Legally,
President Obama has reiterated the principle that he can pick and
choose which U.S. laws he wishes to enforce (see his decision to reverse
the order of the Chrysler creditors, his decision not to enforce the
Defense of Marriage Act, and his administration’s contempt for
national-security confidentiality and Senate and House subpoenas to the
attorney general). If one individual can decide to exempt nearly a
million residents from the law — when he most certainly could not get
the law amended or repealed through proper legislative or judicial
action — then what can he not do? Obama is turning out to be the most
subversive chief executive in terms of eroding U.S. law since Richard
Nixon.
Politically,
Obama calculates that some polls showing the current likely Hispanic
support for him in the high 50s or low 60s would not provide enough of a
margin in critical states such as Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, or
perhaps also in Florida and Virginia, to counteract the growing slippage
of the independent vote and the energy of the clinger/tea-party activists.
Thus, what was not legal or advisable in 2009, 2010, or 2011, suddenly
has become critical in mid-2012. No doubt free green cards will quickly
lead to citizenship and a million new voters. Will it work politically?
Obama must assume lots of things: that all Hispanics vote as a block in
favoring exempting more illegal aliens
from the law, and are without worry that the high unemployment rate
hits their community among the hardest; that black voters, stung by his
gay-marriage stance, will not resent what may be seen as de facto
amnesty, possibly endangering his tiny (and slipping) lead in places
like Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. And because polls show
overwhelming resistance to non-enforcement of immigration law,
Obama also figures that the minority who supports his recent action
does so far more vehemently than the majority who opposes it. Time will
tell; but my gut feeling is that his brazen act will enrage far more
than it will delight — and for a variety of different reasons. As with
all his special-interest efforts — the Keystone cancellation,
war-on-women ploy, gay-marriage turnabout, and now de facto amnesty —
Obama believes dividing Americans along class, ethnic, gender, and
cultural lines will result in a cobbled together majority, far more
preferable than a 1996 Clinton-like effort to win over the independents
by forging a bipartisan consensus.
Economically,
why would we formalize nearly a million new legally authorized workers
when unemployment is approaching its 41st consecutive month over 8
percent — especially when Democrats used to label 5.4 percent
unemployment as a “jobless recovery”? Here in California, the slowing of
illegal immigration,
due mostly to the fence and tough times, has led to steep wage hikes
for entry-level and farm labor, and given a little more clout to
Americans in so-called unskilled-labor fields. In other words, it really
is true that the real beneficiaries of border enforcement are low-paid
Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans who become more valued when
they are not competing with virtually unlimited numbers of illegal-alien
workers.
When
you collate this recent act with the class-warfare rhetoric, the
“punish our enemies” threats, the president’s and Eric Holder’s serial
racialist statements, the huge borrowing, the national-security leaks,
the takeover of health care, the push for redistributive taxes, and even
the trivial appointments like a Van Jones, Anita Dunn, or Armendariz,
you can fairly conclude that Obama
most certainly did not like the way the United States operated for the
last 30 or so years, and has tried his best, through hook or crook, to
change America in ways that simply were not possible through legislative
or even judicial action. Give the president credit. He has thrown down
the gauntlet and essentially boasted: This is my vision of the way the
new America should work — and if you don’t like it, try stopping me in
November, if you dare.
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