Opinion Lame duck?
Obama’s action on immigration could signal a new course for his remaining tenure.
After the drubbing meted out to the Democrats in this month’s US midterm elections, President Barack Obama promised that he would work to “get the job done”. He made a beginning on Thursday night when, after years of pressure from immigration activists and stalled legislation in Congress, where the Republicans have blocked every attempt at reform, Obama announced vast executive measures to prevent the deportation of four million of an estimated 11 million undocumented migrants, including hundreds of thousands of Indians.
These are mostly parents of American citizens and teenagers who were brought into the country illegally as children.
The new programme does not offer permanent legal status or create a path to citizenship, which, experts agree, would represent an overreach of presidential authority. As it is, the Republicans claim that Obama has violated both the constitution and democratic norms by issuing an executive order of this scope — Speaker John Boehner even called him “Emperor Obama” — and are threatening to force a government shutdown over the 2015 budget in order to “defund” the programme. But two years before the next presidential election, the Republicans find themselves in a terrible political bind — not least because Obama is forcing them to take a position on an issue they do not seem to have a coherent policy on. A hardline position on immigration could undermine the electability of the party’s 2016 presidential candidate, while intemperate reactions like those calling for impeachment or another round of budget brinkmanship leave the party vulnerable to old allegations of it being incapable of governing.
This is a new, muscular Obama, wielding the power of his office — and his pen — not to conciliate, as he vowed to do when first elected president, but as a weapon. Immigration reform is likely only the first of many brawls in his final years in office.
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