A Broken System

Among the rulings handed down today by the Supreme Court is a one-sentence affirmation of a lower court ruling that blocked the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) plan. I won’t go into the details of the plan here, other than to note its intent was to introduce some degree of normalization for the illegal immigrant parents of children here legally (either as citizens or permanent residents).

The interesting elements here are the institution of this program/policy via executive action instead of Congressional legislation, the push-back from a couple dozen states, the President’s reaction, and what it all tells us about government and government attitudes.

The President was, as would be expected, not amused by the decision. Or, rather, non-decision. Since the seat emptied by Justice Scalia’s death has not yet been filled, the court ended up with a tie vote, which left the lower court ruling (itself spurred by a challenge filed by 26 states) that blocked the program’s further implementation. Thus, there’s no actual precedent set here, just the termination of an executive action. In his comments, Obama noted:

For more than two decades now our immigration system, everybody acknowledges, has been broken.”

This is essentially correct.

And the fact that the Supreme Court wasn’t able to issue a decision today doesn’t just set the system back even further, it takes us further from the country that we aspire to be.

This, on the other hand, is a combination of political grandstanding and dismissal of the very loud voices of dissent that have elevated Donald Trump to the GOP presidential nomination. It’s also a misdirection. The President overstepped his role: he legislated. That’s not in his job description. That job falls to Congress. Congress is not subordinate to the President, nor vice versa. If he is unhappy with what Congress has done or is doing, there are two legitimate paths forward:

One – he can pursue a compromise. He can get together with Congressional leaders and work on legislation that both he and a sufficient members of Congress find acceptable. Both Bushes, Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Eisenhower, and Truman all, during at least part of their tenure, faced a Congress that was partially or wholly controlled by the opposition party, and all managed to work with them.

Two – he can sit in stalemate and make his case to the voters that they should hand the Congress back to his party so that his party can legislate his agenda.

He did neither. Instead, he took to the media and portrayed the Republican Party as one of pure, shameless opposition. While the Left has embraced this narrative, the reality is that GOP intransigence was fostered by his earliest years. It began with his victory gloat:

Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day I won.

and continued with his big signature initiative, ObamaCare. Just to remind everyone, the Democratic Party completely controlled Congress during Obama’s first months in office, with a supermajority in the Senate and a majority in the House. The Dems crafted ObamaCare on their own, in essence shutting the door on the Republican Party. That was just the poster child for the state of government in 2009 – one where the Democratic Party did whatever it wanted, and the opposition was dismissed. When Ted Kennedy died and Republican Scott Brown filled his Senate seat in early 2010, the Dems lost their supermajority. Then, the Republicans, boosted by the Tea Party movement, handed the Democrats an epic loss in the mid-term elections and took over the House.

Obama then had no choice but to work with the GOP, but he had poisoned that well, and he didn’t quite come across as someone whose goal was to mend fences. He maintained his adversarial stance, even as the voters left the House in the hands of the GOP in 2012 and handed the Senate to the GOP in 2014. He famously spoke of his pen and phone and decided he’d do as he wished, he reneged on his promise to reverse expansion of executive power, he opted to modify ObamaCare a couple dozen times without involving Congress, he repeatedly scolded both Congress and the Supreme Court, his purported “equals”… in short, he acted like someone who had no interest in figuring out how to work with those who didn’t rubber stamp his agenda.

Now, he complains that immigration is a “broken system.”

As I noted above, he’s right. The current system, in place since the mid 1980s, has resulted in a population of illegal immigrants that’s generally estimated at 11 million or so. Because it hasn’t been addressed in a systematic and bipartisan fashion, it has devolved into a major political hot potato. And, because it has become one of the biggest wedge issues in this election, the debate has gone binary, with the extreme positions on both sides drowning out anyone who might dare mention a comprehensive compromise solution.

This outcome, make no mistake, is a result of the double whammy that is Obama’s lack of leadership and disregard for the system. He didn’t act like a proper leader back when there was actually some bipartisan effort on the subject. Then, he decided that, if Congress didn’t give him what he wanted, he’d go ahead and do it anyway, in essence daring them to stop him. Congress didn’t, but today the states did.

Now, he’s back to scolding, back to being the finger-pointer-in-chief.

Immigration reform is going to have to wait until the next presidency, and will the direction it will take. Obama’s in true lame-duck territory on this issue, and he has no one but himself to blame for it. He laments a broken system, but he does not understand his major (perhaps even prime) role in breaking it. The GOP does get its share of blame, because it got pissy after the 2008 shellacking, and got so wrapped up in internecine squabbles between the old-guard establishment and the actual small-government folks (the Tea Party Freshmen and the Liberty Caucus, to name two groups) that it didn’t put together a coherent message or vision. Nevertheless, the tone in such things is set by the guy at the top, and right out of the gate Obama set the worst possible tone.

A broken system? I agree. The whole thing is broken. You broke it, Mr. President.