The Law Means Nothing to These People

President Obama has just nullified, all by his lonesome, a provision in a duly-enacted law: the employer mandate in ObamaCare. It's one thing to give priority to enforcing one law over another, such as stressing interdiction of cocaine over marijuana. But to just cancel a law is quite another matter. In "Obama's never-mind presidency" on July 5 in the Washington Post, George Will writes:

Although the Constitution has no Article VIII, the administration acts as though there is one that reads: "Notwithstanding all that stuff in other articles about how laws are made, if a president finds a law politically inconvenient, he can simply post on the White House Web site a notice saying: Never mind."

Never mind that the law stipulates 2014 as the year when employers with 50 full-time workers are mandated to offer them health-care coverage or pay fines. Instead, 2015 will be the year. Unless Democrats see a presidential election coming.

If we are to be a nation of laws not men, then the president mustn't be allowed to get away with this. A Congress not wanting to appear entirely irrelevant would insist that President Obama enforce ObamaCare as written or withhold funding for it altogether. If ObamaCare is not ready for prime time, then postpone all parts of it until 2015, not just the employer mandate. But do it the right way, through Congress. On ABC News's July 7 edition of "This Week," Mr. Will again addressed the lawlessness of the Obama administration when he said:

Why, indeed, not suspend the individual mandate? Because the law doesn't provide it? The law means nothing to these people. And by the way, this is why, Cokie, this is going to affect the immigration debate. Because the House Republicans are going to say no matter what we write in the law, this administration will waive any provision it doesn't like.

So our experience with health-care reform bleeds over into immigration reform. If our imperial (and imperious) president can vacate or delay parts of ObamaCare he doesn't like or that are politically inconvenient, then he can do the same with immigration reform, such as enforcing border security. Once bitten, twice shy.

It makes no sense to get all worked up about passing a new law when the laws already on the books are being nullified before they even take effect or were never enforced in the first place. If you'll recall, Congress passed a law back in 1986 that was supposed to seal the border and stop invasions by illegal aliens. It doesn't seem to have worked. So there's no urgent need to enact yet another law the feds will just ignore.

Obama says he won't sign an immigration bill that does not have a special, new "pathway to citizenship." (Fine, he also said he wouldn't raise our taxes and that we could keep the health insurance we have.) But when has America ever NOT had a route to citizenship? The U.S. already has the most welcoming immigration laws of any nation on this planet, and we always have had.

In his July 8 column "Why Obamacare Threatens Immigration Reform" at National Review, John Fund writes:

The Obama administration's instinctive dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law are finally catching up with it. Few Republicans in the House -- even those who devoutly want immigration reform -- trust the Obama administration to enforce with consistency and integrity anything that passes Congress. [...]

In the classic 1960s free-market poem "Tom Smith and His Incredible Bread Machine," an entrepreneur is pursued and prosecuted by an ideologically driven Justice Department on trumped-up charges. Just before he is sentenced, he asks the judge presiding over his trial what is happening to him. "The rule of law, in complex times, has proved itself deficient," she sneers at him. "We much prefer the rule of men! It's vastly more efficient." [Find the poem here.]

One of the more fiery critics of the Senate's immigration bill is Ann Coulter. Ms. Coulter asks "if we already have de facto amnesty, why is this bill even necessary?" In her July 3 column "I Got 30 Million Reasons" at Human Events, she writes:

Republicans don't have to be brave to vote against amnesty. They need to not be idiots.

This isn't a single issue. It's every issue. Presidential elections are decided by a few million votes. Giving the Democrats 30 million new voters means Republicans lose on everything --- Obamacare, public sector unions, big government, abortion, gay marriage, racial preferences, and on and on and on.

In another few years, the whole country will be California and no Republican will win another national election.

Excuse my language, but Miss Ann simply has more balls than many Republican men in Congress. In "If the GOP is this stupid, it deserves to die" she writes: "Republicans are devoting all their energy to slightly increasing their share of the Hispanic vote while alienating everyone else in America."

Regardless of what kind of immigration bill, if any, that the House passes, it should not contain a single ounce of pork. This would create a sharp contrast with the Senate's whorish bill, which is "sickled o'er with the pale cast of [lard]." (For more on pork, here's Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Breitbart, Michelle Malkin, and Investor's Business Daily.)

Still, our immigration system could be tweaked. Perhaps the most important tweak would be to retain what Larry Kudlow calls the "brainiacs," i.e. the highly-skilled foreigners who attend our universities. To educate and train these scientists, engineers, and techies and then send them packing after they graduate is really stupid, even by the standards of the Obama administration.

A consensus is emerging: we can't trust this guy anymore. The soaring oratory now rings false and hollow... and America must endure three and a half more years of it.

Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst from Kansas City.

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