NYT ‘Legal Scholar’ in Support of Obama Executive Amnesty Was His Harvard Law Professor

The New York Times and a liberal professor at Harvard have teamed up to downplay the federal court ruling finding President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty unconstitutional.

In her story about the ruling—and the injunction that federal Judge Andrew S. Hanen issued ordering the immediate halting of the implementation of Obama’s amnesty—New York Times reporter Julia Preston argued that Hanen’s ruling would be “quickly suspended” by a higher court.

“Some legal scholars said any order by Judge Hanen to halt the president’s actions would be quickly suspended by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans,” Preston wrote.

Preston, however, only quoted one legal scholar: Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard.

“Federal supremacy with respect to immigration matters makes the states a kind of interloper in disputes between the president and Congress,” Tribe told her. “They don’t have any right of their own.”

“All of that is interesting political rhetoric,” Tribe added about what Preston described as how the lawsuit quoted Obama’s many different times saying he didn’t have the authority to grant executive amnesty, adding: “but it has nothing to do with whether the states have standing and nothing to do with the law.”

Preston doesn’t disclose in her story that Tribe was one of Obama’s professors during the president’s time at Harvard Law School. Tribe, who actively campaigned for Obama and supported his runs for the White House, is on record as previously saying he thinks Obama was “the best student I ever had.”

According to the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper of the Boston-area ivy league school, when Obama was elected in 2008, Tribe spoke fondly of him.

‘There are those in whom challenge stirs greatness, those who rise to challenge rather than letting it break their stride or spin their compass,” Tribe said of Obama, calling him“the most impressive and talented of the thousands of students I have been privileged to teach in nearly 40 years on the Harvard faculty.”