While the establishment media has largely ignored this story, and its profound implications for constitutional liberty, today the Supreme Court will hear United States v. Texas.
This case is the challenge to Obama’s amnesty for illegal aliens, the so-called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program, an expansion of the earlier Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The lawsuit was brought by governors and attorneys general from Texas and twenty-five other states.
Under these unconstitutional programs, Obama claims the right to, by executive fiat, make an illegal alien “lawfully present” in the U.S. and eligible to receive a work permit after an application is reviewed (typically merely rubber stamped) and a fee is paid.
According to our friends at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the core issues of the states’ case are that the DAPA program:
(1) DAPA violates the president’s constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
(2) DAPA was promulgated without public notice and comment.
(3) DAPA is in excess of agency authority.
Other major legal issues include:
(4) Is DAPA discretion?
(5) Is DAPA an interpretive rule?
(6) Does the Executive have authority to grant DAPA recipients work authorizations?
Nearly all the media attention has been focused on the discretion issue to the exclusion of all the others.
But is it really just discretion to not prosecute when, under DAPA, the government is handing out work permits and making illegal aliens eligible to work in the United States as well as to receive Social Security, unemployment, and disability benefits?
Obama explicitly claims that he has unlimited authority to allow any alien to work — unless Congress explicitly prohibits it. Except that even when Congress explicitly prohibits such work (as with illegal aliens), the president still claims authority to grant it. Obama also claims authority to make any alien “lawfully present” in the United States. In other words, Obama claims to have the power to allow any alien to be in and to work in the United States.
The real issue in this case is not “discretion,” but whether or not there is any limit at all on presidential power.
President Obama’s announcement that he was unilaterally offering amnesty to youthful illegal immigrants was further confirmation that Obama’s administration is the most lawless in American history.
However, Americans should not really be surprised that Obama took this path – it was, after all, apparently in his political interest to pander to radical sentiment among some Latinos, and it was in Obama’s words “the right thing to do.”
Notice there was no mention of “the constitutional thing to do.”
The Framers of the Constitution recognized that “the right thing to do” was a plastic concept, readily molded to fit political expediency – that’s why they created a system of checks and balances to ensure that no individual or cabal could gain absolute power or control the levers of government power without check.
But what happens if the executive, in this case Barack Obama, simply ignores the law, or refuses to enforce it?
As ConservativeHQ Chairman Richard A. Viguerie and attorney Mark J. Fitzgibbons pointed out in their e-pamphlet “The Law the Governs Government,” for many years the political establishment has shown contempt for the Constitution and rigged the rules to protect and hide its lawbreaking.
From unilaterally granting amnesty to a select group of illegal aliens, to trampling on the religious freedom and freedom of conscience of American Catholics and other Christians, to using unmanned drones to gather information for federal regulatory and law enforcement agencies, to ignoring Congressional subpoenas, to trying to use the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the Internet even after a federal court held it had no authority to do so this endemic government lawbreaking has gotten progressively worse under Obama.
In the Federalist No. 44 James Madison wrote that:
the success of the usurpation [of power by the Congress] will depend on the executive and judiciary departments, which are to expound and give effect to the legislative acts; and in the last resort a remedy must be obtained from the people who can, by the election of more faithful representatives, annul the acts of the usurpers.
What Madison meant was that voters provide the final answer when government is presented with an intractable situation or gridlock. Such is the case now.
Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign on the issue of illegal immigration, and being the message carrier for America’s forgotten country class voters on that issue has sustained Trump through a series of blunders that would have destroyed any other candidate.
The Republican majority in Congress has consistently failed to act, will the federal courts rein-in the executive, or will the people have the ultimate say at the ballot box?
We are about to see.
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