Does anyone remember Schoolhouse Rock?

Remember the short educational cartoons that would play between episodes of Scooby Doo and other cartoons, back in the day? Two that stand out in my head are the ones about "conjunctions" and one about "a bill".

Apparently, the writers at Saturday Night Live remember the episode about the lifecycle of a bill, too. Here's their new version of it.

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/capitol-hill-cold-open/2830152

It's funny! ... how people are now acting like there hasn't been a bill that House Republicans have been sitting on for nearly a year and a half without even taking a vote ...

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/immigration-bill-2013-senate-passes-93530.html

Ben, very true.  Unfortunately.
This country has seen executive orders passed by nearly every president that has been through the Oval office.  To Obama's credit, he's passed the least number of executive orders of any president in the past 100 yrs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/07/10/how-obama-has-used-executive-powers-compared-to-his-predecessors/

Jimmy Carter has the most, and Obama has the least.  Surprisingly, Obama narrowly edged out G. W. Bush for the title.  Yeah, I was shocked to read that too.  Given that Obama has 2 more years in office, it'll be interesting to see if he can still maintain this title.

I was just reading about how similar the stalled Senate bill is to the 1986 immigration reform bill passed by Reagan.

Interestingly, the bill (which granted a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who'd resided in the U.S. for four years) created households in which some people were eligible for the path to citizenship and others weren't. Reagan didn't like this and tried to pass more legislation to close the loophole, but that didn't pass -- so Reagan fixed by executive order:

The bill, however, did not include family members and Reagan responded to this flaw by halting the deportation of their children without waiting for Congress to act. In fact, Congress failed to act during his tenure and Reagan's Republican successor, George H. W. Bush, acted unilaterally to protect families from breakup through deportation.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/224998-the-key-precedent-for-executive-action-on-immigration-that

That's actually all Obama has done -- he hasn't granted anyone citizenship or even a path to citizenship, he's just ruled out deportation as punishment for illegal immigrants who don't fit a set of criteria defined in the source article as:

those who came to the U.S. after Jan. 1, 2014, convicted criminals, suspected terrorists and potential national security threats

In other words, nobody Obama's protected from deportation is newly classified as anything but an illegal immigrant, and certainly won't get the right to vote, as right-wing articles have been screaming ...

conjunction junction what's your function?

can you dig I'm still just a bill?

E Lec Tri City - Electricity!

GWB used signing statements in lieu of executive orders.  Bush had 161 signing statements.  By contrast, Obama has issued only 27 signing statements. The purpose of a signing statement is to define or clarify what the president views as the meaning of the bill, particularly seizing upon ambiguous aspects of it.

With creative use of a signing statement a president can make a law mean anything he wants. It's far more subtle than an executive order, but more sneaky as well.