Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.
Sir Walter Scott (Marmion, 1808
I started, a couple of days ago, what I assure you would have been a brilliant analysis of President Trump's actions, to the extent there actually were any, on DACA; the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order that President Obama put in place. But George F. Will, who is a full time pundit, as opposed to me, who must relegate my activities to my free time, beat me to it, darn it. He said nearly the exact same things, in his Willian style, that I was going to say in mine. And as he's a heavy weight pundit, while I'm definitely in the amateur league, I'll defer right away to him on that.
Will actually looks at two such topics, but his discussion on DACA was right on the mark.
I've discussed immigration here before and accused both parties in Congress of doing nothing on it. This is a byproduct of that. President Obama's action which has been styled DACA is actually an unconstitutional determination for the Executive not to enforce the law. He made the decision as almost nobody is comfortable with applying the law to the people it applies to here, which would be illegal aliens (let's cut the crap on "undocumented", we all know that means illegal aliens) who were brought here and who few up in the United States. We can wax romantically about and call them "Dreamers" or act hostily and call some criminals, but most are just regular young people who have grown up as Americans with foreign born parents, a category that includes a lot of other people, most of whom did not have parents that violated the law to get in the country. The feeling is that deporting these people would be unjust. And I agree it would be.
But that doesn't mean that the doesn't say what it says. An a governmental Executive Officer does not have the liberty to not apply the law, although this is at least one of two such examples that I can think of in which the Obama Administration determined to do just that. You can find others, no doubt, throughout our nation's history, but this one is spectacularly unconstitutional and legalistic in that it even contemplates registration of the illegal in order that the Executive Branch can help them evade the law.
Now, it's clear that something needs to be done about this, and sooner or later something would have been. Nobody ever filed a Petition for a Writ of Mandamus on this issue, but if anyone had, the Court's would have almost certainly told the Executive Branch to knock it off and do its job (a Writ of Mandamus is just that, a Court order instructing a government official to do his job in some specific way that he is not). No modern President has ignored such an order and as far as I can recall only Andrew Jackson ignored the Courts in regards to an illegal executive order, that being his order to deport the Cherokee.
It's orders like that, in part, that should give us real pause about executive orders not being challenged. President Obama was seeking to prevent an injustice, but Jackson committed one, and every time an order like this goes unaddressed it tees up an inevitable situation, sooner or later, in which a President goes too far in a direction like that. Executive Order 9066, which lead to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two was another such example. The President simply cannot do that.
But the modern Congress has let Presidents act just that way, which is frankly to act like being a President comes with dictatorial powers. Its encouraged it by sitting on its hands and not voting on the tough issues.
It needs to.
Except kids brought in by their immigration law evading parents. They truly aren't at fault.
But a Democratic Party that sees every immigrant as a future Democratic voter, and a Republican Party that has tended to see every immigrant as a menial labor in a Republican factory or Republican lawn, has conspired to do nothing. That's given us this mess.
Does that mean those who fit into the DACA category should be deported?
I'm sure some think so, but most think not.
Is that what Trump said he was gong to do?
Well, whatever he said in the past, it's not actually what he said here. Indeed, as DACA is illegal anyway, he's basically doing nothing so far which continues, for at least six months, the same institutionalized result the illegal executive order did. Which is what most people want.
And Congress knows what most people want in regards to at least these people.
Will it act?
It has an immigration bill before it. Maybe it'll actually take it up and remember what its job actually is supposed to be.
That will be a big chore for it. But solving this problem, which can be more easy to solve than people suppose. But it will require both parties to act like adults on a serious problem. So far, they haven't been able to on this issue. Maybe now they have to.
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