Pierce writes: "The Stupid ice had to be cracked on this issue, and the president's done that. Ball's in your court now."



President Obama speaks about immigration from the Rose Garden of the White House, 06/15/12. (photo: Reuters)

Obama Goes Long on Immigration, GOP Goes Crazy

By Charles Pierce, Esquire Magazine

ow this is more like it, and not merely because it is making the usual suspects squeal.

In a Twitter post, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the decision "avoids dealing with Congress and the American people instead of fixing a broken immigration system once and for all... This is a classic Barack Obama move of choosing politics over leadership," Graham's tweet said.

You know what, Huckleberry? Tough. You and your party have demagogued this issue to the point where, in the last presidential campaign, John McCain had to disavow his own immigration bill. Who in the hell is the president supposed to lead?

This guy?

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, called the change a "decision to grant amnesty to potentially millions of illegal immigrants... Many illegal immigrants will falsely claim they came here as children and the federal government has no way to check whether their claims are true," Smith said in a statement. "And once these illegal immigrants are granted deferred action, they can then apply for a work permit, which the administration routinely grants 90% of the time."

Or, maybe, this guy, the nuttiest member of the House not named Allen West....

"I will tell you that - I'm not without experience on this - I'm prepared to bring a suit and seek a court order to stop implementation of this policy," King said.

And somebody stole the strawberries, too.

Steve King is the leader of your party on this issue, Huckleberry. Live with it.

(Ooops, I may have overrated Steve King here. Congressman West, checking in from beautiful downtown Paranoid Palms, Florida.)

(And here's a guy from Tucker Carlson's little vanity publication, acting like a jackass.)

It has the added benefit of being a decent policy move, too, considering it was the only one that the Republican banana factory in the Congress left to him. The president is simply acting as the head of the Executive Branch - the same principle under which John Yoo once assured us would allow C-Plus Augustus to crush a child's testicles if he saw the need to do so. What he has done is excise the specter of existential dread from the lives of 800,000 young people, most of whom (presumably) will be electorally grateful. That's enough alone for cynical bastids like me. But it's also a brave and decent thing to do, which seems to have occurred to (among others) Senator Marco Rubio, who'd like to have a political future after he hits 45, and who probably looks at a party speaking through Steve King on immigration and sees that evaporating before his eyes...

"There is broad support for the idea that we should figure out a way to help kids who are undocumented through no fault of their own, but there is also broad consensus that it should be done in a way that does not encourage illegal immigration in the future," he said. "This is a difficult balance to strike, one that this new policy, imposed by executive order, will make harder to achieve in the long run."

Only if your party continues to pander to the flock of loons, senator. You know what's happening here. The Stupid ice had to be cracked on this issue, and the president's done that. Ball's in your court now.