Can Obama's amnesty of illegal aliens save America?

The response of conservative experts and politicians to Obama's latest decision was expected - they are outraged, upset and disgusted. While I can understand their emotions, I disagree with their conclusions. In fact, Obama may have inadvertently acted as a savior of the Republic. 

This Friday morning I accidently overheard my colleague, who I will call JC in order to preserve his anonymity, talking in his cubicle about the unconstitutionality of Obama's "edict" to amnesty 5 million illegal aliens. In all fairness, by that time I already knew what I wanted to write in this post, but I could not resist jumping right in the middle of this discussion to express me opinion on the subject. I fully sympathize with the argument that Obama's decision is unconstitutional, but that by itself is hardly an argument which can win a lot of supporters among American people. A careful recitation of the Articles of the Governing Law of the Republic will most likely put to sleep a  majority of our semi-literate population, while upsetting probably another 20%. And in all honesty, these numbers may well hold true for our Supreme Court. More importantly, the real issue is that our Constitution has been dead since at least the 1930ies and FDR's New Deal, if not even earlier with Woodrow Wilson. No fair person, knowledgeable of the letter and spirit of the Constitution and the history of its adoption would agree that the major building blocks of today's federal government - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, most of labor laws and even environmental laws satisfy the limited role of the government envisioned and codified by the Founding Fathers. In other words, our Constitution is dead and buried, and most of the people do not care, so it's useless to appeal to it.

What's worse, is that the oppressive role of the federal government, the "welfare socialism", as well as extreme environmentalism are slowly but steadily suffocating the Republic. If the current trajectory is not drastically altered, America will eventually become a pseudo-socialist state, with lobotomized population brainwashed in government-controlled schools and universities. Conservative debate about the niceties of the Constitution in light of this debacle seem to be incredibly naïve - and reminds me of two apocryphal stories about the well-meaning British. Apparently, before WW1, the British intelligence refused to intercept German radio and written communications. The argument was that "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's letters". During the start of WW2, the British initially refused to bomb German factories, because that could cause the damage to private German property and was apparently unfair. Today's Republicans in many ways remind me of the same - and what's worse, they tend to treat the Democrat Party as a well-meaning but somewhat confused dear friend of theirs.

But still, you may ask, how does Obama's amnesty have to do with this? Well, once we acknowledge that the Constitution is essentially dead, and this country is going to hell, we must ask ourselves - what can be done about it? Even president Reagan, who was elected twice with the promise of cutting federal government and privatizing Social Security and eliminating Medicare was unable to achieve this. President Bush attempted a moderate reform of Social Security and he too was stopped. It is also widely acknowledged that American welfare state is soon to go bankrupt, and there is apparently no attempt to be made to rescue our country. Congress, even with Republican control is unable to break the Democrat obstruction, as the past has shown.

And yet, let's not forget that the foundation of the liberal regime in this country is federal power to prosecute the people who attempt to withdraw their monetary support of the welfare state. You have to support it with your taxes - or you will be sent to jail. Same applies to environmental laws, labor laws and the like. Until today, the executive branch was expected to prosecute all the dissenters from the welfare state, and the president was powerless to stop this. But what has happened this Friday? President Obama is now demonstrating that the motivated president can refuse to uphold the law, and prosecute the people who openly violate it. In other words, he is setting the precedence that the enormous federal power to prosecute (which is the foundation of American liberalism) can be simply set aside by the President. As it stands today, the President cannot arbitrarily prosecute his opponents, but he can, if he so decides, remove the entire oppressive power of the federal apparatus. This means that the sole pillar of liberalism, the threat of federal violence has been dramatically weakened, and Republicans can remove it if they elect a conservative president. It is no longer necessary to have a complete control of Congress to reform the welfare state - the president can simply declare that people who refuse to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes will not be prosecuted. Moreover, he may unilaterally cut federal taxes, union laws and environmental regulations without the need for a protracted and most likely unsuccessful struggle in Congress.

Does it mean that we won? No, but it means we now have an opening. In order to satisfy his narcissistic desires to "fundamentally change the country", as well as his angry response to the rejection by American voters, Obama removed a major defense wall around the welfare state.
Will the Republicans use Obama's error? If we make sure that the man we elect to serve in the White House has the guts to defend this country, and people in Congress won't surrender, we may have a chance to stop this country from falling into the abyss. The only other alternative would be to appeal to the Armed Forces and remind them they took an oath to protect this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic - but that is the step few people are ready to call for.