King Barack The Timid?

Having lost his "street cred" with movement conservatives through his involvement with the Senate CIR bill, Marco Rubio is trying to repair the long-range damage to his political career by jumping back (rhetorically, at least) onto the side of the crazies.  Case in point:  his recent warning that President Obama might use his administrative authority to grant temporary protective status to all current undocumented immigrants, if CIR is not enacted by the full Congress.  This warning received a boost last week by this article about a "secret memo" generated within the Obama Administration, discussing the possibility of the President using his administrative authority to grant a measure of legal status to the undocumented.

Immigration lawyers have long known that this was possible.  Some in fact (myself included) have argued that Obama should just go ahead and do it, given the current political logjam in Washington.  We have, regardless of how it originated, a human rights crisis in this country when we have 11 million or more people, most of them children, who are essentially people without a country.  They cannot conduct the most basic activities of human existence without fear of incarceration or worse.  And, despite that fact, they live their lives among us, affecting those lives in positive and negative ways regardless of what we do or don't do.  Those reasons have, or should have, the effect of sweeping aside all other considerations for the one individual, the President, who is charged to act on behalf of everyone in this country.

Obviously, Obama is reluctant to do this.  And there are practical considerations that support that reluctance.  What can be unilaterally done by one President can be unilaterally undone by another; witness Mitt Romney's refusal to commit to a continance of the DACA program if elected.  A legislative change, on the other hand, is far more permanent.  And the cooperation of Congress prevents its members from turning immigration into impeachment bait--something that they could do, on the other hand, with an administrative program (and something that, in the event of an all-Republican Congress in 2015, they might do through DACA and the provisional waiver program, which thus far represent the limits of Obama's administrative action on immigration).

Nevertheless, Obama's refusal to use his administrative power more openly to goad Congress into acting legislatively is why I have come to think of him as King Barack the Timid.  He's been under no real impeachment threat for the past six years, with the Senate in the hands of the Democrats during that time.  What would it have harmed to have set a deadline for Congressional action, promising to use his administrative authority in the event the deadline was met?  Nothing.  Even if he then had to pull the trigger on his promise, all he had to do was add a renewal feature to whatever relief he granted, thereby giving Congress the freedom to act at a later date.

Obama, and modern Democratic Presidents generally, have been far too modest in their conception of the Presidency.  Even the Framers understood that an executive needs the freedom to act unilaterally; that's why Article II of the Constitution is far less detailed than Article I.  Democrats, and Obama in particular, need to be less afraid of the potential of the office.  Just because that potential is flagrantly abused by Republicans doesn't mean that Democrats have to treat the Oval Office as a Cone of Silence.

Life Magazine, in a special issue on the Presidency, included a quote which described it as "a job as big as the man."  Leaving the question of sexism aside, that has and will always be true.  It would be nice to find out, sometime before January of 2017, exactly how big Barack Obama can be.  And, unless CIR becomes a reality, I hope that immigration will be the vehicle that helps the rest of us to find out.