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Like a spoiled child who must always be the center of attention, the president promises to double down on the lawless presidency with an executive edict on immigration. Jonathan Tobin posts on what might result.
… Hispanics may be grateful for the temporary end of the deportations but it will not escape their notice that in doing so the president has ended any chance of immigration reform for the rest of his term. Nor will they be unaware that a GOP successor will invalidate amnesty with a stroke of the pen as easily as the president has enacted them. Republicans will rightly understand that there is no dealing with an administration that would rather go outside the law than first negotiate in good faith with a newly elected Congress on immigration. Nor can they be blamed for thinking any deal based on promises on border enforcement will be worthless with a president who thinks he has the right to simply order non-enforcement of the laws he doesn’t like.
Even more to the point, the orders will create a backlash among the rest of the electorate that always results when presidents begin to run afoul of both the law and public opinion. A lawless presidency is something that is, by definition, dysfunctional, and that is a term that has already defined Obama’s second term up until this point. Democrats who are counting on wild applause from their base should understand that just as Republicans learned that domination by their Tea Party wing undermines their electoral viability, they too should be wary of governing from the left.
The spectacle of mass amnesty without benefit of law will shock ordinary voters, including many who are Democrats or who think the immigration system should have been fixed. After the orders, responsibility for the failure to do so will rest on Obama, not the Republicans. What the president may be doing with these orders is to remind the voters that parties that grow too comfortable with exercising authority without benefit of law must be taught a lesson, one that will be paid for by his would-be Democratic successor in 2016. Rather than building his legacy, the president may actually be ensuring that his time in office is remembered more for his lack of respect for the rule of law than any actual accomplishments.
Free Beacon staff post on liberal Ron Fournier’s reaction to GruberGate.
… “The problem is the central attribute you have to have as any leader, in any walk of life and certainly in government is trust,” Fournier said. “This president has destroyed the credibility of his administration himself and government itself.”
Fournier said the administration’s mistakes, on top of fallout over Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber’s embarrassing comments, have made Obamacare increasingly difficult to defend.
“In the long run, as somebody who would like to see this bill work, I think they have really undermined it,” Fournier said. “And it’s going to be harder to defend it.”
Scott Johnson of Power Line calls our attention to six great minutes on Special Report Monday night.
What is Grubergate all about? It’s about more than Gruber’s obnoxious account of the passage of Obamacare, an account that exposes the illegitimacy of the law’s enactment. It is about more than the corruption through which he has profited handsomely in selling the law. It is about more than the sewage he pumped out for distribution by the White House, by Democratic leaders and officeholders, and by the mainstream media adjunct of the Democratic Party; the sewage was intended for consumption by the American public.
Grubergate is about all of these things and more. I haven’t seen anything that captures the phenomenon better than this six-minute video produced by the team at Fox News Special Report with Bret Baier (below). The video names names and cites sources. It is a superb piece of work and a genuine contribution to understanding. …
Real Clear Politics links to video and transcripts of last night’s Special Report by Brett Baier.
BRET BAIER, SPECIAL REPORT: In Brisbane, President Obama tried hard to downplay Jonathan Gruber’s role in the formation of his health care bill. Gruber, who was not only paid by HHS, but eventually made millions from other federal agencies and states has talked often about his time dealing directly with President Obama.
JONATHAN GRUBER: We had a meeting in the oval office with several experts including myself. …
… SEN. JOHN KERRY: According to Gruber, who has been our guide on a lot of this, it’s somewhere in the vicinity of an $8 billion cost. …
… REP. NANCY PELOSI: I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber’s of MIT’s analysis, in comparison to the status quo vs. what will happen in our bill. …
… SEN. HARRY REID: Jonathan Gruber is one of the most respected economists in the world said in today’s Washington Post, here’s a quote — “here’s a bill that reduces the deficit, covers 30 million people, 30 million more people and has a promise of lowering premiums. …
Peter Wehner says now the president is lying about his lies.
This is getting pathological. According to this story in Politico, President Obama, when asked whether he had intentionally misled the public in order to get the law passed, he replied: “No. I did not.” He actually did, repeatedly. Here’s just one example–on the president’s pledge that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period”–that comes to us courtesy of Glenn Kessler, who works for that well-known right-wing outlet the Washington Post. …
… No American can take joy in saying this, but the evidence clearly warrants it: We have a president who is lying about his lies. It’s not good for him, for the office of the presidency, or for our political culture. He might try telling the truth. At this point it won’t salvage his presidency, but it might begin to repair some of the extraordinary damage to his credibility.
Craig Pirrong, The Streetwise Professor, is in good form when posting on presidential lies.
The Gruber Gone Wild video collection (with a release a day!) demonstrates graphically that Obamacare is a 900+ ply tissue of lies. And Obama himself was the lead retailer of those lies.
Today gives another example of Obama’s mendacity. He came out against Keystone, again, but this time on the grounds that it just helps Canada, and doesn’t benefit the US one whit:
“Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. It doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices,” …
… The mendacity is not all that’s appalling about this statement. One of Obama’s worst habits has been giving allies the back of his hand, while he sucks up to sworn enemies. Canada is a close ally, and has been for decades. Indeed, even now Canada is actually contributing military force to Obama’s otherwise farcical anti-ISIS coalition.
Fat lot of good that it does them. Who needs friends like Canada when you have Iran? Can Canada help Obama build a legacy? No! So what good are they? (Please ignore the fact that the legacy will really be a nuclear arms race in the other Gulf: the Arab/Persian one.)
The sad thing is that we are in for two years of this mendacity. It will be all Alinsky, all the time. Non-stop demagoguery in the service of progressive causes. He lost, but we’ll pay.
So we will have to update Twain. No longer should you say “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” The version that will describe the next two years is: “lies, damn lies, and Obamaisms.”
Matthew Continetti rightly points out some of the big losers will be the Central and South Americans who’ll hit the road north. He also has suggestions for a GOP response to unilateral executive actions.
Last summer the southern border disappeared. Unaccompanied minors from Central and South America surged across the Rio Grande. Desperate parents had sent their children thousands of miles north. The impoverished girls and boys were housed in ramshackle facilities before being sent elsewhere. The images were heartbreaking. They seemed drawn from a post-apocalyptic future. And they were entirely preventable.
Government policy caused the border crisis of 2014. Not the 2008 law granting special protections to unaccompanied minors from countries other than Mexico, an ex post facto explanation meant to blame George W. Bush. It was after Obama’s 2012 authorization of deferred action and work permits for illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as children that such migration spiked. This blatant political move, as well as the president’s repeated pledge to amnesty the rest of the illegal migrant population, spurred the uptick in border crossings. The humanitarian tragedy followed.
Now Obama wants to repeat history. Indeed, he wants to expand the 2012 program so that it encompasses not hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants but millions of them. …
Jennifer Rubin also posts advice for how the GOP can react.
The Republicans are wrestling with a knotty question: How do they thwart President Obama’s unilateral power grab on immigration reform without splintering the GOP, damaging their prospects in 2016 and assenting to a dangerous precedent?
It would seem any approach in response to an executive edict legalizing millions of people should take into account these three concerns, but with two caveats.
First, it may not be possible to stop the president. Nevertheless, they should make sure that the GOP has the most to gain and the Democrats the most to lose if he proceeds.
Second, prospective 2016 presidential candidates will differ widely on what they consider damaging to the party’s prospects, and theirs. Governors who intend to run against WashingtonD.C. might not care if the GOP shuts down the government, wreaks havoc on the country and gets bogged down in a war with the president. They are going to run against D.C., against Hillary Clinton (who will be forced to cheer the action) and against any GOP senators who contributed to the mess. Among the 2016 GOP presidential aspirants in the Senate, Ted Cruz (Tex.) is the most at risk of a meltdown or another government shutdown. He was largely responsible for the first shutdown and another one would eviscerate any hope he might have of being seen as a responsible figure. Meanwhile, he and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) must satisfy their core supporters whose sense of political realism is shaky. …
The immigration move is so outrageous, even David Brooks is aghast.
… This move would also make it much less likely that we’ll have immigration reform anytime soon. White House officials are often misinformed on what Republicans are privately discussing, so they don’t understand that many in the Republican Party are trying to find a way to get immigration reform out of the way. This executive order would destroy their efforts.
The move would further destabilize the legitimacy of government. Redefining the legal status of five million or six million human beings is a big deal. This is the sort of change we have a legislative process for. To do something this seismic with the stroke of one man’s pen is dangerous.
Instead of a nation of laws, we could slowly devolve into a nation of diktats, with each president relying on and revoking different measures on the basis of unilateral power — creating unstable swings from one presidency to the next. If President Obama enacts this order on the transparently flimsy basis of “prosecutorial discretion,” he’s inviting future presidents to use similarly flimsy criteria. Talk about defining constitutional deviancy down.
I’m not sure why the Obama administration has been behaving so strangely since the midterms. Maybe various people in the White House are angry in defeat and want to show that they can be as obstructionist as anyone. Maybe, in moments of stress, they are only really sensitive to criticism from the left flank. Maybe it’s Gruberism: the belief that everybody else is slightly dumber and less well-motivated than oneself and, therefore, politics is more about manipulation than conversation. …
We close with a Washington Post Editorial.
DEMOCRATS URGING President Obama to “go big” in his executive order on immigration might pause to consider the following scenario:
It is 2017. Newly elected President Ted Cruz (R) insists he has won a mandate to repeal Obamacare. The Senate, narrowly back in Democratic hands, disagrees. Mr. Cruz instructs the Internal Revenue Service not to collect a fine from anyone who opts out of the individual mandate to buy health insurance, thereby neutering a key element of the program. It is a matter of prosecutorial discretion, Mr. Cruz explains; tax cheats are defrauding the government of billions, and he wants the IRS to concentrate on them. Of course, he is willing to modify his order as soon as Congress agrees to fix what he considers a “broken” health system.
That is not a perfect analogy to Mr. Obama’s proposed action on immigration. But it captures the unilateral spirit that Mr. Obama seems to have embraced since Republicans swept to victory in the midterm elections. He is vowing to go it alone on immigration. On Iran, he is reportedly designing an agreement that he need not bring to Congress. He already has gone that route on climate change with China. …