I’ve read both sides of the debate over the recent actions by Obama on illegal immigration. And I can’t decide who’s right. Was it a completely lawful decision by an executive exercising prosecutorial discretion, or an outrageous overreach by an executive who essentially re-wrote the law on immigration?
And that’s exactly the problem. It ought to be possible to tell whether an outrageous abuse of power has occurred. But our system of government in America is based on a hopelessly vague document called the Constitution, which does not clearly spell out who has the power to do what. If we had a parliamentary system like Britain, it would be immediately apparent whether an abuse of power had occurred.
On immigration it is the right complaining of an outrageous abuse of power. But it is pundits on the left who worry that the Supreme Court may rule that the ACA does not allow for the federal government to provide insurance subsidies via federal insurance exchanges. Paul Krugman is already warning that a ruling along those lines would be an outrageous abuse of power. There sure is a lot of abuse of power going around! And once again, this problem would not occur under a parliamentary government. They would respond to any court ruling by simply fixing the language of the law.
As an aside, the immigration decision is a win from the utilitarian perspective. What I don’t see discussed very much is that it is also a win for libertarianism. It will create a small libertopia of about 5 million people right within the US. These people will be terrified of stealing things, for fear of deportation. But they will have little to fear if they don’t violate the property rights of others. They will no longer have to fear the INS—only the groups that all Americans fear (IRS, TSA, NSA, CIA, FBI, local police who need to seize more cash to finance their budgets, and all the other scary groups out there.) And they will have to work to survive–no relying on welfare benefits. That’s not a pure libertopia, but it’s pretty close. In no other time or place did you have legal gay marriage, legal pot, and no welfare. Not even Holland. And yet (formerly) illegal alien communities in many western states will now face that policy regime. I wish them good luck.