Amnesty and Impeachment

Absent the credible threat of impeachment, Obama will pardon millions of illegal aliens.


We have to face those consequences. We don’t get to avoid them by being reasonable, moderate people who recoil from the I-word. Nor, in the matter of illegal immigration, is there any funding cut or loopy congressional lawsuit that can dissuade this president. There is either a credible threat of impeachment or a transformational mass-amnesty. That’s it.
National Review
By Andrew C. McCarthy
November 8, 2014 4:00 AM

There is high anxiety over President Obama’s impending unilateral amnesty order for millions of illegal aliens. How many millions? The estimates vary. On the low end, 3 to 8 million, assuming some correlation to the potential beneficiaries of the president’s already existing amnesty decrees (including DACA or Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals).

On the high end, as many as 9 to 34 million, factoring in likely categorical expansions of amnesty and their ramifications over the next several years.The anxiety stems from a remorseless truth that no one — most especially Mr. Obama’s most ardent detractors — wants to confront. It is the truth I have addressed, to much groaning and teeth-gnashing, in Faithless Execution, my recent book on presidential lawlessness.

It is this: The nation overwhelmingly objects to Obama’s immigration lawlessness, but it has no stomach for the only effective counter to it — the plausible threat of impeachment.

To hear the demagogue-in-chief tell it, the controversy over how to deal with the approximately 12 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. is a Manichean debate between enlightened humanitarians and vulgar xenophobes. (To be fair to the president, he is far from alone in peddling this smear.) But objections to Obama’s reckless immigration policies — indeed, to his policies in general, as this week’s historic election reaffirmed — cut across party and philosophical lines.

To be sure, the most intense protest is heard in “restrictionist” circles and among those for whom rule-of-law and national-security concerns trump sympathy for the plight of legions of decent but unlawfully present non-citizens (some of whom were brought here as children and are blameless for their illegal status). There are also, however, many enthusiasts of immigration amnesty — the euphemism is legislative “reform” — who recognize that the president’s sweeping, dictatorial approach is angering the public. That damages not just the cause but the career prospects of those who’ve made the cause their own.

So, on immigration, the president has managed to unite much of the country . . . against him — who says he’s divisive? Nevertheless, Obama made clear again this week that he intends to push ahead with massive amnesty by executive order. Further infuriating the public with his cynicism, he has strategically but quite openly delayed his directive until after the election, as if to say, “The rubes are too stupid to grasp what I’m doing even when I make no secret of it!”

As Faithless Execution recounts, the delegates at the 1787 Philadelphia convention included impeachment in the Constitution because they believed it to be “indispensible” (as Madison put it) to preventing the abuse of executive power. Congressional authority to remove a president would be a decisive check. Still, the Framers reckoned it would rarely be invoked.

To turn back most instances of executive overreach, less drastic remedies would do the trick. The ballot box, for one: The Framers high-mindedly assumed that an imperious, corrupt, or incompetent candidate would not be elected, much less reelected. In addition, the power of the purse would enable Congress to cut off the funds a president would need to carry out reckless or lawless enterprises; and requiring Senate approval of presidential appointments would give lawmakers additional leverage to bend the president into compliance with the law and the public will.

But here’s the problem: Obama has no more elections to worry about; and, other than impeachment, the rest of the arsenal designed by the Framers is impotent when it comes to most of his immigration scheme.

That scheme implicates three closely related but importantly distinct considerations: the lawless status of the aliens in question; non-enforcement of the immigration laws against them; and the conferral of legal status on them. On the first two, the president’s power to forgive law-breaking and refrain from law-enforcement is plenary. The abuse of these powers is essentially irresistible . . . except by impeachment. As for the third consideration, even though the president has no direct power to confer legal status or benefits (e.g., work permits) on aliens, that technical deficiency could be overcome by the abusive exploitation of the aforementioned powers he undeniably has.
I acknowledge in Faithless Execution that to refrain from invoking impeachment as the credible threat the Framers intended it to be is a rational political choice. My point is that it is a choice fraught with consequences.

We have to face those consequences. We don’t get to avoid them by being reasonable, moderate people who recoil from the I-word. Nor, in the matter of illegal immigration, is there any funding cut or loopy congressional lawsuit that can dissuade this president. There is either a credible threat of impeachment or a transformational mass-amnesty. That’s it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...rew-c-mccarthy