When You've Lost The New Republic...

Maybe not the whole publication, but it looks like Obama has lost Danny Vinik on immigration. Read:

Still, Democrats could also lose some of their ability to claim the moral high ground on such issues. And that could matter very soon, because some Republicans are so angry about a potential immigration order they are considering using a government funding bill to block it, possibly setting up another shutdown. The last time the GOP shut down the government in 2013, they were clearly the party in the wrong—they were the ones violating common understandings of acceptable practice in politics. This time, they’d claim Obama was the one overstepping traditional boundaries—and it’d be a lot harder to say they were wrong.

Vinik continues:

The policies that reportedly the president is planning to implement are those about which intelligent people of good will can agree or disagree. He’s going to shield from deportation millions of people who actually face no realistic prospect of deportation. He’s going to give work permits to millions of people who are already working, most of them. I’m not saying it’s trivial, but put this in context. And he’s going to direct in the enforcement discretion the agents to concentrate on (a) criminals and (b) people who arrived recently. Fine. The policies are defensible. The process is execrable. Beyond the legalities, beyond the precedents of executive discretion and beyond the constitutional questions, there’s a simple etiquette of democracy, particularly after we have had, as Tom Cotton said here, an election in which this issue featured in many states, and the results were clear. The country opposes what the president is doing.

The joke’s on you. The second quote was really from George Will on Fox News Sunday last weekend. But we’ve come to a place where you can’t tell Danny Vinik from George Will without a scorecard — what a country!