My piece on the home page today is on the open-borders crowd’s plans to amnesty the illegal population by executive decree if Congress fails to comply with Obama’s demands. One thing I didn’t address is that Rubio actually used this possibility as a rationale for voting for Chuck Schumer’s immigration bill. He argued that if Republicans stopped the bill, which contained at least a few concessions from the Left in exchange for amnesty, Obama would just amnesty illegals administratively without offering any enforcement as a sop to Republicans.
This is how he put it on Mark Levin’s show:
If we don’t do anything, then the status quo remains, which is they won’t do anything. You won’t have E-Verify, you won’t have. . . . In fact, I think it’s possible that they could give legal status like they did to the DREAM Act qualificators, I mean people who qualified under the DREAM Act — they could do the same thing to millions of people more. What would stop them from doing that?
But this is the collaborationist logic of the defeated. The proper response, the constitutional response, is to say that the chief executive will be impeached if he acts contrary to Congress. The supporters of amnesty can cite all the polls they like, but until they get a bill passed by both houses of Congress, they don’t get their amnesty. If there’s no bill by next summer, they can make amnesty for illegal aliens the center of their 2014 campaign, and see what the public thinks. But Rubio’s claim that Republicans are helpless and must accept whatever crumbs the Democrats are willing to provide is Petainist nonsense.