Today, thanks to servile Democrats and feckless Republican leadership, the system has revealed itself as finally and utterly broken. Forget for a moment how you feel about immigration policy. As it happens, my position is relatively close to the President’s. Nonetheless, the authority to set immigration policy is clearly delegated to the Congress by the Constitution and Congress has spoken – repeatedly and exhaustively – on this subject. President Obama’s Executive Order was not issued in a vacuum in which Congress had not acted, but instead was a direct declaration that the law would henceforth be enforced in a manner completely opposite from the written law on the books. Each and every person in Congress – Republican or Democrat, immigration hardliner or amnesty proponent, should have objected strenuously to this, if only for the sake of protecting the right of Congress to pass laws that will be enforced as written. Even if you agree with the President’s policy, if you are a member of Congress who cares at all about the rights of Congress to exist and do their job, you could not agree with the way the President went about accomplishing it.

The fundamental error which the framers made – which, in their defense, was perhaps not foreseeable at the time – was the way that the concept of “self interest” would change in the festering culture of Washington, DC in the early part of the 21st century. It was assumed by the framers that Senators and Representatives would always view the most powerful self interest they had as their right to write the laws of the country and to enlarge their own political power. They could not have foreseen – even in their most pessimistic visions – the fawning culture of lobbyists and the perks it would provide Senators and Representatives in the modern world. They could not have understood the way in which, as politics polarized, political parties and their self interest would ultimately become the only way to get and keep this power, along with all its attendant material benefits – nor the way that protecting a Congressman’s post-Congressional lucrative lobbying career would become the highest goal of nearly everyone who assumed the office.

And so we were treated to the spectacle, a few years back, of Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)10% smiling through a mouthful of s*** sandwich as he explained that it was a good thing that even though Congress had declared they were not in recess, the President had decided they were in recess anyway and had made a number of recess appointments. This was the day we all knew good and well that the concept of checks and balances, at least between Congress and the President, was good and dead. If members of the President’s own party would not stand up even for the right of Congress to decide when they were frigging in session and when they were not, they would never stand up to him on anything. And now we know that not only will they not stand up to him, they will affirmatively filibuster any effort to stop a clear affront to their own prerogatives, in order to keep their party apparatus and lobbying constituencies happy.