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Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the resignation of a truly lawless president.
It thus seems ironic that politicians of the same Party as the first president in American history to resign in shame, would be calling the present president “lawless” for, through executive orders, trying to do the job they, the representatives of the people, were elected to do, but will not or can not do — then have the audacity to sue the president.
It is one thing for a lone, little blogger to criticize a do-nothing Congress and to wistfully encourage the president to prevail over such disgraceful “legislative dysfunction” and “unhinged governance” by issuing such lawful executive orders, but it is another thing for the Editorial Board of the New York Times to do so.
On the matter of immigration, the Times Board did so a week ago when, discussing how “Congressional nihilism has created a vacuum,” it pointed out that is now “President Obama’s job to fill it, to keep his promise to end the border crisis and find ways to redirect immigration enforcement and protect possibly millions of families from unjust deportation,” but warned, “Of course, regardless of what he does, the system will still be marked by chaos and pain. And the hard-liners will scream at any action he takes.”
Today, in its Editorial, the Board once again says “Mr. Obama, [it is] your move,” hoping, even predicting, that sometime in late summer the president will respond to Congress’s refusal to act on immigration reform and “will use his executive authority to protect many unauthorized immigrants from deportation.”
The Times believes that “the most obvious thing is to lift the threat of deportation from immigrants who should be the lowest priority for removal: those with citizen children, jobs, clean records and strong community ties.” A group whose size some put at four million to five million, says the Times.
Of course, right-wingers — forgetting the true lawlessness of 40 years ago — will once again call Mr. Obama the most lawless president in history or, as the Times puts it, preemptively declare Obama “Caesar, crossing a Rubicon into lawlessness.”
On the contrary the Times points out:
In truth, Mr. Obama is well within his authority to madden the right. His power to conduct immigration policy is vast. Congress has given the president broad flexibility and discretion to enforce immigration law. It has also given him the resources to deport about 350,000 to 400,000 people a year, as Mr. Obama has done, relentlessly. It could have given him billions more to deport everyone, but it has not.
The Times lists several other practical benefits of and how even the national interest would be served by what it believes will be the president’s use of his executive authority this summer and claims that the country understands these and “was once moving toward an overhaul of the immigration system.”
But Congress, the Times says, “has failed at every turn. Even a small-scale idea — legalizing ‘Dreamers’ who were brought here as children and are Americans in all but name — has been repeatedly stymied by the nativist right.”
Yes, it is certainly and rightfully “your move now,” Mr. President.
Read the Times Editorial here.
Lead photo: A girl and her father stand with some 200,000 immigrants’ rights activists at the National Mall to demand comprehensive immigration reform on March 21, 2010 in Washington DC. Credit: Ryan Rodrick Beiler / Shutterstock.com“>www.shutterstock.com
