Congress gets chance to do its job on immigration

Even in our divided politics, it should be a matter of consensus that the president of the United States can’t write laws on his own.

That’s what President Barack Obama did twice when he unilaterally granted amnesties to swaths of the illegal immigrant population. The courts blocked one of these measures, known as DAPA, and President Donald Trump has now begun the process of ending the other, DACA, on a delayed, rolling basis.

In a country with a firmer commitment to its Constitution and the rule of law, there’d be robust argument over how to deal with the DACA recipients — so-called DREAMers who were brought here by their illegal-immigrant parents as children — but no question that Congress is the appropriate body for considering the matter, not the executive branch.

Instead, President Trump is getting roundly denounced by all his usual critics for inviting Congress to work its will. Obama came out of his brief retirement to join the pile-on. In a Facebook post, the former president said it’s wrong “to target these young people,” and called Trump’s act “cruel” and “contrary to our spirit, and to common sense.”

This is a lot of hyperventilating, even for a former president of the United States who must loathe his successor. Trump’s decision is a relatively modest way to roll back what is clearly an extralegal act.

The president goes out of his way to minimize disruption for current DACA recipients. The administration will stop accepting new applications for the program but will continue to consider two-year renewals for recipients whose status is expiring between now and March 5. This gives Congress a sixmonth window for its own solution before anyone’s status changes.

The proximate cause of the Trump decision was a threat by the attorney general of Texas and other states to bring a suit challenging the legality of DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Attention had to be paid, because Texas and other states successfully got the other Obama unilateral amnesty, DAPA, enjoined by the courts.

In his post, Obama waves off the legal challenge. He says DACA is based “on the well-established legal principle of prosecutorial discretion.” He maintained the exact same thing about DAPA, and that didn’t save it in the courts, including the Supreme Court.

True prosecutorial discretion involves a case-by-case determination by authorities. Obama’s executive amnesties were sweeping new dispensations designed to apply to broad categories of illegal immigrants. They didn’t involve simply deciding not to prioritize the deportation of the affected illegal immigrants, but the conferral of various positive benefits on them, most importantly work permits.

This is clearly a new legal system for these immigrants, and in fact, President Obama once slipped and told an audience, “I just took action to change the law.” Prior to DACA, Obama repeatedly said that he didn’t have the authority to implement his own amnesty absent congressional action — before doing just that.

Now, Trump is giving Congress another chance. It has gotten out of the practice of legislating, but it isn’t hard to see the parameters of a deal: a codification of DACA, putting it on firm legal footing, in exchange for enforcement measures. Whatever Congress arrives at, it will have more legitimacy than the jerry-rigged legislating of a president wielding a pen and a phone.

Obama’s executive amnesties rendered the left’s warnings about Trump during the campaign a little tinny. What was the worst a President Trump could do? Push for legislation, and when it failed, impose it on his own? Obama had already done it, and neither the former president nor his supporters have second thoughts, yet warn hourly of Trump’s threats to our constitutional system.

President Trump has exercised his powers foolishly at times, but he’s never exceeded them. What Obama calls, pejoratively, the White House shifting “its responsibility for these young people to Congress” is really just basic civics. Congress writes the laws, even when it’s not to Barack Obama’s liking.