Lawless

President Obama yesterday announced that his administration will block the deportation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who do not present a national security risk.  They will then become eligible to request a temporary relief from deportation and apply for work authorization.  John Yoo has some thoughts on the precedent that will be created by this move:

President Obama's claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates an unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law.  He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served.  There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

Under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the President has the duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."  This provision was included to make sure that the President could not simply choose, as the British King had, to cancel legislation simply because he disagreed with it.  President Obama cannot refuse to carry out a congressional statute simply because he thinks it advances the wrong policy. To do so violates the very core of his constitutional duties.

Lincoln famously argued that as President, he did not have the duty to enforce the principles of the Dred Scott decision.  He saw that the principles established in that case violated the Constitution because they reversed the compromises over slavery that were anchored in directing that peculiar institution toward the path of its ultimate extinction.  But he never argued that he could simply by executive order not enforce the Compromise of 1850 because he may have disagreed with the policies enacted.

UPDATE:

The Editors at NRO have pretty damning evidence on the tacit 180 turn the President has done regarding his circumvention of the nation's immigration laws:

Though apparently a little fuzzy on the subject of judicial review, President Barack Obama is supposed to be a constitutional scholar of some sort. On the subject of his decision yesterday to unilaterally enact sweeping changes to U.S. immigration policy on nothing but his own say-so, we would like to introduce Barack Obama to Barack Obama, who during a Univision interview just last year affirmed: “America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president, am obligated to enforce the law. . . . There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.” A little softness in the polls and one executive order later, the president has reversed himself.