WH Blasts Court Ruling Striking Down Obama's Executive Amnesty, Of Course

Guy Benson | November 11, 2015 10:45 AM

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals dealt another blow to President Obama's lawless executive amnesty program earlier this week, drawing a sharp rebuke

from the administration:

WH "strongly disagrees" with federal Appeals Court ruling against @POTUS' program shielding 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation.
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) November 10, 2015

"Strong disagreement" today, but here's the thing: It wasn't too long ago that Obama would have agreed with the court's ruling. After he issued his legally-questionable 'DACA' executive order -- effectively imposing a version of the DREAM Act by fiat -- Obama repeatedly told immigration activists that he lacked the constitutional authority to go any further on his own. He'd made similar noises about legal restraints prior to moving forward with DACA anyway, but this time around, he seemed more insistent:

Over and over again, Obama said he simply could not legally do what he ultimately did, unilaterally suspending the threat of deportation for roughly five million illegal immigrant adults. He did so under the guise of "enforcement discretion," even though the action proactively issues work papers and Social Security numbers to these unlawful immigrants. That's not selective enforcement; that's an overt abuse of executive power. A lower court struck down Obama's unprecedented Caesarism, and now a major federal court has upheld that injunction. In the face of these judicial rebukes, the Obama administration is

reportedly considering a plot to ignore Congress' unambiguous, bipartisan wishes (backed by strong public opinion) by shuttering the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility. Obama has long been obsessed with this piece of anti-Bush theater, but has been stymied at every step, including by strong Democratic Congressional majorities in 2009 and 2010. Relatedly, just yesterday, the Senate passed an updated version of the National Defense Authorization Act -- a previous iteration of which was vetoed by Obama -- by an enormous margin:

The #Senate just passed the bipartisan #NDAA (91-3) which prohibits the President from moving terrorists from #Gitmo to the U.S.
— STEW (@StewSays) November 10, 2015

The upper chamber also passed a separate appropriations bill that bars Obama from relocating Gitmo detainees to US soil. What's the president's next move? Will he blatantly back-hand Congress again as his administration draws to a close, or continue to empty the facility through other, reckless means? I'll leave you with a bit of snark: