The New York Times mocked conservatives who are concerned about President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty and lawlessness, reserving the choicest words for its own right-of-center columnist.
In a Sunday editorial, the Times argues that “the most obvious thing” for Obama to do “is to lift the threat of deportation from immigrants who should be the lowest priority for removal: those with citizen children, jobs, clean records and strong community ties.” The Times acknowledge that “four to five million” illegal immigrants could be in that group.
The newspaper then mocks conservatives opposed to amnesty, saying that the “mere possibility of Mr. Obama’s protecting any of the 11 million immigrants living here outside the law is already making Republicans clutch at their chests and cry out: Oh, the legality!”
“He has done nothing yet, but right-wingers have pre-emptively declared him Caesar, crossing a Rubicon into lawlessness,” the Times says, referring to its right-of-center columnist Ross Douthat.
Referring to Obama’s executive amnesty, Douthat wrote last week that “something rather dangerous is happening in American politics right now, all the more so for being taken for granted by many of the people watching it unfold.” That would include the Times, which has been enabling and egging on Obama’s lawlessness. Douthat argued that “the granting of temporary legal status, by executive fiat, to up to half the country’s population of illegal immigrants” is radical and “simply does not happen in our politics.”
“What’s more, given that the Democrats controlled Congress just four years ago and conspicuously failed to pass immigration reform, it’s especially hard to see how Republican intransigence now somehow justifies domestic Caesarism,” Douthat wrote. “And an American political class that lets this Rubicon be crossed without demurral will deserve to live with the consequences for the republic, in what remains of this presidency and in presidencies yet to come.”
The Times made it clear that the publication wants Obama to cross that Rubicon, blasting “the nativist right” and praising Obama for being “poised to expand the shield” to the “Dreamers’ parents, siblings, grandparents and perhaps millions of others.”
“In truth, Mr. Obama is well within his authority to madden the right,” the Times argues, while claiming that “deferring deportation is not the dreaded ‘amnesty’ that Republicans” have been alleging.
Asserting that giving temporary amnesty to illegal immigrants is in the country’s “national interest,” the Times blasts Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), and “their hard-core colleagues and allies” for believing that “the right number of unauthorized immigrants to welcome is zero; the right time is never.”
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