I’m in the habit of reading Ross Douthat’s blog “Evaluations” at the New York Times, which, when he is not ruminating about the reverberative, not to say rebarbarative, phallocentricity of John Melius, is largely devoted to Ross’s mostly honest account of “thoughtful” conservatives like Ross to craft a domestic policy for the Republican Party that isn’t largely defined by tax cuts for the rich and kicks in the teeth for the poor. Once and a while, of course, Ross has to drop the nice guy act and come up with some red meat. This week he serves up a plateful of raw beef, a hilarious conspiracy theory he calls “Obama’s Impeachment Game.”
All that talk you’ve been hearing from the Republican fringe about impeaching Obama? Well, it’s the Democrats who are doing it! Well, somehow. According to Ross, no one would be paying attention to Sarah Palin et al. if it wasn’t for the “Obama political apparatus,” which, in Ross’s telling, consists of “a close aide of the president, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the ‘independent’ voices at MSNBC,” which, to my mind, is not quite the all-powerful wind machine that Ross makes it out to be.
Democrats saying mean things about Republicans, yeah, that’s bad,1 but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Here’s the Democrats’ “sordid genius”—they’ll ridicule the Republicans for being impeachment nuts, and then Obama will actually commit an impeachment-worthy offense—to wit, “an extraordinary abuse of office: the granting of temporary legal status, by executive fiat, to up to half the country’s population of illegal immigrants,” utterly unmanning the poor, defenseless Republicans, who would look like fools if they even thought to give Obama the sound impeaching he would so thoroughly deserve, if, contrary to fact, he had done that which, according to Ross, he might do!
Over at the New Republic, spoilsport Eric Posner points out that it’s the “Executive Branch” that executes the laws, with, inevitably, a significant amount of executive discretion. Eric doesn’t point out, as I will, that George W. Bush’s administration put the laws forbidding employers to hire illegal immigrants on the shelf for the first six years of his presidency, bringing not one single indictment, until the not yet named Tea Party right rose up in nativist anger to put a stop to this furriner-coddling Wall Street nonsense.
In a follow-up post, Ross more or less drops the impeachment conspiracy theory, because it makes him look like, well, a conspiracy theory monger, instead of the totally honest and straightforward guy that he totally is. Because if Obama actually grants legal status to illegal immigrants, instead of simply ignoring their presence, as honest Ronald Reagan and honest George H. W. Bush—and honest Bill Clinton—did, it’s a totally different thing!
Well, maybe it is—a little more illegal, and a lot less hypocritical. I guess Obama should go easy on the illegality, and heavy on the hypocrisy. It’s not like he isn’t pretty good at both.
Afterwords
Neither Eric nor—understandably—Ross, mentions House Speaker John Boehner’s howler regarding the Central American kids flooding into Texas, insisting that there are “numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action, to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries,” more or less inviting the president to rewrite the law on asylum-seeking kids and, not incidentally, pull several billion dollars out of his ass to “secure our borders.” Boehner, of course, is currently suing President Obama for his past “dictatorial” behavior—i.e., unilaterally waiving provisions of the Affordable Care Act. For his part, Boehner—again, understandably—does not mention that George Bush did the same thing with regard to the Medicare Part D prescription drug program.
UPDATE
Brian Beutler, also of the New Republic, provides more liberal riposte to Ross, and links to some fairly tendentious lawyer talk on the subject, about whether “deferred action” is illegal, but it seems to me that all of this ignores the fact that, pre-9/11, Republicans bragged about the fact that they wouldn’t enforce the immigration laws. Rudy Giuliani went to the point of saying that, as far as he was concerned, there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant. It’s only since 9/11, and since the Republicans lost control of the White House, that salutary neglect becomes impeachable outrage.
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In his numerous follow-up postings with regard to this column, Ross constantly accuses the Democrats of playing political hardball on immigration, as if this were somehow “cheating”. ↩︎
