Barack Obama learns a little jujitsu.
Over the past several weeks, President Obama has threatened to go around and without Congress to impose some form of immigration reform. He has threatened Congress. He has had his surrogates like Dick Durbin come out and say “It’s not a bluff! He’ll do it! Really! He will!. Not. A. Bluff.”
Well, today the president had little TV moment to lays his cards on the table. Sure enough, it wasn’t a bluff. He was holding a pair of 2’s Ace high, and he wants Republicans to be very intimidated by that.
“America cannot wait forever for them to act,” Obama said from the Rose Garden. He said he’s launching a new effort to “fix as much of our immigration system as I can, on my own, without Congress.”
The president is pushing for new executive actions in defiance of Boehner’s threat last week to file suit against the president over alleged executive overreach. Even before Monday’s announcement, Boehner and his colleagues alleged that the president has gone too far in making changes without Congress to immigration policy, the Affordable Care Act, environmental regulations and other issues.
This new push would go further still.
A senior White House official said Obama will first direct the Homeland Security and Justice departments to “move available and appropriate enforcement resources from our interior to the border.” Further, the president has directed a team to “identify additional actions and send recommendations to him by the end of the summer on steps he can take without Congress, but within his existing authorities, to fix as much of our broken immigration system as we can.”
Those are executive branch actions. He could have done all of that without making a grand moment out of it. Well, it was an attempt at a grand moment. In reality, this president has probably never looked smaller.
Obama also asked for increased penalties for persons who smuggle immigrants who are vulnerable, such as children. The request is part of a broader administration response to what the White House has called a “humanitarian crisis” on the border.
Which he provoked, by audaciously deferring action against many illegal aliens who are already here. The man’s lack of humility and humanity are catching up with him.
Obama is asking Congress for emergency money that would, among other things, help conduct “an aggressive deterrence strategy focused on the removal and repatriation of recent border crossers.” Obama’s letter to Boehner, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell says the administration is confronting the influx with a coordinated response on both sides of the border.
“This includes fulfilling our legal and moral obligation to make sure we appropriately care for unaccompanied children who are apprehended, while taking aggressive steps to surge resources to our Southwest border to deter both adults and children from this dangerous journey, increase capacity for enforcement and removal proceedings, and quickly return unlawful migrants to their home countries,” Obama wrote.
He hopes that Republicans overreact to the manner in which he announced this and denounce him, which he thinks will help him with his hard left base. That’s the jujitsu part. There isn’t much in that statement to overreact to, at least on substance. His smears of Republicans became tiresome and boring so long ago that they’re just background noise now.
Obama took the moment to order Republicans in Congress to do exactly what he wants. That’s not how the Constitution works. He took time to paint the opposition party as obstructionists. They’re elected to do the job their voters want, not the job that the unpopular president wants. He took the time to rant.
Barack Obama is a very small man. He almost visibly shrunk both himself and his presidency a little bit more today. He managed to turn his vice president into a potted plant, standing behind him during today’s announcement.
Between this statement and his serial lawlessness, Barack Obama has effectively killed off any cooperation with Congress for the remainder of his term. He is about to get a Republican Senate to go along with the Republican House as a reward. He will go down as a failed president whose total lack of experience, class, respect for other points of view and for the rule of law have done him in.
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