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Why the GOP is really mad at Obama for helping Latino students

LatinaLista — As I reported last week, the criticisms thrown Obama’s way by GOP politicians over the new deferred deportation policy for undocumented students were swift, furious and numerous.

Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King

On Sunday, GOP reps twisted and turned in their seats on the Sunday morning talk shows criticizing Obama for not working with Congress to do something to help these young people.

That line of talk is about as believable as an Obama campaign rep saying the move wasn’t political.

The fury over Obama’s move — that he would actually undermine the GOP party’s make-Obama-a-one-term-president strategy — provoked Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King to announce that he was going “to bring a lawsuit and seek a court order to stop implementation of this policy.”

Rep. King contended that President Obama violated the US Constitution in exercising his Executive Powers. However, Lyle Denniston from the website Constitution Daily wrote that Rep. King is better off not wasting the court’s time.

Article III, the part of the Constitution that gives the federal courts their powers, is a major barrier to Rep. King’s lawsuit, and very likely will lead to its dismissal in court. Article III regularly has been the basis for federal courts’ refusal to get into the middle of “separation of powers” conflicts between members of Congress and the White House.

No federal court has authority to decide any lawsuit unless it involves an actual “case or controversy,” and that means that the lawsuit must have been filed by someone who will suffer some specific kind of legal injury from government action, and it must have been the type of injury that can be fixed by a court ruling.

…Republicans, of course, were also troubled about the politics of the new policy: they said it was timed to have an impact on this year’s election, in a blatant bid by the President for support from Hispanic voters. But that, too, is an argument that courts do not attempt to settle.

Mr. Denniston’s last statement is the crux of the anger by some GOP politicians over the new policy because now instead of being able to tell Latino voters that Obama has done nothing in fulfilling promises made to Latinos in 2008, they can’t risk saying a whole lot, except, of course, for the extremists in the party who are anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-women’s rights, anti-taxing of the wealthy and anti-president-of-another-color who don’t care a bit about losing the Latino vote.

Yet, for those in the party who understand the power of the Latino vote and were betting that Obama would continue his practice of reciting, “Can’t we just get along?” and not rock the boat by taking a leadership role on a highly controversial issue, they were thrown off balance and off message.

They can no longer make Obama look like the bad guy without further jeopardizing the image of the GOP in the eyes of Latino voters — and being caught between a rock and a hard place is enough to make anyone mad.

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