BARACK OBAMA TROLL
Maybe President Obama is just trolling?
For those who don’t know, in Internet parlance, trolling is an effort to elicit outrage from a specific group or the public generally. As the always useful — but not always G-rated, or spell-checked — Urban Dictionary explains, “Trolling requires deceiving [sic]; any trolling that doesn’t involve decieving [sic] someone isn’t trolling at all; it’s just stupid.” (Pro tip: When spelling “deceiving,” remember it’s “i before e except after c.”) The definition continues: “As such, your victim must not know that you are trolling; if he does, you are an unsuccesful [sic] troll.”
I don’t like the president’s executive action on immigration. I think it’s constitutionally dubious — for exactly the reasons Obama has insisted more than 20 times in the past. “I’m not a king. My job as the head of the executive branch ultimately is to carry out the law,” Obama told Telemundo in 2013. “When it comes to enforcement of our immigration laws, we’ve got some discretion. We can prioritize what we do. But we can’t simply ignore the law.”
If all King Obama was doing was opting not to deport some immigrants here illegally, he’d be on safer ground. But his new proposal would allow an estimated 3.5 million “undocumented Americans” to get all sorts of documents — Social Security numbers, work permits, drivers licenses, etc. That’s not prosecutorial discretion, that’s a rewrite of existing law.
Still, the fine print of what Obama is doing is far less dramatic than many of his defenders and critics claim. Some are comparing it to the Emancipation Proclamation, which is ridiculous. People who voluntarily come to America illegally are in no way comparable to poor souls kidnapped abroad and forced into eternal bondage. Moreover, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t have a two-year time limit or require slaves to fill out paperwork and pay back taxes.
Others claim it’s no big deal and perfectly consistent with executive orders taken by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. This goes too far the other way. Reagan and Bush were mostly cleaning up problems with laws passed by Congress. In the other instances, they were responding to specific foreign crises.