Remember all the times Obama said he didn't have the power to rewrite immigration laws?

We all remember. This is probably the second-biggest lie he told as president, after all. (Not quite “lie of the year” material but close.) Still, via Conn Carroll, it’s something to kick back and watch eight minutes of soundbites unfurl as a reminder of the sheer volume of rhetoric he devoted during his first term to warning his base that his hands were tied on executive amnesty. Obama would say that there’s no inconsistency here. He claimed he didn’t have the power to change immigration law and he didn’t change it; he merely exercised “prosecutorial discretion” in placing DREAMers at the back of the line. But that would also be a lie even if he hadn’t taken the extra step of granting DREAMers work permits. If the president deems an enormous class of people effectively exempt from enforcement of a federal statute, then functionally he’s changed the law itself. Imagine, for instance, Trump exercising “prosecutorial discretion” by declaring that anyone with a net worth of $5 million or over won’t be prosecuted for tax evasion as a rule. Technically that’s not a change to the law. Functionally it’d mean the president had unilaterally changed the marginal tax rate for the very rich to zero.

DACA was dubious in other ways. Obama introduced the program five months before the 2012 election; for all the sonorous rhetoric dedicated to it over the past 48 hours, ultimately it was a pander aimed at protecting O himself first and foremost. The rationale for executive action, that Congress wasn’t acting “fast enough,” fed the pernicious progressive belief that somehow the president acquires extra constitutional authority to act unilaterally if the legislature doesn’t do what he wants in an expeditious way. (We may see a reprise of that if Congress whiffs on the DREAM Act and Trump keeps DACA going next March.) And of course, writ large, DACA was just a band-aid on a wound that Democrats themselves had allowed to go untreated when they had the power to address it. Victor Davis Hanson:

But note his about-face came only after the fact that from January 2009 to January 2011, Obama enjoyed a large majority in the House, and until Scott Brown’s election in 2010, a supermajority in the Senate, led by Harry Reid. And yet over that period, Obama did not force over the impotent objections of Republicans a DACA bill that would now have precluded the present conundrum — in the fashion in which he had successfully pushed through Obamacare without a single Republican vote.

Observers have a right to be a little skeptical about the current outrage that was not voiced against an American president in 2009–12, who passed on the opportunity of DACA amnesty, and added insult to injury to “dreamers” by asserting that his constitutional lawyering made it unethical and illegal to pass a law by fiat and circumventing the Congress — at least until he needed reelection heft.

John Kasich said today that instead of six months, Congress should need just six hours to take care of DREAMers. Pelosi and Harry Reid could have carved out six hours in 2010. They didn’t because amnesty of any sort, even for a sympathetic class of illegals, is a hard sell in red districts and they were already facing a dicey midterm environment due to ObamaCare. They put their own electoral chances above a resolution for DREAMers — and got wiped out in November 2010 anyway. Bear that in mind the next time a liberal lectures you on warped priorities vis-a-vis young illegals. Exit quotation via Politico: “Think about how it’ll look on TV, Barack Obama told Donald Trump. All those kids being rounded up — teenagers, good kids. It’ll be all over cable news.”