Divider-in-Chief (24 page)

Nearly two years later, in April 2010, Obama sounded similar in demonizing opponents of amnesty. “You can try to make it really tough on people who look like they, quote, unquote look like illegal immigrants,” Obama told a crowd in Ottumwa, Iowa.
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“[N]ow suddenly if you don't have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you're going to be harassed, that's something that could potentially happen.”
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Obama was referring to SB 1070, Arizona's immigration law, which was signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer in 2010. Critics, including President Obama, said it encourages racial profiling. But the bill was modified specifically to address those concerns. It allows police only to check the immigration status of someone stopped for other reasons.

Lawsuits were filed challenging the law's constitutionality and compliance with civil rights statutes. Eric Holder's Department of Justice filed suit and also asked for an injunction against enforcement of the law. The Obama administration argued that the law's provisions clash with the federal government's role in setting immigration policy.
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In April 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court began considering the constitutionality of SB 1070. During oral argument, the justices did not seem to buy into the administration's contention that the federal government can stop Arizona from enforcing immigration laws, telling government lawyers that the state appeared to want to assist federal officials, not conflict with them.

“It seems to me the federal government just doesn't want to know who's here illegally,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said at one point.
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Even some of the liberal justices appeared not to buy the Obama administration's arguments. When the solicitor general argued that Arizona's enforcement of immigration undermined federal authority, the court's first Hispanic justice, Sonia Sotomayor, replied, “You can see it's not selling very well.”
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Liberals followed Obama's lead and demonized the statute. Ignoring the clear language of the law, news outlets portrayed it as allowing racial profiling. Public protests took place in more than seventy cities. An economic boycott of Arizona was led by the Reverend Al Sharpton (who else?).

Despite the uproar, the law was not controversial among the general public. A Rasmussen Reports poll found that 60 percent of Americans supported the law, while just 31 percent opposed it.
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A Gallup poll found that of the 75 percent of Americans who had heard of the law, a majority—51 percent—were in favor of it, compared to just 39 percent who were opposed.
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Numerous other polls came to similar conclusions.

The law received bipartisan support in Arizona. Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords defended some of the motivation for the bill. She said her constituents were “sick and tired” of the federal government failing to protect the border, that the current situation was “completely unacceptable,” and that the legislation was a “clear calling that the federal government needs to do a better job.”
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Twenty House Republicans sent a letter to Holder that stated, “Not only does this lawsuit reveal the Obama administration's contempt for immigration laws and the people of Arizona, it reveals contempt for the majority of the American people who support Arizona's efforts.”
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President Obama personally weighed in numerous times, repeatedly mischaracterizing the law and demonizing its supporters. He labeled it “misguided” and suggested that it “undermines basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”
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Obama's immigration fear-mongering reached a low point in a speech at the U.S.-Mexico border in May 2011 when he mocked Republican demands that a border fence be erected as a condition to immigration reform. “Maybe they'll need a moat,” he said. “Maybe they'll want alligators in the moat.”
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Obama even targeted Mitt Romney. “We now have a Republican nominee who said that the Arizona laws are a model for the country,” Obama
said in an interview with Univision in April 2012.
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“These are laws that potentially would allow someone to be stopped and picked up and asked where their citizenship papers are based on an assumption.”

When the reporter interjected to describe such stops as “racial profiling,” Obama didn't disagree. Instead, he reinforced the falsehood, responding, “Very troublesome... this is something that the Republican nominee has said should be a model for the country. So what we need is a change either of Congress or we need Republicans to change their mind, and I think this has to be an important debate... throughout the country.”
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As Obama knows well, he's minimizing the chances for “an important debate” when he denigrates those who support the measure as proponents of racial profiling.

In late June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the most controversial part of SB 1070 was constitutional. In a 5 to 3 decision (Justice Elena Kagan recused herself because she served as President Obama's solicitor general when the federal government filed the original lawsuit against the state), the court upheld the part of the law that requires an officer to make a reasonable attempt to determine the immigration status of a person stopped, detained, or arrested if there's reasonable suspicion that person is in the country illegally.

Three parts of the law were ruled unconstitutional, including a provision that would have made it a state crime for an immigrant not to be carrying papers, another allowing for warrantless arrest in some situations, and another forbidding illegal immigrants from working in Arizona.

Governor Brewer nonetheless called the decision “a victory for the rule of law.” She added in a news release, “It is also a victory for the 10th Amendment and all Americans who believe in the inherent right and responsibility of states to defend their citizens. After more than two years of legal challenges, the heart of SB 1070 can now be implemented in accordance with the U.S. Constitution.”
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It is clear Obama's divisive tactics are not addressing the issues Hispanics care about most. A June 2012 Gallup poll found Hispanic voters
prioritized numerous issues ahead of immigration, including the economy, health care, and economic growth.
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But with nothing to offer Hispanics or anyone else on the economy, Obama continued to pander on immigration. On June 15, 2012, Obama issued an executive order that allows illegal immigrants under age thirty who came to the United States as children and who do not pose a risk to national security to be eligible to stay in the country and apply for work permits.

While many immigration groups were happy about the announcement, it was an overtly political move made for electoral gain. South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham denounced the rule change as “possibly illegal” because it bypasses Congress.
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Even Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who generally supports the substance of the measure, said that by going around Congress, Obama had made it “harder to find a balanced and responsible long-term” solution.
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Henry Bonilla, a former Republican House member from Texas, told
Politico
that Hispanics understand that if Obama's true conviction was to legalize young illegal immigrants, he would have done it upon taking the oath of office. “People are smart and they see through that,” he explained.
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Even many of Obama's allies who support immigration amnesty saw cynical politics in the move. “In many ways, President Obama's unilateral shift in immigration policy was a bluntly political move, a play for a key voting bloc in the states that will decide whether he gets another term,” reporters for the
New York Times
wrote.
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“But as political moves go, it held the potential for considerable payoff. It sent a clear signal to fast-growing Hispanic populations in Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia and other states that he understood their frustration at his lack of progress so far in addressing problems with the immigration system and reducing the number of deportations.”
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A writer for the United Kingdom's leftwing
Guardian
newspaper wrote that she was initially “elated” at hearing about the decision. “Yet, as the initial shock wears off, I can't ignore a rising sense of skepticism in response to the president's nakedly political move in an election year.”
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Or as a
Politico
article put it, the decision was “a loud message to Hispanic voters to remember Obama in November.”
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A 2011
Politico
op-ed by Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, argued that Hispanics know Obama is pandering to them in his vilification of Republicans and his posturing on immigration issues. Aguilar concluded: “This doesn't mean that the majority of Latinos are going to vote Republican. But it does mean that many will consider voting for the Republican candidate. If the GOP nominee gets at least 40 percent of the Latino vote—and can win states like Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico—Obama could possibly be defeated in 2012.”
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There is another factor, too. In his efforts to slice and dice the American voting public, to play the balkanizing game of identity politics, Obama might have failed to recognize that when he emphasizes issues like gay marriage for his well-heeled homosexual constituency, he could be helping to alienate an already restive Hispanic constituency.

And if Obama's war with the Catholic Church and other religious groups continues over issues of freedom of religion, his support among Hispanic voters could erode even further. Though it has worked for him so far, Obama's politics of theatrics over substance, of dividing the electorate into balkanized groups to which he can deliver empty, demagogic messages of hope and change, might just have run its course.

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n February 18, 2009, less than one month after starting his job as Obama's U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder delivered a speech to Justice Department employees marking Black History Month in which he declared, “We are a nation of cowards on race.”
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Holder—America's first black attorney general—said race “is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation's history, this is in some ways understandable.... [But] if we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”
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Holder's words now seem more than a little ironic. For Holder has often used the Justice Department he leads to deepen America's racial divides. Under Holder, the Department of Justice is accused of systematically ignoring civil rights cases in which blacks are the alleged perpetrators, invoking Jim Crow in response to states' attempts to cut down on voter fraud, and suing the state of Arizona for overtly political purposes when the state attempted to enforce the nation's immigration laws.

After the 2008 election, the Bush Justice Department brought a case against two members of the New Black Panther Party who were videotaped in front of a Philadelphia polling place dressed in military-style uniforms and allegedly hurling racial slurs and threats while brandishing night sticks.

The Anti-Defamation League, Southern Poverty Law Center, and U.S. Commission on Civil Rights all consider the New Black Panthers to be a hate group. And the Philadelphia incident was a fairly straightforward case of voter intimidation. The Bush Justice Department filed suit against the New Black Panther Party, accusing it in a civil complaint of violating the Voting Rights Act.

The Obama administration initially pursued the case, but then moved to dismiss the charges after the accused New Black Panther members agreed not to carry deadly weapons near polling places in 2012.

J. Christian Adams, a former lawyer for the Justice Department, quit his job over the agency's failure to pursue the case further. And, in testimony before the Commission on Civil Rights, Adams described the department's unwillingness to pursue cases involving black defendants as “pervasive.”
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By not pursuing the case, Holder was exhibiting the very cowardice he had just told the country to move beyond.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for extensive disenfranchisement of black voters across the country. Today, voter disenfranchisement is almost non-existent. In fact, illegal voter registration and voting is a far greater problem. But Holder and the Obama administration have political reasons to revive fears of discrimination against minority voters.

In a June 2012 speech, Holder told members of the Council of Black Churches that the sacred right to vote faced “the same disparities, divisions, and problems that—nearly five decades ago—so many fought to address.”
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He said, “In my travels across this country, I've heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from citizens, who—often for the first time in their lives—now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation's most noble ideals; and that some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang in the balance.”
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