Our dystopian future

I can’t think of anything smart (in a straightforward sense) President Obama ever said, but he had a certain gift for promulgating bad policies that are difficult to undo. Obamacare is first and foremost among them, but Obama’s catastrophic foreign policy also presents a powerful case in point. That bit about undermining American allies while building up America’s enemies — that wasn’t just bad, it was evil. But the arrangement with Iran — front-loading benefits that could not be taken back and undoing sanctions that could not be restored — pure genius. We will be living with the results for a long time to come. Living if we’re lucky.

Undoing DACA, on the other hand, shouldn’t be difficult. Obama promulgated that piece of work by executive decree after advising us repeatedly that it was beyond his constitutional powers, as it was. Maybe advising us repeatedly that it beyond his constitutional powers should qualify as one smart thing he said, but it didn’t require great insight, especially when saying it comported with what he felt were the political imperatives of the moment.

Undoing it should be easy. President Trump could restore the status quo ante with the stroke of a pen, or he could let the courts do it. He doesn’t have the appetite for it. Andrew McCarthy has more here.

Note: If it was unconstitutional to issue work permits during the Obama era, it is unconstitutional to renew them during the Trump era. Query: If Congress doesn’t act to as contemplated in the next six months, do you suppose that President Trump will do then what he didn’t do today? My answer: I don’t, but perhaps we shall see.

It is not clear whether President Trump killed DACA today as to current beneficiaries, i.e., whether he will continue renewals past the deadline in the case Congress fails to resolve the issue. Politico has posted the text of Attorney General Sessions’s statement on DACA this morning posted here. As Rich Lowry points out (without the pun), it’s a long, long way to temporary.

The rule of law is so passé. The progressive war on the Constitution continues with ever greater success and ever greater prospects for success.

The worst is yet to come. Bernie Sanders gave us a preview of coming attractions in the course of his campaign. He isn’t even a Democrat, he just played one so long as he had a chance of capturing the party’s presidential nomination. Yet even a fool could see that he represented the throbbing heart of the Democratic Party. Revealed: the throbbing heart of the Democratic Party is socialist.

Ed Rogers peers into the future and sees this:

The race to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020 will be a race to the left. The Bernie Sanders agenda has taken root. By the time the Democrats’ nominating process was complete in 2016, Hillary Clinton had become Bernie Sanders-lite. I see the next Democratic nominee as likely to be Sanders on steroids.

Economic polices will consist of government giveaways and anti-business crusades. Social causes will give no quarter to moderate positions, and LGBT special interests, labor unions, global warming fanatics and factions such as Black Lives Matter, along with other grievance industry groups, will face no moderating counterforce.

This seems to me to understate matters considerably, but it is a useful exercise. As for Antifa, Rogers sagely observes: “The pandering to come will be nauseating, but nonetheless compelling to watch.”

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses