House passes border bill; Obama plans to ignore it and take executive action

Barack Obama's usual excuse for bypassing Congress and acting on executive authority alone is that Congress won't take action. What he really means, of course, is that Congress won't rubber-stamp the ideas he proposes. Obama believes the only action that's legitimate is the action he wants, so anything apart from that he simply defines as inaction.

But in the case of the border crisis in Texas, Obama cannot make that claim. After a few days of scuffling over the details, the House came together on Friday and passed a measure to deal with the issue. See? House Republicans take action! But look who doesn't:

However, a separate Senate bill died on a procedural vote a day earlier, and no more votes in that chamber are scheduled until early September.Even if the Senate were somehow to approve the House bill, Obama vowed Friday he would veto it. In the absence of any legislation that all sides can agree on, the president threatened to act on his own to address immigration challenges, potentially during the five-week recess. "I'm going to have to make some tough choices to meet the challenge, with or without Congress," Obama said Friday, speaking to reporters in the White House briefing room. He later added: "I'm going to have to act alone, because we don't have enough resources."

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But House leaders scrambled to corral the votes for the bill Friday out of a desire to pass something before the recess, if only to save face and put the pressure back on the Senate to act.

So Harry Reid uses a procedural trick to kill the bill, and Obama announces he would have vetoed it anyway. Then, bam. Obama is once again going it alone in pursuing executive action, which will almost certainly involve some degree of amnesty for new arrivals and/or illegals who have been in the country for some time. So what's Obama's excuse this time? The House Republicans are the only ones who have passed a bill here. Consistent with his usual rhetoric, shouldn't Obama call out Reid for scuttling the bill in the Senate? Of course he won't. Remember, for Democrats, immigration policy is all about their dream of turning Texas blue, an in order to do that they need open borders and an easy path to citizenship (and thus, votership) for anyone interested in coming here and enjoying the fruits of America's generous welfare state. Obama doesn't want to solve the border problem, and he certainly doesn't want to solve the current crisis that sees massive numbers of unaccompanied children coming across the border. Rather, he wants to use the crisis as an excuse to take executive action that serves the political interests of the Democratic Party. When he says Congress "refuses to act," what he really means is that the Republican House refuses to be part of this charade.