What Obama’s Quick Illegal Immigrant Fix Ignores

America’s ward-heeler-in-chief just bought some votes with the policy equivalent of a keg of beer and a slab of bacon. Obama’s memorandum to Homeland Security head Napolitano to stop the deportation of illegal aliens brought here as children and granting them work permits bypassed Congress, that branch of government our quaint Constitution makes responsible for such policy. Obama said so himself last year when he reminded people that he couldn’t “change the law unilaterally” and “We have to pass bills through the legislature and then I can sign it.” But the need to stanch the bleeding from a week of economic bad news for his reelection campaign has given the president Constitutional amnesia. If Obama had been sincerely interested in crafting a legal, bipartisan, permanent solution to this problem, he could have negotiated with Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who has crafted a more sensible solution than last year’s Dream Act, and worked through Congress. But the need to throw some goodies to Latino voters in several swing states critical for his own reelection was more important than actually governing according to the Constitution.

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