A U.S. president, under severe pressure from his party’s base, repeatedly denies he has the legal authority to take unilateral action his base wants him to. Eventually, he flip-flops, taking the exact executive action he previously said he had no legal authority to take.
It happened this month when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an order banning evictions in most of the United States, just minutes after President Joe Biden told reporters, “The bulk of constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”
The same thing happened in 2012 when then-President Barack Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
For months, Obama had been telling the press, “With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case,” and, “The fact of the matter is there are laws on the books that I have to enforce,” and, “My Cabinet has been working very hard on trying to get it done, but ultimately, I think somebody said the other day, I am president, I am not king.”
But then on June 15, 2012, Obama decided he was king after all, gifting work permits and legal status to millions of illegal immigrants who first entered the country as minors. Obama then replayed the same dance for the next two years, telling everyone who would listen that DACA was a narrowly targeted program and it could not expand to illegal immigrants who had entered the U.S. as adults.
But Obama caved again. Since DACA was a completely illegal abuse of executive authority with no discernable legal limit, he could expand it to illegal immigrants who entered as adults. And that is exactly what he did when he announced Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, just days after the Democratic Party had been soundly rejected at the ballot box on Nov. 4, 2014.
Obama’s DAPA program was soon found to be an illegal use of executive power by a federal district court, a decision eventually affirmed by the Supreme Court. Because there is no legal difference between the authority for DACA and DAPA, we can safely assume DACA would be rendered illegal should its legality ever reach the Supreme Court, too.
Not that the Supreme Court’s opinion would in any way sway a Democratic president. As Biden said the other day, “Well, look, the courts made it clear that the existing moratorium was not constitutional; it wouldn’t stand. And they made that clear back in, I guess, July 15 or July 18.”
Biden’s fuzziness on the actual date of the court’s decision notwithstanding (the correct date is June 29), it is clear he knew the CDC moratorium was illegal, but he went ahead anyway.
Trust in the federal government is at an all-time low, particularly on immigration and public health, precisely because of lawless behavior like Biden’s. Every day, thousands of illegal immigrants are pouring across the southern border at the express invitation of the president, who told them, “If you want to flee … you should come.”
Instead of turning migrants away to other countries, Biden is processing them into the country as fast as possible, a decision that has only caused hundreds of thousands of more migrants to come and thrown our border communities into complete chaos.
Democracy is more than about giving power to whoever wins an election. It is also about checks and balances and respecting the rule of law. Yes, Biden won the election in 2020. But that does not make him king — not even if there is a global pandemic going on.
