Complaints that the president's new policies represent a dangerous move towards executive tyranny are incomprehensible
By M.S. | AMSTERDAM
SOMETIMES living abroad leads one to lose perspective on the fine details of the American political debate. Sometimes it allows one to escape from the ridiculous echo chamber of the American political debate. I am not sure which of these phenomena I am currently experiencing, but it is definitely one or the other, because I find the widespread concern that Barack Obama's announcement of new immigration policies represents a dangerous move towards executive tyranny to be incomprehensible. The policies are just that: policies. Congress, should it so choose, can pass a law overriding them in favour of whatever alternative immigration policies it wants. Congress can also pass a law removing the president's authority to establish these sorts of immigration rules at all. The president, in his speech, openly invited Congress to overrule his policies by passing a law, as he has been begging Congress to do for years. What sort of "tyranny" is this supposed to be?
A brief sampling of views voiced by Republicans in Congress in the aftermath of the announcement:
Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, warned against the president’s “brazen power grab.”
Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said that the president’s actions were not only unconstitutional but also “a threat to our democracy,” and promised to “use every tool at my disposal to stop the president’s unconstitutional actions from being implemented.”
And Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, a longtime outspoken opponent of a broad immigration overhaul, said in a phone interview that Congress should fight back by funding all of the government except those agencies carrying out the president’s order.
Mr McCaul should not have to search very long to find a tool at his disposal to stop the president's actions from being implemented. As a member of Congress, he might try proposing a bill, and seeing if he can get it passed. Then, as detailed in this helpful explanatory video, it would become a law, and the president would have to obey it. This seems considerably more direct and less costly than Mr Sessions's idea of defunding the agencies that would carry out the president's orders.
Some people seem to be upset because they think the president, in announcing a relaxation of deportation rules despite his party having just lost an election, is defying the will of the people. I can't make heads or tails of this idea; it gets everything upside-down. If the Democrats had not lost control of the Senate, and Mr Obama went ahead and established immigration policies which Democrats had been unable to push through the legislature—secure in the knowledge that they could still block any Republican effort to override them—then this might represent a bit of a power grab by the executive. Then Mr Obama's invitations to "pass a law" might ring hollow. In fact, though, because of their sweeping election victory, Republicans are about to assume control of both houses of Congress. If Mr Obama's actions really do defy the people's will, Republicans will be in an unparalleled position to undo those actions by passing a law, and to reap the popular approbation that follows. A grateful nation will offer them its tearful thanks. Go ahead, guys! What are you waiting for?
And yet Republicans do not seem to be talking about simply passing a new immigration law. If they are reluctant to do so, perhaps there is a reason. Maybe Republicans hesitate because the public doesn't actually hate Mr Obama's measures so much. In fact, rather inconveniently, the public seems to support immigration policies much more lenient than anything Mr Obama can offer through executive action, including a pathway to citizenship for those who are here illegally.
There is, however, an even more significant barrier to a Republican effort to pass their own preferred immigration policy: as Ezra Klein puts it, they don't have one. Or, rather, they have two—let them in, and throw them out. The former policy is preferred by the Republican party's traditional business constituency, which generally wants to let in lots of highly skilled workers and entrepreneurs to run America's companies, and then let in lots of low-skilled workers to work for them, hopefully making everyone lots of money. The latter policy is preferred by the Republican party's aggrieved Tea-Party base, who have been ruthlessly bending the party to their will over the past four years. (While most Republicans actually favour a path to citizenship, most Tea-Party primary voters oppose it; 37% would support a national effort to deport all undocumented immigrants.) When Republicans cry that they are helpless to overturn Mr Obama's tyrannical actions, what they mean is that they are helpless because they cannot agree on what to do; half of them want to do one thing, and the other half quite vehemently want to do the opposite.
Even the fact that the Republican party is divided in its policy preferences on immigration should not present an insuperable obstacle to passing legislation to override Mr Obama's actions. Moderate, business-friendly Republicans who want to allow some currently illegal residents to stay in America could strike a bipartisan deal with Democrats who share their perspective. This is how a bipartisan immigration-reform bill passed the Senate in 2013, only to die on the vine when Mr Boehner's House refused to take it up. And yet Mr Boehner insists that "the president has chosen to deliberately sabotage any chance of enacting bipartisan reforms that he claims to seek.” How has Mr Obama "sabotaged" such a chance?
The explanation here is the same one that has held throughout the Obama presidency: Mr Boehner refuses to put together a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats to pass a bill over the opposition of his Tea-Party faction. Because the Tea-Party faction's preferred stance on illegal residents is "deport them all", moderate Republicans who want to pass legislation would have to co-operate with Democrats and cut against their own right wing. They would then be vilified as "amnesty"-supporting RINOs, and possibly lose their jobs in the next primary elections to a farther-right candidate.
Mr Obama's new measures have changed nothing in terms of the policies that might form the basis of new immigration legislation. Whatever immigration policies Republicans wanted or did not want on Wednesday, they should want or not want exactly the same policies on Friday. But Mr Obama's announcement has had an emotional effect on Republicans. When Mr Boehner says that Mr Obama has "sabotaged" the chances for immigration legislation, what he is saying is that his Tea-Party faction is a creature of whim and slight, uninterested in policy but hot-tempered at the merest provocation, and that the announcement of new policies has wrecked his chances of hushing the beast long enough to get some sensible legislation past it. Mr Boehner has spent the past four years trying to sell the world on the fantasy that he can reach a compromise with his Tea-Partiers on immigration. He can't. Mr Obama can hardly be held responsible for that problem.
