Thread: English First:Tell President Obama to Repeal E.O. 13166

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Tell President Obama to repeal E. O. 13166

Dear English First Supporter:

I need your help, today – this very minute – to convince the new Congress and our
new President that E.O.13166 needs to be repealed now, before more billions of dollars are squandered; before more children are cheated out of a decent education; and before more people die because of improperly translated medical information.

As you may know, in the closing months of President Clinton’s term of office, he passed a number of Executive Orders that have caused this nation great harm.

One of the most harmful of these Presidential orders was E.O.13166 which had the effect of making the United States officially multilingual by requiring government, at all levels, all businesses, all vendors, all subcontractors and all those receiving any form of federal benefit to provide all of their services in the language of choice of any recipient.

What most people fail to grasp is how wide a net this insane Presidential order actually covers. In our opinion, it extends to all schools, hospitals, and, very possibly, even places of worship and nonprofit organizations like English First!

Under full implementation, E.O.13166 could require that all hospitals have available translators for every patient that may walk into their emergency room – in all of the 300+ languages spoken in the U.S. Can you imagine what that may do to your hospital bills?

Can you imagine the lawsuits that could happen if a faulty translation causes the wrong medicine to be administered or the wrong leg cut off? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

For eight years, under the Bush Administration, E.O.13166 grew slowly, aided and strengthened by the Bush Justice Department and Office of Civil Rights.

Fortunately, it did not have the full support of President Bush, so its growth was
slow. E.O.13166 was enforced only when challenged by radical pro-Hispanic organizations seeking to further weaken America’s one-language policies.

Throughout the eight years of the Bush presidency, you and I tried again and again to have E.O.13166 repealed by legislation or, more simply, by persuading the President to eliminate this terrible and dangerous order with a simple stroke of his pen.

At different times, we came close. English First managed to get a repeal passed in the Senate and, at another time, in the House. But we failed to get the two chambers to work together in order to produce a bill capable of passing both simultaneously.

Today, E.O.13166 is still in place and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission is still harassing, intimidating and suing various businesses and agencies for not complying fully
with this destructive and dangerous presidential mandate.

But now, E.O.13166 is about to be given a boost by a Congress firmly in the hands of people, like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who seem to have little or no understanding for the importance that our common language had in uniting the American people.

They seem totally unaware that our common language was the glue that held our nation together and enabled people of every nationality, race, color and religion to live and work together, in peace and harmony.

Unfortunately, those in Congress that do understand the importance of keeping all Americans united behind a common language and who support making English the official language of the United States are in the minority, leaving the door open for full implementation.

What would full implementation of E.O.13166 look like? There seems to be no limit to where this order could be applied. It could easily --

* force towns to spend their entire school budget providing multilingual educational services instead of reducing class sizes, improving technology or updating textbooks;

* require multiple translators in hospital emergency rooms, driving heath care costs through the roof while opening the door for faulty and life-threatening translations;

* convince many doctors in areas where non-English speaking communities have sprung up to give up their practice because they cannot afford to pay for translation services.

* force the closure of small hospitals, emergency care facilities, rehabilitation centers and nursing homes due to the costs of translation services and/or the risk of lawsuits.

* require every contractor doing business with the government to be multilingual or risk civil rights lawsuits – this includes every company that does business with the government – from food purveyors to office supply companies to construction companies.

* require organizations like English First to provide its letters, newsletters, websites and blogs in the language of choice of every subscriber - bankrupting many overnight and ending the ability of groups like ours to represent your interests.

Taken to its limit, this insane order could even force churches to provide United
Nation-like headsets to ensure that all visitors could hear the sermon in any of the more than 300 languages spoken in the United States!

Yes, I know this may sound rather far-fetched, but think about this -- E.O.13166 has been the official law of the land for eight years and its full implementation only now has the support of the Congress and agencies like the U.S. Office of Civil Rights and the Justice Department.

And since governments have a natural urge to expand themselves, I ask you … who’s going to stop this from happening?

Will it be President Obama? Or, perhaps, the Congress, now firmly in the hands of the Democrats, whose last President wrote the order? Or, how about the Republican minority who,
when they had the majority and the opportunity to do something about this, lacked the morale courage to defeat it for fear of losing Hispanic votes at the next election?

So who will stop this nightmare from happening? You and I will stop this.

How? Because when Americans see something that is so wrong and so harmful being done by their elected officials, especially when the country is in trouble, they get out of their easy chairs, hopping mad and ready to fight.

Our job, yours and mine, is to focus that anger into a powerful, unifying message that tells President Obama, in plain English that he needs to fix this fast if he hopes to retain the support of the American people.

Impossible? Not at all. President Obama doesn’t need to carry Bill Clinton’s baggage. Why should he defend an issue that seems to go against his own vision for America that includes providing better educational opportunities for all children, especially the under-privileged and unifying the country so we are all pulling together, in the same direction.

Repealing E.O.13166 actually accomplishes both of these objectives by freeing up billions of educational dollars that can now be spent on providing quality education. And what better way to unite all the people than to give them a common language with which they can begin to understand each other.

Of course, it won’t be easy. Reid and Pelosi believe they are indebted to the “spokesmenâ€

Questions Concerning Executive Order 13166

(Q) What is Executive Order 13166?

(A) E.O. 13166 was signed by Bill Clinton on August 11, 2000. E.O. 13166 declared that a person’s language choice was a protected civil right, based primarily on one lower court ruling (Sandoval).

(Q) Will repeal of E.O.13166 mean that federally funded entities which currently assist Limited English Proficient persons in their own tongue may no longer do so?

(A) No. Repeal of E.O. 13166 would simply make provision of services by federally-funded entities voluntary, rather than mandatory.

(Q) What are the costs of E.O. 13166 likely to be?

(A) No one still really knows. SANDOVAL WAS OVERTURNED BY THE SUPREME COURT and the Bush Administration did not enforce E.O. 13166 with vigor.

The Office of Management and Budget's 2001 estimate of medical translation costs found a “low-end calculation [of] .042 per encounter in the health care areaâ€