Amnesty as Impeachment Bait

[Draggingtree]

National Review:

AUGUST 7, 2014 8:00 PM

Amnesty as Impeachment Bait

The president’s breathtakingly cynical plan to ward off a midterm shellacking

 

By Charles Krauthammer

President Obama is impatient. Congress won’t act on immigration, he says, and therefore he will. The White House is coy as to exactly what the president will do. But the leaks point to an executive order essentially legalizing an enormous new class of illegal immigrants, perhaps up to 5 million people.

 

One doesn’t usually respond to rumors. But this is an idea so bad and so persistently peddled by the White House that it has already been preemptively criticized by such unusual suspects as (liberal) constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, concerned about yet another usurpation of legislative power by the “uber presidency,” and the Washington Post editorial page, which warned that such a move would “tear up the Constitution.

 

If this is just a trial balloon, the time to shoot it down is now.

[Draggingtree]

Executive Power and Immigration

 

John Yoo

August 14, 2014

 

Rumors abound that President Obama is soon to issue an executive order granting millions of illegal aliens some kind of legal status in the country and creating a permit system that would allow them to work. Current federal immigration law requires the deportation of these aliens and creates no work permit program. Most people admit that Congress has delegated no authority to the President to create classes of legal and illegal aliens — that is Congress’s job, which it has carried out by statute. I think the proposed order is unconstitutional — but unlike previous examples of Obama’s failure to enforce the laws, it is open to challenge in court.

 

The President has the constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” (Article II, Section 3). That includes the discretion to allocate enforcement resources to best execute federal law, because the government

 

For those interested in a fuller legal discussion of the issue, see my article in Texas Law Review, available for free download here:

 

http://ricochet.com/executive-power-immigration/