Obama Delays Immigration Action, Marco Rubio Astonished That Politics Influenced Decision

After some not terribly subtle hints from Democrats in red states who'd rather not have to deal with one more claim of tyranny, Barack Obama announced this weekend that he was going to delay executive action on immigration until after the midterm elections. He had said that he would move by the end of the summer to enact a change, but between the enormous right-wing freakout over Central American children taking all our jobs and the House's passage of a bill that would rescind a hold on deportation for young people brought to the US, Obama decided it was worth pissing off Latinos in hope of holding the Senate, maybe.

There's almost certainly a hilarious joke in this nobody's-happy compromise, and we bet you sharp commenters will find it. We'll just have to settle for groaning at all the Republicans accusing Obama of playing politics with this very important issue, after they've spent over a year doing nothing about immigration since the Senate passed its immigration reform bill in June 2013. Republicans have been screaming about immigrant children with scabies and ebola, but dammit, now that Obama fellow has gone and politicized everything.

A special bouquet of Irony Roses to Sen. Marco Rubio, who last year repudiated the Senate immigration bill he sponsored, and also went on CBS yesterday to say that Obama's delay was "definitely politics." Rubio also explained that aexecutive action on immigration would just get in the way of Congress's fixing the problem, which it could do if Barack Obama would simply recognize that Americans don't want any action on immigrants who are already here until they're sure the border is 100% secure forever. Now that's decisive.

At least Rubio's consistent, sort of: a couple weeks back, he warned that an executive order on immigration would make Congressional action impossible, while yesterday he said that he was glad that Obama didn't issue an executive order, but he's still good and outraged that Obama might take action later. Couldn't he just double the Border Patrol again first, to show that he's serious?

On the up side, at least the president has once again disappointed a big portion of his base, so at least Republicans will see that he's serious about working with them. We expect they'll jump at this chance to warn that Obama intends to subvert the Constitution, take our guns, and declare Spanish to be the national language, just as soon as he's instituted Sharia law and dissolved all marriages between straight people.

[ NYT / WaPo / CBS ]