WASHINGTON POST On An Obama Administrative Amnesty: Don't Worry, The President Wouldn't Do Anything THAT Unconstitutional!
11/15/2013
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Brad Plumer, writing at the Washington Post's WonkBlog, asks "Can Obama legalize 11 million immigrants on his own?" He points out that Marco Rubio warned of this—""this president will be tempted, if nothing happens in Congress,to issue an executive order" , amnesty fans have been asking for it, and Obama has already done it, in the case of the DREAM Act kids . (Which was Rubio's point, although Rubio was using it as an excuse for preemptive surrender.)

Plumer [Email him] then goes on to say that Obama won't do it, because it will be too illegal:

"But, legal experts say, it would be extremely difficult to expand this program to cover all (or even most) of the country's 11 million undocumented immigrants. And Obama only has the power to defer deportation — he can't "legalize" immigrants on his own. That's a key distinction here. True immigration reform ultimately depends on Congress."

Of course, this assumes that  Obama will follow the Constitution, and that if he doesn't, that a Republican Congress will call him on it, neither of them a slam-dunk.

Here's what Mickey Kaus said recently, writing about the Obamacare debacle:

Not too early to think about … :What happens when/if it becomes clear to the White House that not only is most of their agenda stuck in Congress, but the 2014 election will give them no relief–and therefore no domestic second tearm legacy? You’d expect a) lots of executive orders and unilateral actions (pushing the constitutional envelope) b) bold foreign policy moves; c) some kind of meta-panic around, say, March of next year …
In fact, said Kaus Wednesday on Twitter, he might even do it now, because he badly needs a distraction:

In spite of the Washington Post, I say it's worth worrying about.

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