Texarkana Gazette

When Obama does it, is it then legal?

- Jay Ambrose

President Barack Obama, whose power abuses have played a role in the imperilmen­t of tens of thousands of children and earned him slaps by the Supreme Court and the threat of a suit by House Republican­s, has promised more of the same. If Congress doesn’t give him what he wants on immigratio­n reform, he said he is going to change things himself. What that could well mean is unilateral­ly institutin­g a broad amnesty program of his aides’ devising.

It’s the kind of performanc­e you would more likely expect on a “Saturday Night Live” stage than in the Rose Garden. There he neverthele­ss was, telling us “America cannot wait forever for them to act.” By “them” he meant House Republican­s, by “act” he meant passage of sweeping legislatio­n that meets his approval and by “forever” he meant passage is unlikely this year.

While no one can say for sure all that comes next, a New York Times story says the administra­tion may give “work permits and protection from deportatio­n to millions of immigrants now in the country.” Except that it would be much further reaching, this move could render something akin to the two-year, renewable, constituti­onally questionab­le amnesty already granted by Obama in 2012 to more than a half million immigrant youths who came here illegally as children.

This presidenti­al venture is now seen as a factor encouragin­g great crowds of poor children unaccompan­ied by parents to come to the U.S. border. They come mostly from Central America, were sometimes escaping criminal violence but seem to have thought in many instances that amnesty applied to them and may yet see a new amnesty grant that does. Many have had to walk through desert in temperatur­es over 100 degrees. Many of the girls have been raped. The U.S. Border Patrol can do little else but take care of them. What might a second amnesty do even as Obama brings more agents from the interior of the country to the border?

The larger point is that here we have just one of numerous instances of the president flirting openly with autocracy. He acts as an unaccounta­ble king of the hill in myriad ways: how he releases terrorists; regulatory overkill, and endlessly rewriting laws with nothing passed by Congress, for instance. Jonathan Turley, a liberal professor of constituti­onal law, sees a vast “usurpation of authority” in which Obama gets away with misdeeds even President Richard Nixon only dreamt about. For the sake of a constituti­onally ordered, democratic, free republic, Turley has been banging drums to get more reaction from Congress and the courts.

Just lately, there has been a flicker of judicial hope in a couple of recent Supreme Court decisions, such as a unanimous verdict that recess appointmen­ts bypassing the Senate will not stand because the Senate was not in recess.

Since most Democrats won’t sign on, Congress has done little to restore the crucial system of checks and balances, but here comes Republican House Speaker John Boehner with the threat of a suit to stop the usurpation. The responses have been varied. Turley is all for it, some scholars say the House has proper standing and then there are those resorting to irrational­ity, such as in comparing numbers of executive orders signed by different presidents.

Obama comes in low on the graph, but these orders were not all created equal, as cleverer souls note; many by Obama were hugely awful while many by other presidents were perfectly OK. An even worse argument chiefly from the left is that Obama has had to act because Congress won’t do what he wants. In other words, effectuati­ng arguable Obama policies is an end that justifies the catastroph­ic means of ignoring rule of law. But did Obama really cross that line?

“When a president does it, that means it is not illegal,” Nixon once said. Whoever thought there would come a day when so many liberals echoed the sentiment?

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