John Adams, Asshole of the Day for August 6, 2014

by TeaPartyCat ()

As the border crisis continues, with Congress refusing to take meaningful action and settling for show bills and hypocritical statements about executive action, there’s still the problem of where all these kids need to be housed until their fate can be sorted out. Whether they end up with asylum as refugees, or being deported as immigrants, they still must be treated humanely, right?

Well, maybe not. Over in Ohio a state legislator is taking a stand:

The Border Patrol has detained more than 57,000 unaccompanied children since October, the vast majority from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the Associated Press has reported.
The Obama administration is looking for places to house the children temporarily until judicial proceedings can be concluded.

As local governments in Ohio, including Franklin County and the city of Dayton, provide possible locations to house a portion of the immigrant children streaming across the country’s southern border, some state legislators want to block such action.

Agreeing to house the children would cause a city, county or private corporation to lose all state funding under a bill likely to be introduced next week in the Ohio House.

“To me, it’s the philosophical issue of illegal,” said Rep. John Adams, R-Sidney, who will sponsor the bill. “They should be sent back to the country they originated from and go through the process of becoming a legal citizen.”

It’s a pretty odd argument he makes— “they should be sent back”. Yes, they are being detained and processed. They are not being naturalized. But they can’t all get tried the day they show up, so until the courts can catch up, they have to be somewhere, but he seems to think that due process doesn’t matter and they shouldn’t be housed to wait for trial.

And his solution is an odd one as well— deny money to cities helping the federal government. To be clear, cities that find buildings for the government to help house detainees waiting to go through the courts is legal. No laws are being broken here.

But bottom line is he objects to the “illegal” aspect of their presence here. He seems to want Obama to ignore the 2008 law signed by Bush and just throw them back across the border. That would be illegal for Obama to do, but at least Rep. Adams wouldn’t have any child refugees in his state I guess.
So, for penalizing cities for trying to help the government house child refugees, John Adams is Asshole of the Day.

It is John Adams’ first time as Asshole of the Day.

Full story: The Columbus Dispatch

Stephanie Doty
Weary of Wonderland
August 6, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/