On the one hand, the President has the right and power to not enforce a law.
Andrew McCarthy:
Prosecutorial discretion means you are not required to prosecute every crime — which, since doing so would be impossible, is just a nod to reality.
On the other hand, the President doesn’t get tochangethe law:
It does not mean that those crimes the executive chooses not to enforce are now no longer crimes. Prosecutorial discretion has never meant that the passive act of non-enforcement has the legal effect of repealing criminal laws enacted by Congress. And it has never even been suggested, because to do so would be absurd, that under the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion, the executive decision not to prosecute certain crimes means the people who commit those crimes should be rewarded for committing them. That, of course, would only encourage others to commit them on a more massive scale.
Yet that is President Obama’s theory. He is claiming not only the power to determine what immigration laws get enforced and which illegal immigrants get prosecuted — power he unquestionably has. He also claims the power to declare (a) that criminal acts are somehow lawful — that illegal aliens now have a right to be here — just because Obama has chosen not to prosecute them; and (b) that those who engage in this unprosecuted activity will be rewarded with benefits (lawful presence, relief from deportation, work permits, etc.), as if their illegal acts were valuable community service.
That is an utter perversion of prosecutorial discretion and a blatant usurpation of congressional power.
So let’s lay this out there:
John Kline? Erik Paulsen? Michele Bachmann/Tom Emmer? Not one dime of funding to enable this adminstration to declare itself emperor.
You vote to enable this madness, I will do whatever I can to primary your asses straight out of DC.
Enough is enough.
It strikes me that I really don’t see a lot of range for prosecutorial discretion. If indeed the number of criminals out there is such that we cannot prosecute all of them, maybe we need to figure out why our laws are so byzantine that nobody can follow them, like the guy prosecuted for throwing fish into the water under Sarbanes-Oxley or whatever. Or maybe we’ve got so many criminals, we can’t possibly prosecute them all…..OK, and given hundreds of thousands of criminal illegals here, we would avoid deporting them exactly….why?
I dunno. I can see priority for some cases over others–egregious crimes and open and shut cases over difficult to prove cases and those with smaller crimes–but I don’t see freedom not to prosecute a crime at all.
It’s worse than McCarthy says. No one will be deported or denied a work permit under the ‘rules’ Obama spoke about last night. No one at all.
It’s open borders. Prepare for declining wages and higher unemployment, everyone!
Chuck Hagel, the US SecDef, was once Senator Hagel of Nebraska.
As Senator Hagel, he crippled immigration enforcement in Nebraska to please his constituents in the meat packing business. Hagel was a Republican.
The scope of executive discretion in executing the law has always been somewhat muddy. Parliamentary systems where the executive generally has the legislative power to rewrite any given law don’t tend to face this problem. In the US, where the president often lacks the two majorities to pass laws, there has always been the need for some discretion, and therefore also room for abuse. What Obama intends to do will be taking us one further step down that path, a path that successive presidents have ventured down before, although perhaps not as far.
Clearly this action goes against the spirit and intent of the existing law. Creating an over-mighty office of the president who can choose to ignore a law or laws at his discretion is not worth any immigration reform.