The editors of the Wall Street Journal who have long supported an open borders policy either de facto or in jure, have come out as opposed to the president’s announced policy change:

The polls show the American people are uneasy about Mr. Obama’s unilateral law-making, and liberals should be too. Mr. Obama is setting a precedent that Republican Presidents could also use to overcome a Democratic majority. How about an order to the IRS not to collect capital-gains taxes on inflated gains from property held for more than a decade? That policy would be broadly popular and also address a basic lack of fairness.

Mr. Obama’s rule-by-regulation has already been rebuked more than once by the Supreme Court. His “I, Barack” immigration decree is another abuse that will roil American politics and erode public confidence in the basic precepts of self-government.

I think there are only two likely explanations for their reaction:

1. Either they think he’s done the right thing in the wrong way or
2. They’re opposed to it because he’s doing it.

Just as a reminder, I’m in favor of increasing the number of work visas given to Mexican workers by a factor of ten or even a hundred, serious workplace enforcement with serious penalties, and increased H1B visas providing the jobs are advertised in a central clearing house well before the visa is received with draconian penalties for abusing the system. I also would not oppose some version of the DREAM Act as long as it were systematically and consistently applied and enforced.

That’s neither a conservative nor a progressive position but I think it comports with the realities of life in today’s United States rather than riding somebody’s political hobby. It’s a lot more liberal than the view of a majority of Americans but based on the polls it’s closer than what either Republicans or Democrats support.

I doubt that President Obama’s announcement last night that he will legalize millions of illegal immigrants via executive order will do much to mollify Republicans or build bridges towards a more collaborative approach to governing in the next term. I’m sure that two, contrasting views will be offered: that Republicans could never have been mollified anyway and that the president’s action merely confirms that he never had any intention of a more collaborative approach to governing.

The political battle will be waged between an appeal to pity on the one hand and whether the move is within the president’s executive discretion on the other. I look forward to the overnight presidential approval tracking polls which will not be available for a few hours. My prediction is that they’ll not show a great deal of movement one way or another—among Americans who were paying attention the move had already been expected.

If I were the Republicans I’d seek an injunction against any enforcement of the presidential ukase immediately. We’ll soon have an opportunity of learning whether Mr. Dooley’s pronouncement is still right.

Mickey Kaus cautions the president:

With Obama’s executive amnesty imminent, anonymous White House aides are cockily dismissing John Boehner’s threatened lawsuit against it as a stunt. Even among opponents of executive amnesty — and I’m with them — there’s a tendency to pooh pooh the suit. It’s a loser, it will take forever to decide, it’s an attempt to ‘redirect Republican rage’ away from budgetary remedies like denying funding, etc.

Not so fast. I’m all for giving defunding a try — also holding up appointments — but don’t sell the lawsuit short. I’ll even go so far as to lay down an Yglesias style marker: If Obama’s executive action is as broad as described, the Supreme Court will strike it down.

I also don’t believe that the president can count on Senate Democrats to back him to the hilt. He’s probably won his last election. They have (they assume) many more to which they may look forward. I haven’t done a head count yet but I’m guessing there are Senators running for re-election in 2016 who can’t run on the president’s executive order.

The Watcher’s Council has announced its winners for last week.

Council Winners

• *First place with 6 1/3 votes!–Joshuapundit–A Murder In Jerusalem…And What To Do About It
• Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes – The Noisy Room – The Subjugation of Christianity and America to the Muslim Brotherhood and Allah
• Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes –Bookworm Room – Found It On Facebook: Everything That’s Wrong With A Poster From The Left
• Third place *t* with 2/3 votes –The Razor – The Left’s War Against Rural America
• Third place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Right Planet – Common Core and Qatar – Sharia Education for All!
• Fourth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Simply Jews – The tortuous un-logic of Will Self, a Jewish un-Jew
• Fourth place *t* with 1/3 vote –The Independent Sentinel – Saving Some Wild Chickens With The Largest Federal land Grabs In Modern Times
• Fourth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Nice Deb – The Gruber Tapes 1 – 10

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 1/3 votes! –Victor Davis Hanson – A Moral primer submitted by Joshuapundit
• Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes –John Bolton/ NY Post – Iran’s nukes: Too desperate for a deal submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes –David Horovitz/Times Of Israel – Seize the day: A challenge to Netanyahu submitted by Simply Jews
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Sultan Knish –Super-Amnesty Will Turn Every City into Detroit submitted by The Noisy Room
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Mollie Hemingway/The Federalist –It’s Time To Push Back Against Feminist Bullies submitted by Nice Deb
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote –Ace Of Spades–Gruber Truthers really need to shut the f*** up now submitted by Bookworm Room
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote –John Fund/NRO – Gruber’s Deception submitted by The Watcher
• Fifth place with 2/3 votes –The Wilderness – Real Genius: Feminism Leaves Science in the Dirt submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Patterico’s Pontifications – Linda Greenhouse: I Am Horrified That the Supreme Court Took Up the Halbig Issue submitted by Rhymes with Right
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Taki’s Mag/Gavin McInnes –10 Black Things Liberals Just Don’t Understand submitted by The Razor
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Sultan Knish –Life Under The Victimocracy submitted by The Independent Sentinel

The announcement post at the Watcher’s site is here.

True or false:

Most U.S. billionaires are entrepreneurs from modest backgrounds, operating in competitive new industries, suggesting the former.

I think it’s false. I think that most of today’s entrepeneurs are canny readers and manipulators of the system. They don’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps, forging fortunes out of nothing by creating new products and industries out of the own sweat and brilliance. There are no more Andrew Carnegies. Or even Tom Edisons.

Today’s billionaires have ideas and creations that produced modest wealth for themselves which they then exploited to rig the system to push down competitors and pull the ladder up behind them. Without intellectual property law and easy scruples Bill Gates would still be running a small consulting firm in Seattle.

Charles Lane is really behind the curve:

Majority rule is not the only progressive principle some progressives seem ready to sacrifice on the anti-Keystone altar.

Remember the corrupting influence of money on politics? Billionaire Tom Steyer has spent millions on TV ads backing environmentalist Democrats and trashing the pipeline itself, thus purchasing outsize influence in the White House and the Democratic Party.

Liberals had principles. There are no more liberals and there haven’t been since Walter Mondale was trounced in his run for the presidency. Progressives have no principles. They have goals, tropes, and tropisms but for them the end justifies the means. When you’re on the vanguard of history, of what use are principles? They’d be a violation of the goals you hold dear.

We don’t have any conservative nowadays, either, but that’s another subject.

In anticipation of the president’s announcement this evening which all are assuming will be some sort of executive legalization program, I should probably hang up my pundit’s spurs if I didn’t do some speculating on what’s going to happen. Since I don’t have any idea of what the president will actually announce, I’ll remark on what the responses should be instead.

If there’s any reasonable argument that the president is acting under his constitutional authority (“necessary and proper” comes to mind), the Republicans (and the American people, a majority of whom oppose any mass legalization plan) will just need to suck it up. Or pass a law that prohibits the president from acting as he did, from enforcing his plan or whatever.

“Reasonable argument” is a pretty broad standard but I haven’t seen many reasonable arguments in support of the president’s position. “All the other kids do it” is not a reasonable argument but that’s the argument I’m seeing most frequently made. “You can’t ignore 20 million people” and an appeal to emotion aren’t reasonable arguments, either.

If there is no reasonable argument that the president has acted under his constitutional authority, I think the first recourse should be seeking relief from the courts in the form of an injunction. If the Court takes sides by refusing to take sides, I have little doubt that the Republican House will impeach the president.

Don’t assume that the Democrats in the Senate will present a united front in support of the president. He isn’t running for any elections but they are. It would be the case of an unpopular president taking an unpopular course of action in support of people who don’t vote.

On the other hand if the president’s announcement tonight is that he’s not going to do anything, we’ll see demonstrations in other places than Ferguson.

In a column ostensibly about the political hazards of unilateral action by the president, Ruth Marcus does a pretty fair job of marshalling all of the fallacious argument in support of presidential action into a handy, compact form. For example, this:

In addition, there is a bipartisan history of presidents taking significant, unilateral action to address humanitarian problems in the absence of congressional solutions.

This combines several fallacies. First, there’s the “two wrongs make a right” fallacy. Because a past president (of a different party) took a particular action, a subsequent president may do so, too.

But then there’s the sort of persistence theory quality to it. A major difference between, say, the amnesty program of the Reagan administration and any new amnesty program is that nowadays we have 35 years more experience with amnesty programs and can reasonably come to two conclusions about them:

1. The moral hazard argument about them is correct. They do, in fact, encourage more illegal immigration.
2. The slippery slope argument on presidential power, too, is correct. Ruth Marcus is instantiating it.

I’m in favor of immigration reform but not this sort of immigration form. A good start would be changing the priorities of immigration policy away from family reunification and towards what’s good for the 310 million rather than for the 20 million.

Is it my imagination or just my little corner of it or has the world gone mad since the midterm elections? I can’t tell whether it’s stupidity, brinksmanship, or just plain boredom but it seems to be everywhere these days. The president seems to be actively courting impeachment with his threats to act alone to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants. The editors of the Washington Post, the Keepers of the Sanctuary of the Prevailing Wisdom say so so it must be true:

We favor immigration reform, including a path to legal status for the 11 million foreigners in the country without valid papers. Congress should have acted on this long ago. We also understand that the president has broad authority in this area, which he exercised in 2012 to pardon young people who had been brought here as children.

Now, however, he is contemplating executive action not really aimed at one group or another but intended “to make the system work better,” as he said in his post-election news conference. He acknowledges that Congress should and could do this job, but he is tired of waiting.

Three years ago, when advocacy groups pressed him to take such a step, Mr. Obama demurred. “Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting,” he said. “Not just on immigration reform. But that’s not how — that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written.”

Mr. Obama may find a constitutional way to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws. But in his frustration with democracy, he is likely to prove his point: Unilateralism will not make the system work.

Returning, briefly, to the facts a majority of Americans oppose amnesty (or anything that sounds like it), want stricter enforcement, and candidates who favored liberalization of our immigration laws were typically defeated in the midterms even in Blue States. All of that may be crazy but they are facts. The president has probably won his last election but the same is not true for Congressional Democrats who cannot be counted on to stand behind the president’s agenda or even to oppose his impeachment.

Those organizing protests in Ferguson, Missouri seem to be actively courting race war. White folk in America have practically nothing to fear from blacks. The statistics could hardly be clearer on this. If you’re black, the person most likely to harm you is black, too. If you’re white, the person most likely to injure you also has white skin. Can you imagine how white Americans could react if they actually had something to fear, as one organizer of the demonstrations has allegedly called for? It’s madness. The people most likely to lose by that are white gentry liberals and non-whites.

At the best of times the world has only a passing relationship with sanity and that’s not limited to the United States although we seem to have made a fine art of it. Young people from all over Europe are going to help the insane barbarians of the Islamic State. They, of course, are upset with the Israelis and the Americans (I don’t believe they really distinguish between us, a view that also seems to extend to the banks of the Potomac).

The Germans are doubling down on their nutty policy of ordoliberalism. They do not believe (or do not care) that their economic policy has adverse consequences for their trading partners whose economies are increasingly in ruins. If only the Portuguese were more German, dammit.

Here in Chicago the mayor’s State of the City message didn’t mention the city’s single largest problem: the enormous bill that needs to be paid next year for the pensions of retired city employees. Very few have called him on it. It’s just plain crazy.

People are outraged over climate change, the situation in Ferguson, and over beheadings in Syria and Iraq. We absolutely need to do something. Nobody seems to be proposing any solutions. In the case of ISIS they either support the Administration or want much, much more bombing. They have yet to enunciate a clear national interest or how their strategy will effect their goals, something that seems to be a common factor behind all of the mad and maddening situations today.

Cold weather has arrived in earnest here in Chicago. The temperature is below freezing. There’s a dusting of snow on the ground.

Tonight my wife’s and my supper is slightly adultized grilled cheese sandwiches (good bread, Dijon mustard, good cheese, a little slice of ham) and Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup. I’ve made cream of tomato soup from time and time and, honestly, mine is better than Campbell’s.

However, there are times when there is no substitute for the foods of childhood and this is one of those times.