The Washington Post editorial board took a surprising position on Wednesday after the paper reported Saturday on plans by the Obama Administration to grant deferred action and work permits to millions of illegal aliens. The Post said that the President's expanded executive amnesty would violate U.S. law and the Constitution.
"Congress is a mess. But that doesn’t grant the president license to tear up the Constitution," the Post editorial said.
In 2011, then-ICE chief, John Morton, issued a series of memos that established enforcement priorities for the agency. The memos placed the enforcement focus on illegal aliens who had committed violent crimes. A year later, another directive was issued that established a registration system for illegal aliens who were 31 years of age or younger and could prove that they had come to the United States when they were younger than 15. The directive, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, shielded more than 642,000 illegal aliens from deportation and gave them work permits.
The Obama Administration is completing a review of a new directive that would expand the DACA program to an estimated 5-6 million illegal aliens.
While the Post continued to express its support for the Schumer-Obama amnesty bill approved by the Senate last year, it argued that the House's inaction is not reason for the President to act without Congressional approval.
"The president should think twice," the Post editorial said. "The right response to the collapse of the U.S. immigration system is for Congress to fix the law. The House had a vehicle to do just that by taking up the legislation passed by the Senate last year. But it does not follow that Congress can be ignored based on its failure to act. The right response to lawmakers who won’t solve the immigration mess is to replace them with ones who will."
To read the full editorial, see WashingtonPost.com.
