The New York Times reports that President Obama is preparing to disregard the results of the midterm elections by taking executive action to provide amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, despite overwhelming evidence suggesting the American people would not support such action.
Polling conducted in August found that a majority of Democrats, and a whopping 81 percent of independents, would oppose executive action on immigration, which is probably why Democratic candidates were begging the president to wait until after the election.
Republican candidates ran aggressively against Obama’s proposed executive actions and were rewarded by voters. According to a recent Gallup survey, 53 percent of Americans want Republicans in Congress to have "more influence over the direction the nation takes in the next year," compared to just 36 percent who said Obama should set the agenda.
Senator Angus King (Maine), an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, told the Times a unilateral amnesty "will create a backlash in the country that could actually set the cause back and inflame our politics in a way that I don’t think will be conducive to solving the problem."
Democratic pollster Peter Hart said on Thursday that executive action on immigration would make the remainder of Obama’s presidency "very challenging," and likened it to the partisan stimulus bill passed in 2009.
Pat Caddell, a pollster who worked for Jimmy Carter, recently argued that the proposed executive action suggests that Obama "doesn’t believe in negotiating. … He is willing to blow his party and the country up because he is a narcissistic man who doesn’t have a clue how to do his job."
Longtime Democrat and MSNBC host Chris Matthews issued a prolonged rant on the subject, arguing that Obama did not view the 2014 midterm electorate as "legitimate," and has responded by refusing to compromise.
"You’ve got these two ships passing in the night," Matthews said. "[Obama] will not recognize that larger ship [opposed to illegal immigration] that voted last night."
Another prominent Democrat has repeatedly argued against the president taking executive action on immigration because "that's not how our system works. That's not how our democracy functions. That's not how our Constitution is written."
That was President Obama, whose views of American democracy and the Constitution have apparently "evolved."