Today, worse is better. The president’s manifest and manifold inadequacies might awaken a slumbering Congress to the existence of its Article I powers and responsibilities.
As a candidate, Donald Trump vowed devotion to all twelve of the Constitution’s seven articles. As president, Barack Obama, discerning a defect in the work of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, supplied Article VIII, which has expired. It stipulated: “Between Jan. 20, 2009, and Jan. 20, 2017, the president shall have the power to do whatever Congress declines to do.” So, when Congress did not confer legal status on “Dreamers” (immigrants brought to America illegally as children), he did it. He conferred such status and attendant benefits on a large category of people and called this patently legislative act a routine exercise of law-enforcement discretion.
When Trump was a candidate, his policy regarding Dreamers made up in concision what it lacked in reflection: “They have to go.” As a president whose incoherence has a kind of majesty, he says he has “a love for these people” who are “incredible” when they are not engaged in rampant criminality. When he is not pardoning Arizona’s scofflaw sheriff Joe Arpaio for his anti-immigrant criminality, Trump casts immigration as a law-and-order issue.
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