Here’s one cluster of links on Drudge’s home page today:
O-WHIPPED: REPUBLICANS LEAVE TOWN WITHOUT IMMIGRATION BLOCK…
Last Tuesday, Obama crossed a Rubicon, ostentatiously demonstrating his Caesarian contempt for the law by effectively granting amnesty to 5 million illegal aliens (those the president calls “undocumented immigrants”). He brazenly circumvented Congress and traduced the Constitution (violating along the way his oath to “faithfully execute” the laws).
What will the Republican establishment do about this upsurge of tyranny? On the evidence so far, not much. They will whine. They will bluster. They will file toothless lawsuits that are guaranteed to go nowhere and achieve nothing. They will temporize, prevaricate, and tell the people who elected them that they are working within the system to save the system. In other words, they will act like thoroughly modern American politicians. “The devilish genius of this form of tyranny,” as the commentator Michael Ledeen has pointed out, “is that it looks and even acts democratic. We still elect our representatives, and they still ask us for our support. . . . We act out democratic skits while submitting to an oppressive central power that we ourselves have chosen.”
Over at NRO, Andrew McCarthy has provided a brilliant anatomy of the president’s Alinskyite modus operandi. Saul Alisnky, the community-organizer radical, wrote the playbook on subverting societies based on a bourgeois commitment to the rule of law, individual liberty, and limited government. As McCarthy points out, his strategy was a “toxic brew of thoroughgoing deceit and brass-knuckles extortion (‘direct action’) [that] has become a part of mainstream politics,” leaching out from the radical, revolutionary fringe and installing itself at the center of our political life. Obama is a prize student of the Alinskyite swindle. He has a sixth sense of (as Gertrude Stein put it in another context) just how far to go in going too far. Last Tuesday, he granted amnesty, by executive fiat and in defiance of the Congress, to 5 million criminals. Over the last six years, as McCarthy mournfully points out, we watched as the president and his coterie repeatedly lied to the American people about all manner of critical issues. “We’ve endured,” McCarthy writes,
six years of “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan,” “How dare you call Obamacare a tax,” “The video did it in Benghazi,” “Of course we’d never let guns walk to Mexican gangs,” “Workplace violence,” “Kinetic military action,” “The IRS harassment is outrageous and intolerable,” and “not a smidgeon of corruption” from “the most transparent administration in history.” Yet what so astonished the commentariat about Obama’s decree of amnesty for illegal aliens was the sheer audacity of hoax.
The sad, the frightening truth about Alinskyites is that they “guage the extent of their authority not by the limits of law but by the potential of raw power constrained only by political expediency.”
Remember that: “raw power constrained only by political expediency.”
In other words, without serious pushback, the president will continue down the path of despotism. Will John Boehner supply the needed ballast? Will Mitch McConnell?
To ask those questions, alas, is to answer them.
Which leaves us where, exactly?
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