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- By this time next year, these streets will be overflowing with shit.
It’s been a rough month for the relationship between the three branches of government. The Supreme Court announced that they’re closing in on Obamacare. President Obama has thrown up his hands in surrender at the idea of working with Congress on immigration reform and has announced executive orders to rectify the situation. And now House Republicans have sued the Obama administration on Obamacare.
Republicans are pushing Ted Cruz’s “Obama is a monarch” comments to the limit, complaining about the “imperial presidency.” Jay Nordlinger at The Corner says “the Left” has a “disdain for process.” He believes Obama has gone too far, but he’s not worried about a hypothetical Republican president abusing executive orders the way he believes Obama has. “I don’t think Republicans in general want to abuse their power,” Nordlinger, who was alive during President George W. Bush’s presidency, writes. Republicans, he continues, “have a constitutional conscience, or a semblance of one.”
The rhetoric is white-hot right now, and someone’s going to get burned. Outgoing Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn speculated that Obama’s executive orders might trigger a white version of Ferguson. Obama’s speech was called blackmail. The word “lawless” keeps popping up, conflating the president with a common criminal. This is a problem, because we have a lot of unhinged people with guns in America, and it seems likely that if authority figures keep calling the president an angry lawbreaker, one of those armed lunatics might just decide to take the “law” into their own hands.
The 2016 presidential candidates are all chiming in. Hillary Clinton supports President Obama’s decision. Jeb Bush says Obama’s actions will undermine “all efforts to forge a permanent solution to this crisis,” as though next year’s rabid crop of Republicans would ever reach any sort of a compromise on immigration. Ted Cruz has argued that Obama’s comments were unfair to every immigrant who came to America legally, a bit of political judo that would be more successful if immigrants believed Ted Cruz was a decent human being, and not a race-baiting monster. Scott Walker and Rand Paul want Republicans to file another lawsuit against the president. And the atmosphere around the politicians just keeps getting more and more toxic. Next year is shaping up to look like a gigantic shit-fight that could escalate into an impossibly ugly presidential primary season.