Obama’s pass-a-bill-or-I’ll act strategy was not just tactically dumb (alienating the very House Republicans it was designed to coerce, stoking activist expectations of an imminent executive overreach to achieve a goal that wasn’t popular enough to sustain the overreaching). It was also substantively dumb – the actual policy assumptions underlying Obama’s proposals (that amnesty doesn’t act as a magnet for further illegal immigration) were disproved by the Latin American reaction to his initial pen-and-phone moves before House Republicans had time to be coerced.
Democrats are still putting on their Goodfellas faces and pretending they have leverage. Dem Whip Steny Hoyer promises a “significant change in policy” if the House does not act in July, according Breitbart News. Senator Dick Durbin says that if Speaker Boehner doesn’t act “the President will borrow the power that is needed to solve the problems of immigration.” (I must have been sleeping in Con Law when they taught the Borrowing Clause.) Senator Robert Menendez defensively declares ”the threat of executive action is not a bluff.”
It’s a bluff. House GOPs should feel free to ignore it, at least through November.** If Obama takes any executive action before then, it will be of the most timid, face-saving variety.
Speaking of Con Law, it would have been appalling, if I weren’t used to it, to hear Xavier Becerra say on Fox News Sunday that it was OK for the president to ignore the Constitution and bypass Congress if what he was doing was popular. Those are the words of a caudillo. The Democrats seem ever-more determined to turn us into a banana republic.
And there’s another blow to ObamaCare’s attempt to run our lives:
The 5-4 decision is a significant victory for those challenging the constitutionality of the President Obama’s health care law. And it strengthens the argument that for-profit entities, like individuals and churches, have religious rights.
So you don’t lose your religious freedom because you make a profit.
Huh.
[Update mid afternoon]
The funniest thing on Twitter today, amidst all the illogic, hatred and hysteria, is the number of people who think that @SCOTUSblog is actually SCOTUS’s blog (and Twitter feed) and attacking them. The @SCOTUSblog folks are having a lot of fun with it.
The launch delays are costing money. Note this, though:
Commercial satellite fleet operators have said that with a price differential so large — more than 50 percent in this case — they can absorb the cost of even lengthy SpaceX delays without much trouble.
This proposal doesn’t go far enough. We need to do it to the entire federal government. Roosevelt recognized the dangers of public-employee unions. They’ve been destroying the country for decades, though.