From immigration to the environment, progressive organizers have offered their holiday wish list for Obama in his final weeks before Donald Trump takes over
Barack Obama has less than one month left in the White House, and progressive activists are hoping he makes the most of it.
While Donald Trump and his cabinet nominees have threatened to undo many of Obamas signature accomplishments, advocates across fields have argued that there are a number of bold, irreversible steps the White House could take to protect vulnerable Americans from the Republican president-elect.
The outgoing administrations astonish decision this month to deny a permit to the Dakota Access oil pipeline has offered a glimmer of is expected to be liberals, who are preparing for the most difficult. From immigration to the environment, progressive organizers have offered their holiday wishlist for Obama in his final weeks.
Immigration
Obama has deported more than 2.5 million people, a greater number than any other chairman, and activists are pushing him to fix his record by saving hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Trump.
The most widely discussed option is pardoning undocumented immigrants, focusing on the more than 750,000 young persons who entered the US as children and are known as Dreamers. The forgiveness, supported by some House Democrats, wouldnt grant them legal status but would offer deportation protection.
It would create a very difficult situation for President Trump trying to remove somebody from the country who has been pardoned, added Kevin Johnson, dean of the University of California, Davis statute school.
Others have asserted that Obama could also pardon 100,000 to 200,000 immigrants who are legal permanent residents with green cards but have minor criminal records and thus could face deportation.
Obama has said these immigrants are not a priority for deportation, but they could be targeted by Trump. Pardons wouldnt remove the underlying crimes but would build the immigrants no longer deportable, according to Peter Markowitz, a Cardozo School of Law professor who has written on the subject.
These are people he said it attains no sense to rip out of their American families, he said. Its truly a few moments where we are going to see whether he lives up to the commitment to those communities.
David Leopold, immigration attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said this would protect people convicted of low-level offenses, such as misdemeanor marijuana possession.
Advocates have argued that there are hundreds of thousands of additional immigrants with legal status who also deserve forgiveness, even though they were convicted of more serious crimes, such as non-violent narcotic felonies.
Mass incarceration
On Monday, Obama commuted the sentences of 153 federal inmates, the most on a single day by any US president. Some activists are hoping that the proclamation, which included 78 presidential pardons, is just the start of a steady creek of mercy orders.
The president has untethered clemency power, said Brittany Byrd, campaign director of the #ClemencyNOW initiative. Theres no restriction as to what he could do.
Byrds organization has alleged that Obama could adopt a categorical approach, entailing granting mercy to groups of prisoners who are extremely low-risk without doing individual reviews of each case. That could include inmates who have not retroactively benefited from recent sentencing reforms, entailing they would face lighter penalties if convicted today.
If the administration doesnt aggressively process applications for forgiveness, some older inmates could die behind bars under Trump.
Corey Jacobs, one of Byrds clients who is serving his 17 th year of life without parole as a non-violent narcotic wrongdoer, was awarded mercy this week, but others with similar stories are running out of time.
Its always bittersweet, because we know there are many more Corey Jacobs that are still waiting, she said.
Political prisoners
Last-minute presidential forgiveness got a bad name under Bill Clinton, who utilized his final day in office to award compassion to fugitive taxation evader Marc Rich. But there are a host of high-profile political prisoners and exiles who merit Obamas mercy on his final day in office, beginning with the Chelsea Manning.
Manning is currently serving a 35 -year prison sentence for leaking documents to WikiLeaks. Her treatment by the military before her sentence has been widely described as torture, and she has since been denied gender-affirming medical treatment and punished with solitary confinement for a suicide attempt.
The whistleblowers mistreatment is thrown into sharp relief by the two years of probation meted out to David Petraeus, the former CIA director, for disclosing classified information to a devotee.
Other protesters worthy of Obamas mercy include NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden; Oscar Lpez Rivera, the Puerto Rican freedom activist who is one of the worlds longest-serving political prisoners; and Leonard Peltier, who has served more than 40 years in prison for the deaths of two FBI agents. Peltier was a leader of the American indian Movement, and Amnesty International has raised serious concerns about the impartiality of his trial and conviction.
Environment
Obama has protected more land and water than any other chairwoman and has now been cancelled oil and gas leases on indigenous sacred grounds and banned drilling in big areas of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans.
But advocacy groups have argued that there is a lot more he could do to shield the environment from the incoming administration, which has very close ties to the oil industry.
Activists are eager to see Obama finalize national monument protections in three areas in the west Bears Ears in Utah( considered sacred by surrounding Native American tribes ); the greater Grand Canyon area( where a designation would bar uranium mining ); and Gold Butte in Nevada( which has been at the center of the high-profile cattles grazing conflict involving rancher Cliven Bundy ).
Those monuments “wouldve been” permanent, said Aaron Weiss, media director of the Center for Western Priorities.
It would be absolutely unprecedented for a chairman to try to reverse a national monument declaration by a previous president.
Advocates are also pushing for the Obama administration to finalize a proposed oil shale regulation that would increase environmental reporting requirements to better protect air, water, wildlife and other resources in commercial growth rentals.
The supreme court
It has been 10 months since supreme court Justice Antonin Scalia succumbed, and nine months since Obama nominated a qualified if unexciting replacing, Merrick Garland.
The Senate Republican unprecedented intransigence in refusing to allow Garland a hearing, let alone a verification election, is likely to be rewarded by allowing Trump to fill the seat.
On 3 January 2017, Congress will go into recess, letting Obama to construct recess appointments. He can appoint Garland to the supreme court, and even push through the other 58 federal judicial nominees that are pending.
The appointments would only last for one year and would certainly be cause for partisan outrage but so has the Senates refusal to consider Garland.
Transparency
As a candidate, Obama pledged that he would operate the most transparent administration in history. While his eight years in office offered up a mixed bag of open government reforms and crackdowns on whistleblowers, the outgoing president does have an opportunity to finish strong.
On 21 November, a coalition of civil liberties groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sent the Obama administration a list of steps he can take to improve transparency and accountability in his final days in office.
These include declassifying and releasing opinions by the foreign intelligence surveillance court and ensuring that the Senates torture report is preserved for future administrations.
Muslim surveillance
Trumps threats to ban all Muslims from entering the US and to introduce extreme vetting of newcomers have inspired widespread fears of unprecedented surveillance and a Muslim registry.
Obama cant control his successors policies, but he could dismantle the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System( NSEERs ), an openly discriminatory registry that was introduced in the wake of 9/11.
The system was used to way people from majority Arab or Muslim countries and has been widely criticized as an ineffective racial profiling tool. It did not lead to a single terrorism conviction.
The president effectively halted the program in 2011, but the NSEERs regulatory framework remains in place. If Obama rescinded the system wholly, it would make it significantly harder for Trump to build a Muslim registry.
Read more: www.theguardian.com
