Sessions: Immigration Bill Will ‘Hammer’ Americans

Posted 1 hour ago by & filed under Conservative Wisdom.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said Friday the Senate’s immigration bill will “hammer working Americans.” Sessions has been a vocal opponent to the immigration reform bill, stating that the bill gives preferential treatment to foreign-born workers over US job seekers.

“This is far, far too many low-skilled workers that are going to take jobs and pull down wages of people unemployed and underemployed right now,” Sessions, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Fox Business. “It’s really, really dangerous.”

The bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on a bipartisan 13-5 vote and will head to the entire chamber to Senate approval. Sen. Bob Menendez said on Friday the bill does not yet have 60 votes.

Sessions pointed out that the union for the officers that guard the border opposed the immigration bill. He went on to say, “We all believe that we need to make this legal system of immigration better. This bill just does not do it, and it can’t pass in this form.”

    




Source: Breitbart Feed

Desperately seeking waivers: Union disgruntlement with Obamacare spreading

Posted 1 hour ago by & filed under Conservative Wisdom.

**Written by Doug Powers

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Last month, a 22,000 member United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers — the same one that endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and lobbied for passage of Obamacare — called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

The list of those unions who are starting to realize they may have sawed off the same branch they were sitting on is growing:

Some labor unions that enthusiastically backed President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul are now frustrated and angry, fearful it will jeopardize benefits for millions of members.

Union leaders warn that unless the problem is fixed, there could be consequences for Democrats facing re-election next year.

“It makes an untruth out of what the president said — that if you like your insurance, you could keep it,” said Joe Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. “That is not going to be true for millions of workers now.”
[...]
“We’re concerned that employers will be increasingly tempted to drop coverage through our plans and let our members fend for themselves on the health exchanges,” said David Treanor, director of health care initiatives at the Operating Engineers union.

And by “there could be consequences for Democrats facing re-election next year” they mean “we expect an across-the-board waiver from the law we lobbied for pronto!“

One for the “epic backfire” file:

Bob Laszewski, a health care industry consultant, said the real fear among unions is that “a lot of these labor contracts are very expensive, and now employers are going to have an alternative to very expensive labor health benefits.”

“If the workers can get benefits that are as good through Obamacare in the exchanges, then why do you need the union?” Laszewski said.

I’m sure the Dems will desperately try and work out an agreeable “fix” to the problem well before the 2014 elections.

Until then, we’ll close with the obligatory Obama promise:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Source: Michelle Malkin

WaPo poll: America divided on Obama’s uniting

Posted 1 hour ago by & filed under Liberal Dribble.

President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton appear together in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House for statements and to answer questions from the media, December 10, 2010.
No president is immune from partisanship and partisan atitudes.

No president, it seems to me, can escape politics – JFK

The Post Partisan Unity Schtick as a “demonstration project” (demonstrating Obama is the “adult in the room” and the GOP is why we can’t “come together”) is not a success:

[T]he country is split literally down the middle on Obama’s ability to unite/divide it is a telling indication that the man who pledged he could change Washington has struggled mightily to make good on that promise.

The numbers in the WaPo poll:

Forty-seven percent of Americans say that Obama has done more to unite the country during his time in office while 45 percent say he has done more to divide it — a statistically insignificant difference. Among registered voters, it’s 47 percent uniter and 47 percent divider.

This should surprise precisely no one.

But it does make ridiculous the claim that Obama’s Post Partisan Unity Schtick was an effective demonstration of how Republicans are the problem when it comes to bipartisanship. I suppose some might point to the 49-43 numbers in favor of the president among independents but my view is that is a function of overall approval, which for the president is 51 percent.

I suppose one could argue that Obama would be doing even worse on this measure (which begs the question of how much does it matter to be viewed as a uniter anyway?) but that is unconvincing, at least to me.

In any event, as a defense of the Post Partisan Unity Schtick, it seems like thin gruel, at best, to me. I think Sean Wilentz’s citing of JFK is instructive:

President Kennedy is sometimes cited as an anti-partisan who held party hacks in disdain—or so a few liberal writers and historians such as James MacGregor Burns have persuaded themselves. But Kennedy relished being his party’s chieftain, and astutely understood the imperatives of party and party leadership, which he explained as well as anyone has. “No president, it seems to me, can escape politics,” Kennedy observed in 1960, as he began his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. “He has not only been chosen by the nation—he has been chosen by his party. And if he insists that he is ‘president of all the people’ and should, therefore, offend none of them—if he blurs the issues and differences between the parties—if he neglects the party machinery and avoids his party’s leadership—then he has not only weakened the political party as an instrument of the democratic process—he has dealt a blow to the democratic process itself.” Kennedy went on to say that he preferred the example of Abraham Lincoln, “who loved politics with the passion of a born practitioner.”

 


Source: Daily Kos