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The rumor mills are flying with speculation that before summer is over, Barack Obama will announce one of the most audacious and most cynical moves yet by an Administration that has proven it can be as partisan and mean-spirited as any that’s ever held our Nation’s highest office.
According to the latest speculation, sometime in the next few weeks the President will issue an executive order granting amnesty to as many as five million illegal aliens.
He will do this claiming he has been forced to act because those dastardly Republicans in Congress have refused to cooperate with all those kindhearted Democrats in passing an immigration bill.
But the real purpose behind this Democratic ploy will be to enrage the Republicans who control the House of Representatives and get them to bring impeachment charges against the President.
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Could Democratic strategists actually be this cynical? Absolutely. As they see it, such a ploy would have three major benefits for the Administration:
• First, it would energize the Democratic base, which has been dispirited and lethargic in the face of the massive unpopularity of Obama and his policies.
• Second, it would immediately become the No. 1 issue in the media, distracting voters from things like Obamacare, jihadist triumphs in the Mideast, Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, the Internal Revenue Service scandal and all of the other issues that have led to Obama’s record-low unpopularity.
• And finally, amnesty for illegals would, they think, bind the Hispanic vote to the Democratic Party for years to come — and create millions of loyal new voters when the 11-million-plus illegals who are already here are ultimately granted the right to vote.
In the past, Obama has admitted that he lacks the constitutional authority to do anything like this. For example, three years ago, on July 25, 2011, he said: “I swore an oath to uphold the laws on the books…. Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the [immigration] laws on my own…. That’s not how our Constitution is written.”
Three months later, on September 28, 2011, he repeated that message: “This notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true…. There are laws on the books that I have to enforce.”
And on November 25, 2013, the President said: “If, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so. But we’re also a nation of laws.”
Yes, we are. Or at least we’re supposed to be. As Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer pointed out in his syndicated column: “Laws created by Congress, not by executive fiat. That’s what distinguishes a Constitutional Republic from the banana kind.”
Krauthammer wrote: “An executive order so sweeping and egregiously lawless would be impeachment bait. It would undoubtedly provoke a Constitutional crisis.”
Indeed it would. But some knowledgeable observers believe that is a price that Obama and his advisers are willing to pay to avoid sweeping defeats in the coming midterm elections.
Batten down the hatches, folks. If these rumors are right, the politic scene is about to get a whole lot nastier.
Until next time, keep some powder dry.
Chip Wood was the first news editor of The Review of the News and also wrote for American Opinion, our two predecessor publications. He is now the geopolitical editor of Personal Liberty Digest, where his column appears regularly. This article first appeared in PersonalLiberty.com and has been reprinted with permission.
