What short memories Democrats have these days.
To hear, see and read the news, it's almost as if there had never been a discussion about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program before.
There was a ruckus about it all the way back in 2012, when President Barack Obama decided to single-handedly subvert legislative authority and enact by executive order that which had repeatedly failed in Congress for 10 years. DACA was also a topic of some debate again last year during the presidential race, when then-candidate Donald Trump made a campaign promise to end the program.
Elections, someone once said, have consequences.
President Trump made good on his campaign promise this week, in a move that should have surprised no one. Even President Obama acknowledged DACA was only intended to be a temporary fix.
Support on the issue has been so anemic that even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, they were unable to pass the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act to protect young children of illegal immigrants from deportation.
Obama infuriated many opponents, and many voters, when he leap-frogged Congress and the people with his executive order five years ago.
As a nation of laws, not men, we the people put our faith into a constitutional set of checked and balanced branches, with legislation duly enacted through our representatives in Congress. That system has preserved liberty and presided over the world's finest-ever example of self-government for 230 years.
Executive usurpation--the president making law--even in the name of a good idea is still a threat to liberty.
The criminal justice system is most concerned with and committed to not justice, but due process. The former frequently suffers to ensure the latter, and rightly so. It's frustrating to know someone is guilty of a crime, but because his rights were violated during the investigation, tainted evidence is disallowed and the state winds up unable to convict him in a court of law.
That's a constitutionally sound outcome, but not a fair one.
The alternative, however--that the locals take the guilty criminal and lynch him--is even more unjust. Theoretically, a lynching could serve to dispense some justice to a guilty criminal, but in doing so it massacres the rule of law. The next mob might be pursuing something other than justice, and the next lynching victim might be innocent of any crime.
Thus our collective constitutional rights--and the diligent preservation of them--take precedence over the outcome of individual cases.
Emotionally, it rubs us wrong for someone to get away with a crime. But intelligently, wisdom tells us if a system allows individuals in authority (like a judge, or a president) to supersede the law--even to further a true or good cause--it becomes susceptible to corruption and abuse.
Anti-Trump delirium has reached a fever pitch that defies viable description. His rabid critics have become so intellectually inept that even when he's deferring to Congress and constitutional process, they still call him demagogic.
We all get annoyed when Congress doesn't do its job. Its approval rating is in the tank and has been now for a while. But none of us, not even the president, is allowed to take that job away from Congress.
What the Democratic elite still don't get is that a great many voters, spanning the political spectrum, support the Constitution more than they support any politician.
Trump was elected partly, and maybe mainly, because he isn't a politician. His view of an issue like DACA reflects the view of tens of millions of others; namely, that constitutional fidelity must reign supreme.
That sentiment doesn't make anybody mean-spirited. And for the obtuse radicals who insist it does, the label applies most to Congress, which has given lip service to immigration but little else, regardless of which party was in power.
Congress has been derelict on immigration for decades, often using the issue as a pawn for leverage on other matters, and it's politics as usual now.
DACA doesn't officially end for six months, and Democratic senators up for re-election in red states will be squirming in their seats as Congress reconsiders the DREAM Act again.
Deferring and protecting productive, educated, working children of illegal immigrants from deportation is a good idea, but it isn't law yet. And the pressure now will be to link it legislatively with some other good immigration ideas, such as better border security and more fast-tracked deportation of criminals without documentation.
The shrillest voices decrying the rescinding of DACA are many of the same shouters who derided candidate Trump as having no chance to win.
Apparently they've forgotten how wrong they were.
Bloviation is no substitute for real discourse, which resonates with mainstream voters. One would have thought Democrats might have learned by now that presuming to speak down to average working Americans from special-interest perches is a prescription for political disaster.
It wasn't a very good campaign strategy. And it won't be very good for policymaking on immigration, either.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 09/08/2017