big kahuna wrote:
dave_w wrote:
I think the house will have just as much trouble herding the cats as the senate, so a tough road for pubs all around.There's a lesson in all this for presidents down the road (and I'm no fan of how powerful the office of the president has become, especially since the New Deal era): Live by the pen and phone, die by the pen and phone.
DACA was completely a creation via the pen and phone and it was executed via an Executive Order, something the Fifth Circuit found unconstitutional (the matter is still to be considered by SCOTUS). The current president is trying to kill it via the pen and phone.
DACA, like the DREAM Act, which has been introduced several times but has yet to pass in Congress (so it isn't even actual LAW), is clearly an area reserved solely for the Congress as the lawmaking body in our federal system. Trying to claim that inaction by the Congress when it came to the DREAM Act justified taking an extra-judicial action on the part of the President -- in the form of DACA -- has never flown with the judiciary, which basically always comes back and says "If Congress had wanted a law regulating XYZ it would have created a law regulating XYZ." This is not withstanding some obscure federal district court judge in San Francisco, of course.
These EOs on the part of president also strengthen the hand of the administrative state and its administrative law judges (ALJs), and that clearly has to be halted before things get completely out of hand as unelected bureaucrats continue to gather unto themselves the power to make laws via agency "regulations" and "rules," none of which Congress has ever voted on when it comes to such de facto (and de jure) "laws."
If this sort of administrative morass doesn't worry people, there's something seriously wrong with our understanding of how things are supposed to work in this country.
