By Paul Bremmer
Some analysts believed President Obama waited until after the midterm elections to announce his unilateral immigration-reform package to give Democrats a better chance to keep control of the Senate.
If that was the case, the plan didn’t work out, with the GOP set to be the majority party starting in January.
But conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly believes Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder also used the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, for political purposes.
"I think that Obama and his attorney general really fomented [unrest] in order to hopefully win the election on November 4," Schlafly said. "They wanted to inflame people in order to get their voters out to vote. I think it was deliberately done, and they weren't content to just let the process take its course.
"I think it has backfired, and the Republicans won a tremendous victory despite everything," she added.
A grand jury is deciding the fate of Officer Darren Wilson. An announcement on whether there will be charges could come any day.
Schlafly, whose recently published book "Who Killed the American Family?" came out just days before she turned 90, said Obama and Holder will be culpable if riots break out in Ferguson.
"But whether the public will see it that way, I don't know," she said.
Schlafly, who lives in the St. Louis area, said she and her fellow St. Louis residents are on pins and needles over the threat of violent protests.
"All the St. Louisans are really worried and upset," she said. "They think all the Democrats who have said anything have simply inflamed the problem."
The unrest in Ferguson is not the only bubbling controversy in the country right now. On Thursday, Obama announced deportation relief for up to 5 million people currently in the U.S. illegally.
Schlafly said she thinks that move, like the work in Ferguson, was done for political reasons.
"Obama's moving ahead with his attempt to do all kinds of illegal things in order to bring in illegal aliens and give the Democrats more votes," she said. "That's what it's for."
The veteran activist said she has talked to many immigrants who came to the U.S. as teenagers two or three generations ago. Their parents taught them to leave their native ways behind and fully immerse themselves in America.
"Those people came in and became 200 percent Americans," Schlafly said. "But that's not the class of people coming in now, who don't really have any comprehension of our system of government and look to big government to be their guide of whatever they want to do."
Many people have compared Obama's executive action to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, the act legalized 3 million illegal immigrants already living in the United States.
However, the law never delivered on its promises of stepped-up border security and increased sanctions against employers who knowingly hired illegal workers. The number of illegal aliens in the U.S. subsequently ballooned from 3-to-5 million to 11-to-13 million.
Schlafly said nobody should cite IRCA to justify Obama's executive amnesty.
"The fact is the Reagan amnesty was a mistake, and Reagan admitted it was a mistake; and we should learn that if you do the same thing that has a bad result, you're going to get another bad result," she said.
Schlafly believes the majority of American people disapprove of Obama's executive immigration reform, but she lamented that Republican leadership in Congress does not seem to be willing to fight the president on the issue.
"They seem to be taken in by this propaganda that we should have bipartisan action, and we don't want bipartisan action," Schlafly said. "The American people voted for a change in the November 4 election, and we expect the Republicans to stand up and fight for what's right."