Amnesty and Impeachment

There is high anxiety over President Obama’s impending unilateral amnesty order for millions of illegal aliens. How many millions? The estimates vary. On the low end, 3 to 8 million, assuming some correlation to the potential beneficiaries of the president’s already existing amnesty decrees (including DACA or Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals). On the high end, as many as 9 to 34 million, factoring in likely categorical expansions of amnesty and their ramifications over the next several years.

The anxiety stems from a remorseless truth that no one — most especially Mr. Obama’s most ardent detractors — wants to confront. It is the truth I have addressed, to much groaning and teeth-gnashing, in Faithless Execution, my recent book on presidential lawlessness.

It is this: The nation overwhelmingly objects to Obama’s immigration lawlessness, but it has no stomach for the only effective counter to it — the plausible threat of impeachment.

To hear the demagogue-in-chief tell it, the controversy over how to deal with the approximately 12 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. is a Manichean debate between enlightened humanitarians and vulgar xenophobes. (To be fair to the president, he is far from alone in peddling this smear.) But objections to Obama’s reckless immigration policies — indeed, to his policies in general, as this week’s historic election reaffirmed — cut across party and philosophical lines.

To be sure, the most intense protest is heard in “restrictionist” circles and among those for whom rule-of-law and national-security concerns trump sympathy for the plight of legions of decent but unlawfully present non-citizens (some of whom were brought here as children and are blameless for their illegal status). There are also, however, many enthusiasts of immigration amnesty — the euphemism is legislative “reform” — who recognize that the president’s sweeping, dictatorial approach is angering the public. That damages not just the cause but the career prospects of those who’ve made the cause their own.

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