Then vs now: Barack Obama on bypassing the Congress to implement immigration reform

  It has been widely reported that Barack Obama has been considering using Executive action to implement immigration reform and according to many this would include some type of amnesty, so I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what Barack Obama had preciously said about using this tactic.

  Back in 2011, while speaking to La Razza, he had this to say:

The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting, I promise you, not just on immigration reform. But that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions

  Back then he said he could not do things on his own because that is not how democracy functions, but there is more:

he has insisted time and again that he’s the president, not the king, and “can’t just make the laws up by myself.” In a 2012 interview with Telemundo, Obama defended his decision to defer deportations for children but said he couldn’t go any bigger.

“If we start broadening that, then essentially I would be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally. So that’s not an option,” he said then.

  He claimed back then that by taking any further Executive action that he would be ignoring the law and that was not an option, but now he is about to do just that so what changed?

  He won reelection and now, as he told Russia before the election, he can be more flexible. Suddenly the law and the Constitution do not hold as much sway with the president as they did when he needed the votes.

  While Democrats are now beginning to speak out about this I have to ask them where they were back then because many of us warned you this would happen. Perhaps you should have listened to us for you reap what you sow…