Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Al.) issues a response to a Wall Street Journal report that confirms that “the President is planning to issue a massive unilateral amnesty after the election” that will “likely be broader in scope than anyone has imagined.”

“Broader in scope than anyone has imagined”?  Who are these dim souls among our politicians and media who didn’t see this coming?  Democrats and progressives have known well, even as they avoided the topic of amnesty like an Ebola-laced cupcake on the campaign trail, that Obama’s proposed post-election amnesty initiative will likely be a sweeping and decisive pardon to basically everyone who has broken our laws by entering this country illegally.  His administration has shown no signs that it would even make exceptions for illegal aliens with serious criminal histories (murderers and rapists!), much less minors, those who’ve chaperoned minors on northward treks, anyone who demands asylum here, etc.  So what reasons could Republicans possibly have for underestimating the scope of Obama’s proposed amnesty?

But while the broad scope of Obama’s amnesty ambition should never have been surprising, the timing should have always been telling. 

The facts are that Americans overwhelmingly do not want amnesty, and running on the policy position of instituting broad amnesty for illegal aliens is a detriment to representatives running for office on both sides of the aisle.  After all, if waving his mighty pen to enact amnesty is something Americans might react positively to, why would he not do it prior to the election and strengthen his party’s position in November? 

No, such an action would have created too many larges waves in the political seas – too deliberate and unpopular a motion, and one that could swallow his Democrat cohorts around the country in the resulting torrents.  Instead, he proudly winked at pro-amnesty lobbies and pledged that he would willfully subvert the legislative branch’s authority after the election, creating just a small wake that would drown only those Democrats who could not successfully distance themselves from him and his destructive policies.  After the election, and having thus minimized the potential disaster his presidency has caused for his party, he would strike with his pen to forever alter the voting demographics of this nation in Democrats’ favor, inking his legacy and securing his progressive bonafieties among his flock.

In other words, Barack Obama knows that American citizens overwhelmingly oppose amnesty for illegal aliens.  He just doesn’t care, and he’s going to institute it anyway.  Barack Obama also knows that such unilateral action undermines constitutional protocol and the separation of powers.  He just doesn’t care, and going to issue his executive decree anyway, regardless of the statement made at the polls in November.

In truth, we should have known that amnesty has been the left’s ultimate endgame for some time, so we shouldn’t be surprised at Obama’s fascist candor and subversive timing in executing it.  Amnesty would seem to secure a new bloc of millions of Democrat voters who will march to the polls every other year (at Democrats’ behest), demanding more taxpayer-funded entitlements. 

In the larger sense, what we are witnessing is the culmination of a century of progressive Democrats’ ambition.  This is just the next (and perhaps last, in their mind) logical step in the quest to transform this industrious and entrepreneurial dynamo that once was America into a government-administrated utopia. 

The problem for the left has been that Americans have an innate impulse to strive toward our independence from government-sponsored welfare.  Limited government authority and expansive individual enterprise are ideals that were chiseled into this nation’s foundational charter.  Yet progressive social engineers have worked tirelessly for a century to strangle that impulse in Americans by binding them with miles of regulatory red tape and smothering them with fees and taxation – or by legislating their serfdom under bureaucratic magistrates whose responsibility it is to seize wealth from the producers to distribute among the unproductive.

This is how socialism works.  Democrats are indeed socialists, and make no mistake – Obama’s proposed executive amnesty is an act of revolution.  

The core of this issue has nothing to do with the ethical underpinnings of the immigration debate, and everything to do with political culture and warring ideologies.  Democrats count on the progressive faithful and gullible moderates to mutter abstract clichés like “we’re a nation of immigrants” with robotic cadence, and think no more.  But we should have the good sense to understand that the landscape today is such that wholesale allowances for immigrants to enter this country, as Obama offers, pose both physical and economic dangers to American citizens.  

First, there is the prevalent threat that those who might wish to harm us will exploit our apathetic approach to immigration policy (see 9/11, or the countless instances where illegal alien murderers, rapists, and narcotics dealers have claimed the lives of Americans, etc.).  But perhaps the greater threat is in the economic implications that an endless deluge of immigrants portends.

“Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  We’ve all heard it countless times.  Well, that was then.  This is now.  Americans would certainly never begrudge a person for being poor and tired, and given that such people respect this nation’s laws and enter in accordance to them, problems would not typically arise – we would encourage them in their pursuit of happiness.  It’s that last bit that causes the problems.  “Yearning to breathe free” should not entail a desire to reap taxpayer-subsidized benefits provided by wealth that these people did not earn, distributed by government officials who likewise did not earn it but crave the immigrant’s affections for having given him a right to someone else’s property.  But thanks to a century of redistributive socialist policies and the resulting subversions of free markets and individual liberty, it does.  And taxpayers are on deck to pick up the check for Obama’s grand ambition.

And he plans to make you pay, regardless of what you have to say on the matter in November.

William Sullivan blogs at http://politicalpalaverblog.blogspot.com and can be followed on Twitter.