WHITE HOUSE or CENTER FOR HISPANDERING?

White House Uses Federal Funds ,“Find a Volunteer Opportunity” (a distinct bias in favor of amnesty)

White House Uses Federal Funds to Steer Volunteers to Pro-Amnesty Groups


As President Obama teamed up last week with former President George H.W. Bush to encourage Americans to perform more community service (Associated Press, October 16, 2009), FAIR’s staff has discovered that a search for “immigration” volunteer opportunities on the administration’s Serve.gov website – which describes itself as “your online resource for not only finding volunteer opportunities in your community, but also creating your own” (About Serve.gov) – has a distinct bias in favor of organizations that support amnesty.

At the Serve.gov website home page, users are prompted to “Find a Volunteer Opportunity” by entering one or more “Keywords” into a search box under the heading “What interests you?” (Serve.gov). Entering “immigration” into the search box takes the visitor to a page outside of the Serve.gov server (All for Good), where the number one result for a search conducted in Washington, D.C. is the “Trinity Amnesty Center” – an organization based just outside President Obama’s home town of Chicago. Clicking on the link for the Trinity Amnesty Center takes the visitor back to the Serve.gov website, where they discover that the Center is seeking volunteers to help “people with immigration problems.” (Serve.gov: Opportunity Sign Up – Trinity Amnesty Center). Another organization that comes up as part of the search results on Serve.gov is CASA de Maryland. According to media reports, CASA de Maryland has lobbied extensively to ensure that illegal aliens would be able to obtain driver’s licenses in Maryland and also worked to help illegal aliens find jobs. (New York Times, December 30, 2005).

Amendment to Require Citizenship and Immigration Questions as Part of Census on Hold in Senate
When the Senate began debate on the annual 2010 funding for the departments of Commerce, Justice and certain science programs on October 7, 2009, Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Robert Bennett (R-Utah) filed an amendment to the “CJS” bill that would have required the Census Bureau, which is part of the Department of Commerce, to include on the census forms questions related to citizenship and immigration status. (See H.R. 2847 and S. Amdt. 2644).

The Vitter-Bennett amendment said: “none of the funds provided in this Act… may be used for collection of census data that does not include questions regarding United States citizenship and immigration status.” (S. Amdt. 2644). During debate on his amendment, Senate Vitter stated that: “the way the census is designed, the House would be reapportioned counting illegal aliens. States that have large populations of illegals would be rewarded for that. Other States, including my home State of Louisiana, would be penalized.” Senator Bennett stated that in “Reynolds v. Symms… the Supreme Court gave us the one man, one vote rule, which said that the districts should be close enough in population that, in effect, every voter had the same weight of representation in the House of Representatives.” Bennett also pointed out that counting illegal aliens in the Senate would “chang[e] the one man, one vote [principle] of the Supreme Court [so that] a State with a large number of illegal immigrants will see to it that its voters have greater representation than voters where the illegal immigrants are not.” In other words, as currently structured, the Census will include illegal aliens as will the Congressional reapportionment that follows. As a result, certain states will have more representation in Congress than they should, which will dilute the value of citizen’s votes in states which have less representation than they should.

On October 13, 2009, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) filed cloture on the “CJS” appropriations bill in an attempt to block a vote on the Vitter-Bennett amendment. This parliamentary maneuver, however, failed as the motion to invoke cloture received only 56 of the necessary 60 votes to pass. (To see how your Senators voted on the motion, see Roll Call Vote 320). Unable to use cloture to block the Vitter amendment, Senator Reid stopped consideration of the CJS bill and instead moved to other legislation. This prompted Senator Vitter to comment that Senator Reid was “going through somersaults right now to prevent there being a direct vote on this amendment because it would be very difficult for [some Democratic Senators] to vote against it.” (The Hill, October 15, 2009).