« Cutting off donations to my alma mater | Are we watching the collapse of the blue city? »
June 19, 2020

Supremes legislate from the bench on DACA. What now?

By Monica Showalter

On questions of immigration, the Supreme Court seems to be representing the interests of foreign nationals who haven't bothered to come to the U.S. legally.

They threw out the perfectly legitimate request to reinstate the 2020 Census question on U.S. citizenship, something that has been on that form since the dawn of the Census and only recently was dropped, saying the Trump administration hadn't presented a good enough reason to do it.

Now they've done the same thing on the question of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama administration executive order that permits a large bloc of illegal aliens to work and stay in the country with zero fear of deportation, cutting them a spot in the line well ahead of immigrants.  Message: Get across the border with your kids; waiting in line to immigrate to the U.S. legally is a chump's errand.  They cited the exact same reason as on the earlier question: that the Trump administration didn't give a good enough reason to them to do it.

This is bizarre stuff — if Obama had a right to issue the order, why does Trump not have the right to rescind the order?  If past presidents had the right to ask about citizenship in the Census, why does this one have to jump through hoops and hope his rationale is good enough to pass muster from the Supreme Court hall monitors?  Equal justice much?

It's not as if this order involved negating legislation — in fact, the original DREAM Act from which DACA sprang actually failed to pass legislation, which ought to weight its rescission all the more.  But somehow, Trump gets less.

It certainly would explain why Trump put out this tweet, much derided from the left.

It's kind of creepy to know there's a Supreme Court out there that gives more presidential rights to presidents of one party and fewer to another.  Funny what Trump-hate can do to legal reasoning.

The problem is Chief Justice John Roberts, the Bush administration appointee who has rapidly swung to the leftist side of the court and pretty well sides with the leftists every time.  (This despite Democrats' insulting behavior to him during their impeachment fiasco.)

Now Joe Biden's out touting the greatness of the ruling, and the press is reporting that it's re-charging his campaign and he plans to run with it:

Earlier on:

Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed on Tuesday that illegal immigrants [sic] in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are "more American than most Americans" because they had "done well in school."

Biden, who recently said he believed drunk driving should not be crime that warrants deportation, made the statement during a campaign rally in Ames, Iowa.

Now he says this:

As for Trump, he's back to the drawing board.  Politico says it would actually be a tough thing for him to decide whether to try again and win Justice Roberts's NeverTrump heart over, or to just scrap it and hold off until re-election. 

Trump is already lagging behind presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in both national and swing state polls. Trying to shutter DACA again could hurt his chances to appeal to Hispanics and slice into Democrats' advantage with them. Some Republicans argue DACA should be rescinded because it was created through an improper use of executive authority but they would still like Dreamers to be protected through legislation.

One thing he could do is work on alternatives to DACA — such as preferential legal immigration for young people in countries where most DACA recipients come from, making it more attractive to immigrate to the U.S. legally than illegally, or the suspended animation of DACA.

Another possibility is to break up the large undifferentiated bloc of DACA recipients — 700,000 people, all admitted on the lowest of standards — and initiate seriously tough standards for admission, cream of the crop alone — no record of any crime whatsoever, no record of illegal voting or ballot-harvesting, and either military service or some kind of proof of immigrant drive over welfare attachment — such as evidence of entrepreneurship for the less academic, or academic achievement in a STEM (as opposed to a woke studies) discipline for the more academically driven — plus fluency in English and other proof of assimilation.  For those who quality, maybe a revised DACA, with a path to citizenship, but no chain migration privileges to reward the parents who foisted them upon us, could be the substitute, a good deal for the better of the DACA kids plus less crime, social disintegration, and Democrat voting blocs for the rest of us.

It's hard to say what will happen now, but for sure, making better offers to attract more law-abiding and economically contributory people would maybe get the rescission of the order through.  With Roberts around, though, maybe it's just best to appoint better judges.

Image credit: Pixabay public domain.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com