OPINION

How Obama Spent His Summer Vacation- Day Two: Grant Illegal Immigration Waivers

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Prepare for the rhetoric to heat up in the debate over border security, the Constitution and the use of executive power to selectively prosecute individuals who the administration deems undesirable.

If you’re a coal company or a community bank, you’re screwed. If you’re a community organizer here illegally from Kenya or Juarez?

Hurra! for you. 

“Reacting to intense pressure from the Latino community and aware that President Obama will need their votes in 2012,” writes Albor Ruiz in the NY Daily News, “the White House announced with great fanfare last Thursday a plan to stop the deportation of some undocumented immigrants.”

With the announcement Obama spent his second day on vacation casting around for the Hispanic support that he ignored for the first three years of his reign.

In a development that’s drawing well-deserved outrage from conservatives and lukewarm plaudits from progressive activists, the administration announced a new policy of selectively enforcing illegal immigration laws.

In short they’ve granted illegal immigration waivers to their friends, just as I predicted in my May 12th column Crass and Cynical on Illegal Immigration.

“Today’s policy announcement clearly demonstrates the Obama administration’s defiance of both the constitutional separation of powers and the will of the American public in its relentless effort to gain amnesty for illegal aliens,” said Federation for American Immigration Reform President Dan Stein according to Boston.com

In trouble with everyone else because of the deficit, the debt, the economy, inflation, unions and the general plague of locusts that he’s brought down on the country, Obama’s trying to shore up support with progressives who have been on the verge of abandoning him recently.

Indeed one of his wise-guys from Chicago, Rep Luis Gutierrez has been critical of Obama in the past months, hinting that perhaps Hispanic progressives will look at not turning out for the president precisely because Obama’s done nothing on illegal immigration. Gutierrez recently noted that on illegal immigration “[Obama] has the power to make things better right now without the Congress having to pass any new laws.”

Obama took the hint.

So Obama’s now going to do for illegal immigrants what he did for gays, unions, Chicago and all of his other cronies: He’s going to ignore enforcing the laws he doesn’t like.  He’s granted a blanket waiver for every illegal immigrant, like he did for his favorites under healthcare “reform,” the Defense of Marriage Act, the new, improved union-run NLRB, the EPA and the rest of the red and screw tape crowd he’s using to hold the gun on us.

This is exactly what people are talking about when they talk about the climate of regulatory uncertainty hurting the confidence of the country.

As citizens we don’t even know that if a law gets passed to make something either legal or illegal that it will have any effect whatever. All we are left with is a parody of John Kerry’s famous “I was for the war before I was against the war”-  we all obey the laws, while we break them.      

That’s even presuming the numbnuts at the White House or that nut house we call Congress are proposing bills that honestly attempt to solve problems like the debt crisis, illegal immigration, bank reform, healthcare costs.

Which of course they aren’t.

The easiest way to create a tyranny in the United States is to create laws that are so vague that the government can decide to selectively enforce them. By doing so you create a permanent underclass of citizens who is wholly dependent on the government as to whether they are treated as criminals or voters.

And the effects go beyond government. Selective enforcement becomes attractive to anyone who would like to stifle dissent.

Conservatives have a long-standing complaint that Facebook regularly buries or otherwise deletes posts that don’t jive with the progressive agenda. On Sunday ZDNet reported that Facebook removed a posting from the account of Arizona governor Jan Brewer that was critical of Obama’s new “backdoor” amnesty policy.          

“Facebook said it was sorry for deleting the post; the company issued a statement saying that ‘the post was removed in error. We apologize for the inconvenience,’” writes Emil Protalinski  on ZDNet. “The social network said it mistakenly removed the post, but did not provide further details, such as whether the removal resulted from complaints by other Facebook users.”

Of course they didn’t.

With the kind of regulatory heft the president has, and is willing to use, you wouldn’t want to be on his bad side either.   

See more top stories from Townhall Finance, new home page, more columns, more news:  

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Marita Noon Turn Your Head and Cough: The Bait-and-Switch Enviro Swindle
Craig Steiner The Clinton Surplus Myth
George Friedman Re-Examining the Arab Spring
Jeff Carter Choice: Slavery or Freedom
Mike Shedlock France and Germany Conquer Europe...OK, Not Really
Chris Poindexter The Gold Standard
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