Strange Bedfellows Unite Against Executive Amnesty

As President Barack Obama gets closer to possibly enacting massive executive amnesty, liberals and conservatives concerned about executive overreach have strangely united against him.

In a New Republic article, Jonathan Cohn observed that Ross Douthat of the New York Times, who has warned about Obama’s “Caesarism” and the media’s enabling of it; Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle; and the left-wing Jonathan Chait, the New York magazine writer who said liberals may look back on it “with regret,” have agreed on an issue for one of the first times and have all expressed serious concerns in recent weeks.

Cohn said “he knows the work of all three writers extremely well” and was “pretty sure this is the first time they have come this close to agreeing on anything.”

On the other hand, Shikha Dalmia-of the Washington Examiner and the libertarian Reason Foundation, which favors open borders-and Jonathan Adler from Case Western Law School, who helped write the Obamacare lawsuit, have supported Obama’s supposed right to enact broad executive amnesty.

Cohn, meanwhile, said he is “decidedly undecided” on the issue until he sees what Obama actually does. And He felt that though the “assumption in many places is that Obama will propose something massive and totally unprecedented,” he is not sure Obama will go that far, because Obama “takes the rule of law as seriously as his critics do.”

“If I wanted to be more cynical, I’d say he cares about his legacy too much to even flirt with impeachment,” Cohn wrote. “Either way, Obama could end up proposing something that falls short of the ambitious notions floating around in the press right now. It would still anger the right, I’m sure, but it might upset some folks on the left, too.”