Obama Puts The Cat Among The Pigeons
” Barack Obama put the cat among the pigeons Thursday night, but he may be surprised by how big that cat could get, and with it a big cat’s appetite for more than pigeons.
His “executive orders” demanding a stop to deportations is no doubt good news for millions of illegal immigrants — 5 million at last count — he wants to preserve and protect for Democrats looking to replenish a depleted constituency. But it’s not such good news for anyone who appreciates law and order on the border. Amnesties can be good, but they must be written carefully lest they invite more of the same misery that led to amnesty. The president’s invitation to the millions south of the border — “Come on in, I’ll find a way to make you legal later” — guarantees that hell on the border will continue, and probably get worse. The hell on the Potomac will get a lot worse.
The president and his lawyers are clever. By not actually issuing an executive order called an executive order — he can call it a “memo” to his prosecutors but it’s still an order from the executive — he will make it more difficult for the Republicans to find a way to overturn it.
Just the anticipation of the president’s big speech set off cries and celebrations. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, having abandoned her dream of ascending once more to speaker of the House, and who knows no more of the nation’s history than the president apparently does, got lost Thursday afternoon in a history book. She mistook Barack Obama for Abraham Lincoln, and his immigration amnesty for the Emancipation Proclamation. “Does the public know that the Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order? she asked. (Does the public know that the Emancipation Proclamation preserved slavery in the four slave states still in the Union, and freed no slaves in the departed Confederate states? The public could look it up.) The only similarities in Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation and Mr. Obama’s order is that neither was intended to resolve anything, but to set loose that cat among the pigeons. The Civil War circa 1861-1865 ground bloodily on, and the immigration system circa 2014 is still broken and bleeding, and probably farther from resolution than ever.
Civil war is the metaphor of the day. Phyllis Schlafly, who almost single-handedly defeated the feminist crusade for an equal-rights amendment, now calls Mr. Obama’s executive order “a modern-day Fort Sumter.” “
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