It’s just. It’s right. It represents prevailing public opinion in a society still more compassionate and sane than not. It shouldn’t be hard.
It’s worthy of our discretion, though a law saying it outright would be better.
It’s that you never blame the kids for the deeds of the parents.
The state trooper doesn’t pull over a speeder and ticket the sleeping children in the back seat. Often, he doesn’t even give the driver a ticket, but a mere warning. It’s called discretion.
You know about discretion. You see it in a governor sparing a man the death penalty although a jury imposed it. But the man was in a gang that beat the victim, and the man didn’t inflict the killing blow. Yet he, alone among those complicit, got the death penalty.
So — being just, being right, being discreet — Asa Hutchinson gave the man clemency the other day.
Ideally, President Donald Trump would leave in place former President Barack Obama’s executive action — constitutionally dubious though it might be in its powerfully compelling discretion. It says innocent children brought to the country by undocumented immigrant parents may, under a prescribed process, stay in the country, not as citizens, but on renewable work permits.
Trump could have announced on Tuesday his exercise of discretion to reconfirm Obama’s order, because, he tells us — evidence often to the contrary — that he has a “heart.” But, as a prisoner of his cynically demagogic campaign rhetoric and mean-spirited base, he didn’t.
Instead the cowardly Trump sent out his right-wing extremist attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to announce that the order was being rescinded, effectively in six months, essentially because — if I might paraphrase — American workers are so pitiful that they can’t find work if those innocent children remain in our country doing productive things.
Better yet, Congress would make the Obama program the law and render moot the issue of whether the executive action was within presidential authority.
But the Republican-led Congress wouldn’t make that law when Obama was president, which is why Obama tried to get away with the probably over-reaching executive action.
Congressional Republicans were paralyzed, per usual, by the prospect of crossing their irrationally angry and intolerant right-wing base, which asserts vilely that those innocent kids who went on to get educations and jobs and serve in our military are drains on the luckily native-born.
They’re not drains. They’re rescuing people from floods in Texas. They’ll help rebuild those homes unless we send them back to a place they never really were.
We have a problem, one supplemental to the underlying one represented by positions of authority held by a demagogue like Trump and an extremist like Sessions.
It is that eight mean-spirited and grandstanding Republican state attorneys general, including our own partisan go-along Leslie Rutledge, aligned with the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, in demanding that Trump rescind Obama’s executive policy by their wholly arbitrary deadline of Tuesday.
Otherwise, they threatened to file suit and probably win on the point that a president can’t quite do as much legally by executive action as Obama nobly attempted.
These pandering Republican attorneys general, these showboaters pulling sleeping children out of back seats, no longer include the Republican attorney general of neighboring Tennessee, Herbert Slatery III.
Apparently, he’s an eventually fair and decent man. He announced last week that he was withdrawing from the Rutledge-infested coalition because “there is a human element to this.”
Who are these primitive people who egg on Rutledge and the others? Again, that would be the Trump 35 percent. It is exemplified by the propaganda of Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News, which assailed Slatery’s human decency as having “caved” to “amnesty” and the “open borders lobby.”
Then there is the instinctively correct but eventually heartless position — of course — of U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton.
Over the weekend Cotton told a conservative publication — of course — that these immigrant children are not at fault and deserve to stay. But then he conditioned their staying on enactment of anti-immigration policies.
He says give him his bill restricting even legal immigration or send those innocent kids back.
That’s not compromise. It’s ransom.
Trump’s attempted finesse of Tuesday is not the worst thing. It even, perhaps, provides a glimpse of the man’s self-reported heart.
The Hill, an insider congressional publication, quotes him as frustratingly asking his staff to find him “a way out” of his nonsensical campaign rhetoric about sending the “dreamers” packing.
He is calling on Congress to bail him out and make a law on the subject during those six months.
It is possible all Democrats and a few Republicans with hearts will make a just and discreet law. But there will be a hostage price to pay in that some sort of meanness or inanity — maybe even funding for the wall — will have to be attached to assuage the primitive base.
But the last time the base-paralyzed Republicans in Congress set out to repeal and replace something … well, let’s not frighten children any more than they are legitimately frightened already.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.