'Pass a bill'

In a move that infuriated his Republican critics and drew unspecified pledges to counter it, Obama said nearly all undocumented people living in the country for more than five years and who have a child who is a US citizen or legal permanent resident can apply for a three-year work authorization.

The president also broadened the program he launched in 2012 that provides temporary residency to young undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States before the age of 16.

"There are actions I have the legal authority to take as president -- the same kinds of actions taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me -- that will help make our immigration system more fair and more just," Obama said in a 15-minute speech broadcast from the White House.

The order will affect about 44 percent of the 11.3 million people -- mostly from Mexico and Central America -- living in the United States illegally and doing menial jobs that most Americans snub.

"Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have a chance to get right with the law?" he asked.

But he quickly stressed that the sweeping order, the most comprehensive immigration step in years, "does not grant citizenship, or the right to stay here permanently, or offer the same benefits that citizens receive.

"Only Congress can do that," he added. "All we're saying is we're not going to deport you."

Obama's executive order shifts US policy from a dragnet approach to all illegal immigrants to a focus on deporting convicted felons and those who pose a danger to society.

[...]

"If you're a criminal, you'll be deported. If you plan to enter the US illegally, your chances of getting caught and sent back just went up," he said.

Not really seeing why the Republicans are so mad about this.

"To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: pass a bill." [...] "I want to work with both parties to pass a more permanent legislative solution. And the day I sign that bill into law, the actions I take will no longer be necessary."

Update: Thank goodness; an explainer.

And what are their alternatives? Impotent rage? A government shutdown? A slow-moving lawsuit? A disastrous impeachment effort? A solemn vow that whatever damage Obama does to the constitutional order, Republicans will double it when they retake the White House? All of these are likelier to wound the GOP than Obama. None of these are likely to benefit the party in 2016. And none of them solve the underlying problem.

Nor does continued confusion around immigration help Republicans. Just ask Mitt Romney, who tried to split the difference between restrictionists and reformers by endorsing "self-deportation". That worked well enough that Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, came out after the election to make clear that "it's not our party's position." But that's only because his party doesn't have a position.

That, really, is Obama's advantage right now. Even if you think he's going too far, he at least wants to solve the problem. Republicans don't seem to want to do anything except stop Obama from solving the problem. That's not a winning position. More to the point, it's not a responsible one.

Who's having the worst week?

-- Bill Cosby or Uber?  I say it's a tie.  Vote in the comments if you like.

-- I am refusing to pay much attention to 2016 presidential jockeying, but if you're not like me and want a much-too-early tell for what the GOP is in store for, then here are two articles you can read today.  A prominent local Republican I had lunch with post-election indicated that former governors are at the top of his list, and named Scott Walker specifically.

Jim Webb announced (that he's just, you know, exploring) yesterday.  Because there is a huge unrepresented constituency to the right of Hillary Clinton that the Democrats will need in order to hold the White House in 2016: conservative suburban, exurban, and rural white males who favor the military above all else.

That might be sarcasm; you decide.  Now you know why I ain't paying much attention.

-- The media keep making themselves the story.  This is really getting stale.

-- Leticia Van de Putte will run for mayor of San Antonio, spoiling the hopes of former state Rep. Mike Villarreal, who's already resigned his seat in the Texas House.  It also sets off a scrum for her Texas Senate chair; running first in speculative replacements is TMF.  There's a special election scheduled three weeks from now to replace Jethro Bodine Glenn Hegar in SD-BFE, and taking the early lead there is state representative Lois Kochwhore Kolkhorst.  (Sorry, that was mean.)  Can she out-crook this guy?  Some country gal is already running for K's House seat.

Update (10/22): Turns out Villarreal did not resign, technically (see his letter saying he will 'decline to assume the office').  As QR notes, he may be able re-assume his place in the Texas House.  He's saying he will not, FWIW.  But another GOP House member has quit to work for Archie Bunker Sid Miller at Ag, so there will be one more HD special election called at some point.

Now you know why I haven't posted about the makeup of the next Lege yet.  Not much left in the way of breaking news; far right moves farther right, same as with our Washington representation.  Plenty of time to take a look at that, probably after Thanksgiving and maybe after all these special elections.

-- Ben Hall is running for mayor of Houston once more, and has gotten busy destroying his credibility all over again.  I thought rich people were supposed to be smart.

I got nothing else.  Still recovering from the latest (and extremely powerful) version of The Crud, and still need to close out my books for 2014.  Talk amongst yourselves in the comments.

While we wait

... for Obama to bust his move on immigration reform, a few leaks begin to trickle.

President Barack Obama is poised to give relief from deportation to millions of undocumented immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens or of permanent legal residents, according to a source familiar with White House deliberations.

Obama has promised to lay out the details of an executive order on immigration. The action could come as early as this week.

The source, who asked not to be identified, said some details were not yet available on which parents of citizens or permanent residents would be included. The Obama administration, the source said, had been looking at options including those parents who have been living in the United States for five years or 10 years.

A top Obama aide is scheduled to have lunch with Senate Democrats on Thursday on Capitol Hill. White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, who will discuss the state of the economy and the post-election legislative agenda, is likely to be pressed on the immigration issue in the closed-door luncheon.

On Monday, in an interview with Univision, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, said that Obama should move on immigration "now."

Obama is expected to take actions to allow some undocumented people to live here at least temporarily without the threat of deportation and to hold jobs in the United States. Obama's executive order could also include further border security steps, according to sources. Obama is expected to stress that he wants to focus efforts on deportations of illegal residents with serious criminal backgrounds.

He might be waiting on the Ferguson grand jury's decision regarding the indictment of Michael Brown's murderer.  If he is, then the immigration news will take a back seat for a few days.

Update: He's not waiting much longer.  It makes sense that he would do it in the evening for primetime TV cameras.  (As opposed to the Ferguson grand jury matter, which will almost certainly be announced in the early hours of some morning, as far from nightfall as they can manage.)

... for Missouri to explode, and engulf the rest of the nation.

A St. Louis suburb that faced weeks of sometimes violent protests following August's fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white policeman remained on edge on Wednesday as it waited to learn if the officer would face charges.

A grand jury has been meeting for nearly three months, considering whether to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson for the Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown, an incident that laid bare long-simmering racial tensions in the mostly black city.

There's been some taunting going on as well.

Some of Wilson's supporters have been almost agitating for a showdown. One raised money to purchase a billboard with the slogan, "Pants Up, Don't Loot," playing off the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" rallying cry of Ferguson protesters. A Missouri chapter of the KKK threatened "lethal force" against protesters.

It's no exaggeration that the rest of the country is nearly as tense as Ferguson.  Not joking.

... to see how many more Texans will have to die from exploding or leaking toxic chemicals before Republicans and those who vote for them start demand some accountability.

On Saturday morning, four workers died at a DuPont chemical plant that manufactures the pesticide Lannate in La Porte, Texas after a leak of the poisonous gas methyl mercaptan. A fifth was hospitalized but later released. The plant hasn’t been visited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 2007.

Such a deadly accident without an explosion or fire is unusual, according to the Wall Street Journal.

[...]

The plant is also out of compliance with hazardous waste management and air emissions standards from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to records reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The agency brought formal enforcement actions against it for violations in 2012 and 2014, resulting in $117,375 in penalties. DuPont is also in discussions with the EPA and Justice Department about these issues at the La Porte plant, which began after a 2008 inspection.

And over the last five years, the plant was cited for violating state law at least two dozen times by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, according to a review of state records by the Texas Tribune, for failures related to performing routine safety inspections, keeping equipment in working order, and preventing pollution leaks. Most recently, it released 36,500 pounds of sulfur dioxide over the course of three hours in September, well above the allowed limit, and in August last year it leaked 40 pounds of chlorine. Some of the more serious citations resulted in fines of a few thousand dollars.

Too bad the families of the dead La Porte DuPont employees didn't drive around and ask.

... for Uber to suffer some blowback for being the world's latest, greatest corporate assholes.  It's got to happen sooner or later, right?

Right?

Senate votes tonight on Keystone, NSA reforms

-- Approval of the Keystone XL pipeline falls one vote short of cloture -- 59-41 -- just minutes ago.

After six days of political wrangling and vote-whipping, the Senate failed to pass a bill on Tuesday forcing authorization of the Keystone XL pipeline, dashing hopes of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) to add the vote to her list of accomplishments heading into a tough runoff election.

Fifty-nine senators voted for the bill, one short of the 60 needed to clear a filibuster. Fourteen Democrats joined all the Senate Republicans in voting for the bill, which was cosponsored by Landrieu and John Hoeven (R-N.D.). The House passed companion legislation on Friday from Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Landrieu's opponent in the runoff election.

Landrieu said going into Tuesday's debate that it was "one of the first debates I've been in in eight years where the outcome is uncertain." She added, however, that she went into the debate "knowing in my heart we have 60 votes. I hope we've got the courage that supports that."

But that last vote never materialized.

The Landrieu Rescue Gambit is very likely also a failure.  The new Senate will take up the measure again in 2015, with an eye toward 67 votes... the number needed to override a presidential veto.

Update: Here are the 14 Democrats who voted 'aye'.

Mark Begich (Alaska)
Michael Bennet (Colorado)
Tom Carper (Delaware)
Bob Casey (Pennsylvania)
Joe Donnelly (Indiana)
Kay Hagan (North Carolina)
Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota)
Mary Landrieu (Louisiana)
Joe Manchin (West Virginia)
Claire McCaskill (Missouri)
Mark Pryor (Arkansas)
Jon Tester (Montana)
John Walsh (Montana)
Mark Warner (Virginia)

Begich, Hagan, Pryor, Walsh, and probably Landrieu won't be in the Senate next year, replaced by Republicans whose no votes don't add to the tally.  Republicans in 2015 who will switch Democratic yes votes include Ernst of Iowa, Gardner of Colorado, Rounds of South Dakota, and Capito of West Virginia.  Meaning they still don't have 67, but that won't slow them down any.

"If you look at new Congress, you can count four more (GOP seats) right away, and there may be others," Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, the lead sponsor of the bill, said after the 59-41 vote Tuesday. "You can see we're well over 60."

Hoeven acknowledged that Republicans would need 67 votes to override a veto, but said one possibility is to include Keystone in a larger energy package that may not prompt a veto threat.

Update (11/19): Or Obama could cut a deal with Republicans.

President Barack Obama might be open to using the Keystone pipeline as leverage with Republicans if they cooperate on other aspects of his long-stalled domestic agenda, such as investing in infrastructure, closing tax loopholes or reducing carbon emissions.

After years of fighting over TransCanada's crude oil pipeline from Canada, a Keystone deal is not entirely out of the question, sources inside the administration and others close to the White House told Reuters on Tuesday.

-- The Senate will also decide tonight how much spying on Americans -- and to what extent -- will continue happening.  Vox:

The original version of the USA Freedom Act, introduced by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) in October 2013, had a number of provisions on the wish lists of civil liberties groups. But by the time the legislation was approved by the House of Representatives in May 2014, it had been watered down so much that leading civil liberties groups opposed it.

So, in July, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced his own version of the USA Freedom Act in the Senate. It is less radical than the original USA Freedom Act, but places more limits on the NSA than the legislation approved by the House.

Debate over the USA Freedom Act has focused on the best way to rein in bulk collection of Americans' phone records. The Senate version of the legislation requires any collection of phone records to focus on a suitably narrow "selector" — a search term that identifies an individual, phone line, or other specific entity.

The Senate bill would also take some other steps to make the NSA's activities more transparent and accountable. Right now, when the government asks the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to approve surveillance activities, there is no one around to present opposing arguments. The Senate bill would change that by creating several new positions for public advocates who could participate in FISC proceedings.

The bill would also require the government to disclose significant FISC opinions (though the government could decline to publish them if it decides doing so would damage national security) and to publish detailed statistics about the extent of domestic spying activities.

Here's the most interesting part; who stands against the legislation and why.

Advocates at both extremes of the surveillance debate oppose the bill. From the pro-surveillance side, former NSA director Michael Hayden and former attorney general Michael Mukasey recently blasted the bill as "NSA Reform That Only ISIS Could Love." At the opposite end of the political spectrum, some hard-core civil libertarians are opposing the bill for being too soft on the NSA.

Interestingly, Kentucky's two Republican Senators, Rand Paul and majority leader Mitch McConnell, oppose the bill for opposite reasons. Paul thinks it doesn't go far enough, while McConnell believes it ties the NSA's hands too much. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, agrees with McConnell.

The bill will need 60 votes to overcome an expected filibuster.

More there about how the various amendments to be offered might strengthen or weaken the bill.  I'll update here with the final vote later tonight (or tomorrow morning if they go on all night).

Update:

The Senate on Tuesday blocked a bill to end bulk collection of American phone records by the National Security Agency, dealing a blow to President Barack Obama's primary proposal to rein in domestic surveillance.

The 58-42 vote was two short of the 60 needed to proceed with debate. Voting was largely along party lines, with most Democrats supporting the bill and most Republicans voting against it. The Republican-controlled House had previously passed its own NSA bill.

The legislation would have ended the NSA's collection of domestic calling records, instead requiring the agency to obtain a court order each time it wanted to analyze the records in terrorism cases, and query records held by the telephone companies. In many cases the companies store the records for 18 months.

The revelation that the spying agency had been collecting and storing domestic phone records since shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was among the most significant by Edward Snowden, a former agency network administrator who turned over secret NSA documents to journalists. The agency collects only so-called metadata — numbers called, not names — and not the content of conversations. But the specter of the intelligence agency holding domestic calling records was deeply disquieting to many Americans.

The bill had drawn support from technology companies and civil liberties activists. Its failure means there has been little in the way of policy changes as a result of Snowden's disclosures.