Obama delays amnesty for illegal aliens until after election

“Comprehensive immigration reform”: an idea so popular that the American people must never, ever be given a chance to vote against it.

After months of listening to Big Media pundits explain how Barack Obama’s impending executive order to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens had Republicans checkmated, a craven White House chose Saturday morning to drop the news that the President would be delaying those orders until after the midterm elections.  No mystery about why: as I said above, the American people must never be given a chance to vote on this, and contrary to all that blather about how amnesty is an inevitable winning issue for Democrats, a terrified Democrat Party has been hissing at Obama that he’ll doom them to oblivion in the midterm elections by passing out those amnesty party favors before actual American citizens go to the polls.

Politico remembers the salad days of mainstream-media spin on amnesty, just to remind everyone of what the “conventional wisdom” said, before voters began making themselves heard:

Just a few months ago, immigration reform seemed like a political winner for the White House on multiple fronts.

It was a high-profile way for Obama to illustrate a Congress unwilling to act, driving him to find solutions without them. And for the midterms, it was going to be the president’s way of boosting Democratic turnout among both Latinos, labor and a wider progressive base that’s increasingly identified immigration reform as a top cause. Voters who turn against Democrats by Obama acting were likely already motivated Republican voters anyway, went the thinking.

And there were several key states where that turnout, particularly among Latinos, seemed like it could be a factor in a win, including Sen. Mark Udall’s re-election bid in Colorado, the Senate bids of Bruce Braley in Iowa and Michelle Nunn in Georgia, along with House races across the country.

But even as the White House said that the Department of Homeland Security, and not politics, would guide the decision, conversations with endangered Democrats began almost immediately. The resistance came from expected spots, like Sen. Mark Pryor in Arkansas, but in recent days, even from people like reliably liberal Sen. Al Franken, running in a race that he’s tried to keep from becoming competitive.

While the Left tries to manage its disappointment over coming so very close to replacing the American electorate with an imported model that would be more friendly to liberal policies, sane people are looking at Barack Obama’s manufactured border crisis, thinking about the growing threat of international terrorism, watching Obama’s limp economy creak through another disappointing unemployment report, and seeing absolutely no reason to believe five million fresh loads of amnesty would be a good idea.  The idea of issuing executive orders that would prompt another massive stampede across our virtually non-existent border, while we’re doing battle against the new terrorist super-state Obama allowed to take root in Iraq, isn’t just bad politics – it’s freaking insane, to a degree that transcends partisan considerations among moderate Democrats.  I’ll bet some of the panicked Democrats pushing Obama to hold off on his executive orders are seeing internal polls that show their own voters turning against them.  

The old conventional wisdom held that amnesty was a battle that Democrats could win, if it was merely a bitter partisan battle that divided the country into warring factions.  What changed over the last few months was the growing sense that a good number of Democrat voters are growing nervous about the border, and certain Democrat constituencies aren’t pleased about getting shoved aside to make room for their new romantic obsession with illegal immigrants.

There are few issues on which the Ruling Class – including the cheap-labor portions of the Republican coalition – is so widely divorced from the priorities of American citizens.  Listening to the amnesty caucus talk about immigration reform is like watching extraterrestrials discuss the current weather conditions on Saturn – it’s got nothing to do with what’s actually happening on the ground in the real working-class world.

There’s also the danger of a big Obama unilateral amnesty push destroying all chances for any sort of major immigration reform plan, a calculation that isn’t going to change after the 2014 elections.  In fact, I’ll offer a grim prediction for the amnesty caucus: today’s retreat is going to be followed by another climbdown after the election, in which Obama tells supporters his hands are tied by the new Republican Senate.  It’s possible for Obama to work out a more moderate immigration deal with the Republicans, one that goes very light on amnesty and very heavy on border security – they’re fairly comping at the bit to pass something like that.  But a post-election amnesty executive order would spoil those chances forever, and realign the electorate in a way Democrats won’t like, come 2016.