On illegal immigration, Biden just stole a page from Trump’s authoritarian playbook | Opinion

President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats frequently warn us of the threat to democracy posed by his predecessor and opponent, former President Donald Trump.

Yet there was Biden on Tuesday, swinging a bat at one of the most important principles of our system of governance. Again.

Biden announced that he was magically changing the rules again on illegal immigration. This time, he’s allowing people who entered the country illegally from Mexico to receive work permits and perhaps eventually citizenship if they’ve been here 10 years and are married to an American citizen.

The president was implementing a new law passed by Congress — ha! Almost had you, didn’t I? No, he was making law up from whole cloth, as he has done to transfer student debt to the taxpayers and dismiss hundreds of thousands of asylum cases.

Biden makes a mockery of separation of powers. He declares through executive action that the law is whatever he says. There’s a word for this: authoritarian, the very term Democrats love to apply to Trump.

To be fair, Biden is following his predecessors, including Trump, in issuing edicts and daring Congress or the courts to act. Congress is impotent, even deferential to the chief executive. It’s not at all the way our system is supposed to work.

This one smells a little more than usual because it’s so nakedly political. The New York Times framed it as a clear tradeoff with Biden’s recent action on border security; Tuesday’s order is meant to mollify the far-left, open-border advocates that the earlier one angered.

And yet politically, Biden and his team are badly missing the point. The country is fed up with illegal immigration, having seen so much of it in the decade-plus since President Barack Obama took the original step toward redefining the law with his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The poll numbers for this issue are worse for Biden than any other, except the economy.

In fact, polls suggest voters, including large numbers of Democrats and independents and, yes, Hispanic people, have shifted hard against illegal immigration. Most probably still want reasonable answers for those here illegally. They don’t want families separated. But first, they demand a solution that provides for secure, orderly migration, mostly in much smaller numbers.

Instead, Biden just provided a huge incentive for the very behavior voters are angry about.

“It’s like a magnet, attracting people into the United States who know that if they wait long enough, President Biden will find some way to allow them to stay in the United States, even though they circumvent legal means of coming into the country,” said Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican.

It’s a desperate political move, too. If Biden has to shore up the pro-amnesty portion of his base at the expense of independents with four months to go until the election, he’s in big trouble.

Biden’s announcement did shed some light on a nagging concern: Why is Trump always described as a threat to “democracy” rather than the Constitution? It’s the latter that provides the protections for civil rights and against majority tyranny and establishes the checks and balances that ensure government by consensus, not force.

Liberals find that all too complicating. They constantly undermine the Constitution, inveighing against the Electoral College, the representation granted to states through the Senate, and any other provisions that stand in the way of the kind of sweeping action Biden took Tuesday. The Constitution limits federal power, and that just makes it too darn hard to remake society.

To be fair, Trump probably also finds the Constitution’s roadblocks frustrating and unnecessary, to the extent he’s ever thought it through. His threats to the sanctity of elections are real. But when it came to executing his presidential power, when he was reined in by courts, he largely deferred. Biden openly brags about circumventing the Supreme Court ruling that he can’t unilaterally open the Treasury to pay off student loans.

Biden and his fellow liberals have spent decades shifting power to unelected bureaucrats on issues that should be far beyond the federal scope. Sadly, Congress often acquiesces rather than make difficult decisions for which voters might hold lawmakers accountable.

It all adds up to an atmosphere in which a president figures he can rewrite the law on just about anything, including immigration. How authoritarian.

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