President Obama has a DREAM: to ignore Congress if it suits his needs.
In a Rose Garden speech yesterday, the president announced he was suspending the deportation of some young illegal aliens and allowing others to apply for green cards.
This essentially puts into effect the so-called DREAM Act — a highly controversial measure that he couldn’t get through the Democrat-dominated Congress two years ago.
To be fair, there is a lot to be said on behalf of the merits of the new policy — more on which below.
First, however, it must be noted that:
* What the president did yesterday was clearly meant to boost his increasingly shaky re-election prospects. It may well have been the most nakedly political act of his incumbency — and was underscored by four combative slaps at the Republicans during his brief remarks.
* It demonstrated contempt for the legislative process; Obama had declined to implement such a policy several times in the past, insisting that only Congress had the power to do so.
* It underscored yet again his inability to bring Congress to his side on a controversial issue — or, more likely, demonstrated his unwillingness even to try.
Indeed, the fact that there is significant merit to the new policy — that is, it shouldn’t be a tough case to make — simply emphasizes his ineffectiveness.
Some 800,000 young people — most brought illegally to America as children by their parents — are affected.
Such kids are in a tough spot as adults seeking to attend college or work — and anyone who thinks there ever will be a political consensus to round them up en masse and expel them is hallucinating.
But that doesn’t address the constitutional issues — as Obama once pretended to understand.
In March of last year, he was asked at a Univision-sponsored town hall, “With an executive order, could you be able to stop deportations of students?”
After noting the separation-of-powers issues, Obama said that there are many immigration laws on the books and “that for me to simply, through executive order, ignore [them] would not conform with my appropriate role as president.”
A month later, as Democrats urged more direct action, “a senior White House official” told The New York Times: “At the end of the day, the president cannot fix administratively what is broken in the immigration system.’’
That was then. This is now.
“The [DREAM Act] bill hasn’t really changed; the need hasn’t changed,” the president said yesterday. “It’s still the right thing to do. The only thing that has changed, apparently, was the politics.”
Precisely.
But such pandering and disrespect for process comes with a price.
As Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — who is introducing his own version of the DREAM Act — observed: “By . . . ignoring the Constitution and going around Congress, this short-term policy will make it harder to find a balanced and responsible long-term one.”
Not that Obama seems to care.