An enthusiastic crowd filled the auditorium earlier today.  Thousands of cheering fans sat eagerly on  their seat, anticipating,…. and then the moment came.  President Ted Cruz stepped onto the stage to resounding applause and announced:

“Capital Gains Taxes are impacting the capacity of our economy to expand; therefore effective tomorrow I’m instructing the IRS to cease and desist any collection or enforcement efforts in that regard.

Effective immediately businesses and individuals can, if they choose, discontinue filing capital gains incomes on their quarterly income tax returns. My administration will make no efforts to punish for non-payment.

However, congress can avoid such an executive order if they will simply send me a repeal bill for any and all corporate and individual capital gains revenue”.

Does it Sound ridiculous? Does it sound like something that might send Democrats and the media into 24/7 news cycles as they debate a constitutional crisis?
Consider:


In essence: Once you agree with me and do what I want, I won’t have to do what I want by myself, without authorization. Problem solved, see how easy?
 

(New York Times)  IN the months since President Obama first seem poised — as he now seems poised again — to issue a sweeping executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, we’ve learned two important things about how this administration approaches its constitutional obligations.

First, we now have a clear sense of the legal arguments that will be used to justify the kind of move Obama himself previously described as a betrayal of our political order. They are, as expected, lawyerly in the worst sense, persuasive only if abstracted from any sense of precedent or proportion or political normality.

Second, we now have a clearer sense of just how anti-democratically this president may be willing to proceed.

The legal issues first. The White House’s case is straightforward: It has “prosecutorial discretion” in which illegal immigrants it deports, it has precedent-grounded power to protect particular groups from deportation, and it has statutory authority to grant work permits to those protected. Therefore, there can be no legal bar to applying discretion, granting protections and issuing work permits to roughly half the illegal-immigrant population.

This argument’s logic, at once consistent and deliberately obtuse, raises one obvious question: Why stop at half? (Activists are already asking.) After all, under this theory of what counts as faithfully executing the law, all that matters is that somebody, somewhere, is being deported; anyone and everyone else can be allowed to work and stay.

So the president could “temporarily” legalize 99.9 percent of illegal immigrants and direct the Border Patrol to hand out work visas to every subsequent border crosser, so long as a few thousand aliens were deported for felonies every year.

The reality is there is no agreed-upon limit to the scope of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law because no president has attempted anything remotely like what Obama is contemplating.

In past cases, presidents used the powers he’s invoking to grant work permits to modest, clearly defined populations facing some obvious impediment (war, persecution, natural disaster) to returning home. None of those moves even approached this plan’s scale, none attempted to transform a major public policy debate, and none were deployed as blackmail against a Congress unwilling to work the president’s will.

And none of them had major applications outside immigration law.

No defender of Obama’s proposed move has successfully explained why it wouldn’t be a model for a future president interested in unilateral rewrites of other areas of public policy (the tax code, for instance) where sweeping applications of “discretion” could achieve partisan victories by fiat. No liberal has persuasively explained how, after spending the last Republican administration complaining about presidential “signing statements,” it makes sense for the left to begin applying Cheneyite theories of executive power on domestic policy debates.  (continue reading)