In this week’s address, President Obama says that the United States Senate will soon take action to fix our broken immigration system with a commonsense bill, and urges lawmakers to act quickly to pass this bill so that we can continue to live up to our traditions as a nation of laws, and also a nation of immigrants.
The bill before the Senate isn’t perfect. It’s a compromise. Nobody will get everything they want – not Democrats, not Republicans, not me. But it is a bill that’s largely consistent with the principles I’ve repeatedly laid out for commonsense immigration reform.
This bill would continue to strengthen security at our borders, increase criminal penalties against smugglers and traffickers, and hold employers more accountable if they knowingly hire undocumented workers. If enacted, it would represent the most ambitious enforcement plan in recent memory.
This bill would provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million individuals who are in this country illegally – a pathway that includes passing a background check, learning English, paying taxes and a penalty, and then going to the back of the line behind everyone who’s playing by the rules and trying to come here legally.
This bill would modernize the legal immigration system so that, alongside training American workers for the jobs of tomorrow, we’re also attracting highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers who will grow our economy. And so that our people don’t have to wait years before their loved ones are able to join them in this country we love.
Senator Marco Rubio spoke on the Senate floor about the scandalous behavior of the current administration. He calls this a pattern, “a culture of intimidation of hardball politics.” According to Rubio, “in the span of four days, [there were] three major revelations about the use of government power to intimidate those who are doing things that the government doesn’t like. These are the tactics of the third world. These are the tactics of places that don’t have the freedoms and the independence that we have here in this country. And it is shocking to Americans that this would come to light in the way that it has. I would submit to you, however, that none of this is new. That what we see emerging here is a pattern, a culture, a culture of intimidation, of hardball politics that we saw both on the campaign trail and now through the apparatus of government.”
The Republican National Committee produced the above ad during last election, but never aired. The ad was based on Hillary Clinton’s famous “3 AM Phone Call” ad from the 2008 Democratic primary election. The RNC added video of the burning U.S. consulate in Benghazi as background footage while the phone is ringing. The phone call, supposedly from someone at the Benghazi consulate, is never picked up.
Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) was on Fox and Friends this morning to talk about the upcoming Benghazi whistle-blowers. According to him, “we were certainly misled at every step of the way. To hear from the administration that there was nothing wrong here — the accountability review board has looked at this and there’s nothing wrong, and what you’re doing is just political.” He believes we were purposely mislead in September because the truth would have been bad for President Obama’s re-election campaign.
On Fox News Sunday, Representative Chaffetz claimed the Obama administration has suppressed the whistle-blowers in the State Department. According to Chaffetz, “they’re scared to death of what the State Department is doing to them. And that’s what — look, we’re the other branch of government. They’re supposed to be able to come to Congress and be able to share this type of information. That has not happened, because the administration has suppressed them.” He goes on to say, “this is a story of the State Department doing things that haven’t been in any other case.”
President Obama gave the commencement speech to Ohio State graduates May 5th, 2013 in Columbus, Ohio. During the speech he told them to reject voices that speak of government tyranny.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.
We have never been a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems. We shouldn’t want to. But we don’t think the government is the source of all our problems, either. Because we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it’s not about what America can do for us, it’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government. And class of 2013, you have to be involved in that process.
Here is the complete speech from President Obama;
“A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.”
- Benjamin Franklin
In the Weekly Republican Address, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory contrasts Washington bureaucracy and weak presidential leadership with the success of the nation’s 30 Republican governors who are using efficient leadership to improve the daily lives of their citizens. Yet despite state-based innovations in such critical areas as energy independence and health care, governors still need Washington to grant states more flexibility, independence and accountability, Gov. McCrory contends. “I urge the President to join us in North Carolina where we’re working to make government a partner, not an impediment to our progress. Working together, we can get this nation back on the right track by simply unleashing the unlimited potential of the American people,” Gov. McCrory concludes.
