “young guns” in the House, preparing to take over leadership from Boehner and company whenever he stepped down. Ryan and Cantor have been vocal about their desire for immigration reform legislation this year. Cantor is now gone. And Ryan’s position as a leader is in serious jeopardy. 

The Death of the Tea Party Was Greatly Exaggerated. After the 2012 election cycle, pundits and the chattering class deemed the Tea Party dead. After the last round of primaries, in which Tea Party groups backed incumbents in many races and lost against incumbents in others – ignoring the victory of Ben Sasse in Nebraska, which the media did – the Tea Party had been relegated to the dustbin of media history. Not so much. 

The Conservative Media Has Firepower. Without the power of Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Breitbart News, and others in the new media, the consistent and steady push for amnesty in the House would have gone largely unremarked upon. Instead, it has become a national issue, firing up the base. Ousting a powerful figure like Cantor is not easy. It takes a major movement to do so. That major movement came as a result of scrutiny from conservatives in the media. 

The Corporatists -- Including the US Chamber of Commerce -- Took a Major Hit. The major business interests within the Republican Party, including the Chamber of Commerce, have been heavy backers of amnesty in Congress. They just got outclassed by an on-the-ground grassroots force. The split between those two groups paves the way for an all-out brawl between the corporatist Republican establishment and the Tea Party capitalists come 2016. 

Establishment Candidates Are In For a Rough 2016 Ride. In 2012, Texas Governor Rick Perry saw his candidacy end on the question of immigration. In 2016, Perry will be in the mix again, as will Jeb Bush. Both are perceived as soft on immigration by the base. The establishment Republican Party is significantly warmer to such candidates than the grassroots are. It’ll be cash vs. activism in 2016. In Cantor’s district, activism just won a stunning victory. 

Democrats Will Shift the 2014 Narrative to Immigration. With the conservative base fired up about immigration, President Obama and the Democrats will seize on Cantor’s defeat to once again swerve to the “Tea Party as anti-immigrant extremist” narrative. The goal: to avoid talking about Obamacare and split the Republican Party. It won’t work. The Cantor defeat is the death knell for the immigration reform caucus in the GOP, at least for this cycle, and that means that the party will be more, not less unified. 

Barack Obama Will Use This As An Excuse for Executive Action -- After The Election. Obama has been threatening executive action for years on immigration. And he has the power to blanket amnesty millions, as I’ve written before in this space. But now Obama believes he may have a ray of hope in campaigning on immigration. That will delay any executive action beyond the election. He’d rather campaign on the basis that he needs a compliant Congress on immigration than act unilaterally prior to the election and have to answer questions about abuse of power. 

This is a stunning night for the GOP. And just as in 2010, the establishment and its donors have no idea just what to do about it. The answer should be: unify. 

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The Top 8 White House Bergdahl Lies

It’s been just over a week since Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was released in exchange for five senior Taliban leaders held in Guantanamo Bay, and so far the Obama administration is averaging nearly a lie a day. Here are the top eight administration claims, laid out and debunked in full.

Lie #1: Bergdahl was very sick

Bergdahl’s health was not rapidly deteriorating, as the administration claimed. Reports have leaked that the only medical problems Bergdahl is suffering from are “gum and skin disorders” associated with poor hygiene.

The video of Sgt. Bergdahl’s handover to American forces that was released by the Taliban shows Sgt. Bergdahl looking relatively healthy. In the tape, he is seen walking into the company of U.S. special operations forces and then climbing into the aircraft without assistance. The video also shows him lucid and communicating with his captors. We know from previous reporting that he was able to write down the letters “SF” with a question mark on paper once inside the helicopter, as a way of asking his rescuers if they were special forces. This proved that his fine motor skills were intact, and that he was aware of his surroundings.

It has also been reported that one of the few exchange between Bergdahl’s rescuers and his captors was a question about his health. The Taliban said he was not sick. Finally, reports from Landsthul Regional Medical Center in Germany state that Sgt. Bergdahl has been in stable condition.

Lie #2: The Taliban threatened to kill Bergdahl

To further justify its decision not to inform Congress (in violation of the law), administration officials claimed that there was a threat to kill Bergdahl if details of the prisoner swap were released. But Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has stated that there is no credible information indicating that there was a threat to Berghdal’s life.

Lie #3: The administration informed Congress about the swap

Reports from Capitol Hill have informed us that the administration last discussed the possibility of a prisoner transfer with members of Congress several years ago. At that time, there was bipartisan and bicameral opposition to the idea. The law requires that the administration notify Congress 30 days prior to the release of any detainee from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The administration has admitted that it engaged in negotiations to secure the deal that set Bergdahl free for over a week prior to the swap. During that week, the administration never informed Congress — and only notified congressional leaders after the deal had been reached, after the detainees from Guantanamo were released, and after Berghdal was in American custody.

It appears that the administration chose to willfully violate the law by not informing Congress, as we now know that there was no credible threat to Bergdahl’s life, he wasn’t ill, and the administration was negotiating for over a week with his captors.

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Holder seeks legal team for children on border

The Obama administration announced a program late last week that would provide attorneys for the young illegal immigrant children crossing in waves over the U.S.-Mexico border, saying they want to make sure the unaccompanied minors are getting fair legal representation.

The joint project between the Justice Department and AmeriCorps, the government’s national service organization, aims to recruit 100 lawyers and paralegals to shepherd the children through the immigration system, making sure they are treated properly and can make claims for legal status or protection if they are eligible.

“We’re taking a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement announcing the plan.

“How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings — many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking — goes to the core of who we are as a nation,” he said.

Known as unaccompanied alien children, they are generally from Central America, are escaping poverty, abuse or dangerous gangs back home, and make the harrowing trek through Mexico and across the U.S. border.

The government expects more than 90,000 of the children to be apprehended on the U.S. side of the border this year and more than 140,000 to be caught next year. That doesn’t include the tens of thousands more who avoid capture.

As the numbers have spiked in recent weeks and border officials have struggled to keep up with the flow, Obama administration officials have declared it an “urgent humanitarian situation” and have tried to find ways to make the children’s lives easier once they get into the U.S.

The effort to give the children some legal representation won praise from immigrant rights groups, who said they were happy to see the administration respond to the spike in children with humanitarian aid rather than stiffer enforcement policies.

“They have real protection claims which should be heard. Without legal assistance, the likelihood of them receiving relief goes down dramatically,” said Kevin Appleby, director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ office of migration policy and public affairs.

The spike in children crossing the border without their parents has shaken the immigration debate. Some analysts say it’s proof that the southwestern border isn’t secure — and blame the influx on mixed messages from the Obama administration.

In a draft memo dated May 30, Border Patrol Deputy Chief Ronald D. Vitiello warned that the all-hands-on-deck effort to manage the flow of children is distracting the Homeland Security Department from other critical parts of its mission, including going after gunrunners, drug smugglers and adult illegal immigrants.

He suggested the government needs to find ways to deter illegal crossings — chiefly by punishing those who cross.

“If the U.S. government fails to deliver adequate consequences to deter aliens from attempting to illegally enter the U.S., the result will be an even greater increase in the rate of recidivism and first-time illicit entries,” he wrote in the memo, which was viewed by The Washington Times.

“Releasing other than Mexican family units, credible fear claims and low-threat aliens on their own recognizance, along with facilitating family reunification of [unaccompanied alien children] in lieu of repatriation to their country of citizenship, serve as incentives for additional individuals to follow the same path,” the memo says.

The children, however, present a difficult problem.

Under U.S. law and regulations, they are supposed to be transferred from the Homeland Security Department’s custody to the Department of Health and Human Services, which is supposed to look after them and try to either connect them with their families or place them in foster families.

The legal program will cost $2 million and involve about 100 AmeriCorps members.

Greg Chen, director of advocacy at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the lawyers and paralegals can help in a couple of areas, including making sure the children have an advocate as they go through the complex immigration system.

“Fairness, legal due process [are] all things that children especially would need to have someone guide them through the process,” he said.

He said the immigration lawyers in particular can review each case and see whether the children already qualify for some legal status — in some cases, they may actually be the child of a citizen parent, for example.

They may also have a valid claim they can make for asylum based on conditions at home or for Special Immigrant Juveniles status, which is available to children unable to reunite with their parents.

The AmeriCorps volunteer notice specifically lists both asylum and special juvenile visas as options the lawyers should consider.

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Six Hidden Disasters In Obama’s Bergdahl Disaster

President Barack Obama is hiding information about his decision to trade five top Taliban leaders for a single American deserter.

Obama’s deputies are trying to draw a curtain over the exchange, chiefly by sticking to a narrow set of talking points — a “sacred rule,” the soldier’s health, the Pentagon’s approval, etc.

But the hidden information could worsen his massive P.R. problem and nudge millions of worried swing-voters into the anti-Obama column, just five months before the critical November election.

It seems clear that Obama broke a law requiring that he inform Congress before he released jihadis from Guantanamo. He clearly shredded the credibility of his top national security aide, Susan Rice, who declared that the deserter served with “honor and distinction,” and that he and his aides also incorrectly claimed Bergdahl was in poor health.

But those are relatively minor scandals compared to the emerging elements of what is becoming a very unpopular traitor-for-terrorists swap in the eyes of the public.

What did the Haqqani terror network get out of the deal?

Sergeant Bowe Bergdal deserted his post in June 2009 and was immediately held by the Haqqani network, not by the Taliban’s jihadi army. Yet Obama released five Taliban people — not Haqqani people — in exchange for Bergdahl. So what price persuaded the Haqqani network to give away their prized prisoner to benefit the Taliban? There’s several possibilities, mostly of them bad for the Obama.

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