Barry’s Illegal Immigration Scheme Is Illegal

In 2014, President Barack Obama signed 12 executive orders directing various agencies in the departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security to refrain from deporting some 4 million adult immigrants illegally present in the United States if they are the parents of children born here or legally present here and if they hold a job, obtain a high-school diploma or its equivalent, pay taxes and stay out of prison.

Unfortunately for the president, the conditions he established for avoiding deportation had been rejected by Congress.

In response to the executive orders, 26 states and the House of Representatives sued the president and the recipients of the orders, seeking to prevent them from being enforced. The states and the House argued that the president effectively rewrote the immigration laws and changed the standards for the deportation of unlawfully present adult immigrants.

During oral argument in the court this week, there was a bizarre exchange over terminology that the president used in his orders. In a weird series of questions, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. asked whether the president’s executive orders could be salvaged constitutionally by excising or changing a few words. This was improper because it treated an executive order as if it were a statute. It is not the job of the court to find ways to salvage executive orders as it is to salvage statutes because the Constitution has given “all legislative Powers” to Congress and none to the president.

Statutes are presumed to be constitutional. Executive orders that contradict statutes are presumed to be unconstitutional and the court has no business trying to save them.

All presidents from time to time have exercised a discretion upon individuals when it comes to enforcing laws that pose hardships. But none has done so for 4 million people, and none has written substitute laws of his own making. Until now.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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