OPINION:
The week was not a good one for President Obama and his shriveling legacy. Mr. Obama, who promised to transform America into a country that he and Michele could be proud of, wanted to build the legacy by bringing in millions of illegal immigrants who, when transformed into voters, would insure a Democratic majority for as far as a patriot’s eye could see.
The president wanted to change the immigration status of 5 million illegal immigrants now in the United States, but didn’t have the authority, which could be granted only by Congress, to do it. So he did it anyway with an executive order and dared the courts to do something about it.
The divided U.S. Supreme Court last week did that something. Several states had sued, arguing that the president’s orders were no better than his whims, and a U.S. district court in Texas agreed. When the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the order striking down the president’s executive order, the issue went to the Supreme Court. When the court said it was divided in a 4 to 4 tie, the appeals court verdict was upheld. No legal precedent was set by the procedural tie, but Mr. Obama’s legacy was doomed. The Constitution was not to be abused, after all.
A petulant president could only retreat into rhetoric. “We’ve got a choice about who we’re going to be as a country,” he said, “what we want to teach our kids, and how we want to be represented in Congress, and in the White House. Americans are going to have to make a decision about what we care about and who we are.”
Well, indeed. Americans have to make that decision every four years, and the stakes this year, as Mr. Obama says, are particularly high. Will Americans want to continue to be a nation of laws, of precedents and procedures, or will they be satisfied to let a president with casual regard for the Constitution do it for them?
House Speaker Paul Ryan called the procedural ruling by a deadlocked Supreme Court a vindication of the Republican view that the president abused his authority. But it’s more like a stay of execution, since Hillary Clinton is expected to expand the president’s political view of Constitutional law. Donald Trump promises to appoint lawyers with a clear view of the Constitution. This is something Mr. Ryan and others, dissenting from the reality of the Trump candidacy, ought to think about.
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