In an editorial entitled, “At Long Last, Immigration Action,” The New York Times offers a full-throated endorsement of President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty action. However, the editorial board freely admits it has no idea what it’s endorsing.
“The reasons given by Mr. Obama and his aides are sound and well within the law,” the editorialists write. Then, a paragraph later, they add:
“Details have not been announced, but it seems that Mr. Obama’s plan will protect the parents of citizens and legal permanent residents, and a larger portion of the young people called Dreamers, who came here when they were children. Other, smaller groups may qualify as well.” (Emphasis added.)
So, they have no idea what’s in the coming executive order, but they support it. It must be so good to be a Democrat, to know the media will have your back not matter what you do.
In fact, the Times urges the president to go even further, essentially acting as though the bill Congress has refused to pass is law.
“Mr. Obama should draw the circle of inclusion as large as possible — up to the eight million or so who might have qualified under an ambitious bipartisan bill that passed the Senate last year.”
The Times has a history of being soft on dictators, so it’s not surprising they’d go down this path.
They also complain that the president has been too interested in bipartisanship on the issue in an attempt to reconcile Obama’s past unambiguous statements of how he doesn’t have the legal authority to act alone with the fact that he’s about to do just that.
“It has been the immigration system’s retreat from sanity, of course, that made Mr. Obama’s new plan necessary. Years were wasted, and countless families broken, while Mr. Obama clung to a futile strategy of luring Republicans toward a legislative deal. He has been his own worst enemy — over the years he stressed his executive impotence, telling advocates that he could not change the system on his own. This may have suited his legislative strategy, but it was not true.”
How was it “not true”? They don’t say because they don’t know.
They conclude their authoritarian French kiss this way:
“The right will falsely label Mr. Obama’s actions lawless. They are a victory for problem-solving over posturing, common sense over cruelty, and lawful order over a chaotic status quo.”
One important word was curiously absent from The New York Times 664 they wrote on the subject — “Constitution.”
Life is about priorities, and the editorial board of the New York Times made theirs clear both in what they said, and what they didn’t.