Obama himself long maintained that he lacked the authority to issue a unilateral amnesty for Dreamers. We’ve gone from everyone assuming that the president can’t act in defiance of the immigration laws to judges insisting that a president must act in defiance of the immigration laws.

This is a more brazen attack on the law than anything we’ve seen from Trump despite his loathing of his own Justice Department. Books have been written about the coming descent of the U.S. into fascism, but evidently no one who promotes or buys these tomes cares about the black letter of the law, at least not when it doesn’t suit their political interests.

The complaints on the right, meanwhile, about an unelected Deep State trying to destroy the president are overdone. Yet here is an unelected branch of government overstepping its constitutional bounds to frustrate a core priority of a president who ran and won on the issue of immigration. This is corrosive of faith in our system, counter to the rule of law, and sophomoric on the part of men and women who are supposed to be neutral arbiters of justice.