Amnesty as impeachment bait

President Barack Obama is impatient. Congress won't act on immigration, he says, and therefore he will. The White House is coy as to exactly what the president will do. But the leaks point to an executive order essentially legalizing an enormous new class of people living in or entering the country illegally, perhaps up to 5 million people.

One doesn't usually respond to rumors. But this is an idea so bad and so persistently peddled by the White House that it has already been pre-emptively criticized by such unusual suspects as (liberal) constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, concerned about yet another usurpation of legislative power by the 'user presidency,” and The Post editorial page, which warned that such a move would 'tear up the Constitution.”

If this is just a trial balloon, the time to shoot it down is now.

Laws created by Congress, not by executive fiat. That's what distinguishes a constitutional republic from the banana kind.

Moreover, Obama had control of both houses of Congress during his first two years in office - and did nothing about immigration. So why now?

Because he's facing a disastrous midterm election. An executive order so sweeping and egregiously lawless would be impeachment bait. It would undoubtedly provoke a constitutional crisis and stir impeachment talk - and perhaps even the beginning of proceedings - thus scrambling the electoral deck.

There's an awful irony here. Barack Obama entered our national consciousness with an electrifying 2004 speech calling for healing the nation's divisions and transcending narrow identities of race, region, religion, politics and ideology. Four years later, that promise made him president. Yet today he is prepared to inflict on the nation a destructive, divisive, calculated violation of the constitutional order and national comity - for the narrowest partisan advantage.

For this president in particular, who offered a politics of transcendence, this would constitute a betrayal of the highest order.

According to White House leaks, the executive order will be promulgated by summer's end. Time enough to reconsider. Don't do it, Mr. President.