The hard truth of President Obama’s usurpation of legislative authority over immigration by offering a green card to under-30 “children of illegals” who have lived and schooled here for several years, is that most people are for it. It’s popular, not just among the Latino community. But everyone.
Point for Obama, most analysts say, and the Latin American vote is likely to pile up in Obama’s corner in several key swing states, my own (Virginia) included.
Now, this assumes that the legal Latinos will switch their vote from “nea” to “yea” because of this “gesture” (that’s what it is, folks, a gesture), notwithstanding their own communities’ suffering under the heavy hand of Obama’s regal, management-from-the-top economy.
(Like the Chinese, Latinos are inveterate from-the-bootstraps, bottom-up capitalists, and will leap at any opportunity to improve their economic lot. That’s why so many illegals come here in the first place, to get that first leg-up. Leftwing “handlers” such as La Raza, who got their spurs organizing labor in the California fields, know that newly arriving Latinos must be immersed into the welfare system quickly, as the Democrats did with the blacks with civil rights legislation, or they may lose their political support. So their vote in bad economic times is never a sure thing.)
What Obama did last week he told supporters only two years ago he couldn’t do…legally or constitutionally. He was right then. But he rolled the dice and it seems to have worked, in part, because the “apparent” goodness of it trumps the illegality. It was good politics, and as we’ve seen with Fast and Furious, all the pundits, including the inimitable Dr Krauthammer drop even the pretense of outrage that once again the law has taken a back seat to political grand gestures in a campaign season. Remember how they all waxed euphoric about what a great liar Bill Clinton was?
Obama timed his order (it’s been partially operational at ICE for several months) to coincide with his expected defeat in the Arizona immigration case before the Supreme Court and the efforts of Sen Marco Rubio to forge a consensus for legislation that would have made legal what Obama has now done illegally. Obama did not want to be upstaged by a potential running mate of Romney’s. Nor did he want a piece of legislation today that was more narrow that the original Dream Act, which he swears he’d sign today if laid on his desk. He does not want a narrow legal act today, filled with common sense goodness, but one that expands the power of government as the original Dream Act does.
It’s a bait and switch.
So Romney’s path is clear. He needs to come out hard by saying there is a right and wrong way to achieve a good thing. The president’s chosen path was was wrong…illegal and unconstitutional, and he can even provide video of Obama saying the same.
That while we want to do the right thing, we need to adhere to the constitutional process, for by allowing presidents to circumvent law, we’re subsidizing that being done again, and again, and what’s worse, we diminish the people’s power to rise up in righteous indignation to undo it in the process.
I am quite sure President Obama wanted to create yet another precedent here for executive action in lieu of constitutionally mandated legislative action, just as he did when he ordered the execution of an American citizen on foreign soil, under the authority of a “finding” by (you guessed it, Attorney General Holder). And no doubt, history will show, he authorized the illegal sale of guns to drug cartel killers in Mexico in the same manner.
Romney doesn’t need to editorialize, as I have just done here, but I think the American people will agree fully that a good thing should be fully debated and done legally, through the Congress, rather than by the hand of an imperial president. Since ICE long ago stopped ordering those children to be deported, there is no hurry. Let’s do it the constitutional way.
We can’t subsidize illegal acts, so don’t sugar-coat it, Mitt. Call the president out on this. This is not a time to be afraid of laying this card on the table.
