Pat Buchanan: ‘Rogue President’ Says ‘To Hell With Constitution’

 
By Sandy Fitzgerald
NEWSMAX

The United States has a “rogue president” who has decided he is going to do what he wants to do and “to hell with the Constitution,” columnist Pat Buchanan, former adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, told Newsmax TV Thursday.

“We have a rogue president who tonight is going to announce that he is going to do something he said not so long ago, one year ago, he does not have the legal or constitutional authority to do,” Buchanan told “America’s Forum” host J.D. Hayworth.

“This is being done for his political base in the Hispanic community. He looked at the election returns and said, with Republicans strengthened like this, there’s nothing I can get done with Congress so I’m going to do what I can do and what I want to do and to hell with the Constitution.”
Buchanan also said he does not dispute the numbers from the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll,  which shows that most Americans don’t agree with Obama taking executive action on immigration.

“The country realizes that the president here is acting in a usurpacious manner, that he is seizing power that he does not have,” the conservative columnist told Hayworth. “Why is he doing it now? Why didn’t he do it two years ago? If he had this authority why didn’t he do it four years ago?”

Obama has always realized that he did not have the authority under the Constitution to enact an executive order granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants, said Buchanan.

And while there have been some who have warned about the potential for violence, once Obama announces his executive action, which was delayed earlier this year until after the midterm elections, Buchanan said he wouldn’t predict violence, but he also would not be surprised by it.

“If you get wild celebrations in the community of illegal aliens around the country cheering and laughing at the rest of the country, you completely demoralize the Border Patrol and the sheriffs along that border who have been fighting this good fight for a long, long time and who have tried to do their job,” Buchanan told Hayworth. “They’re now being told everything you’ve done to protect the border and to maintain us as one nation, one people, is by the boards.

“We’re in another country now and I can’t express how much I feel this diminishes us as one nation, one people, and one country when you’ve said, in effect, folks who can walk into your house and sit down at the table are entitled to do so and entitled to remain,” said Buchanan. “We cannot deport them and deportation is out of the question.”

Further, Buchanan called the president’s decision on executive action an “ollie-ollie-oxen-free invitation” for people who are not arriving legally, and an insult to the people who have been patient and taken the legal steps to become American citizens. 

“Folks who have waited to become American citizens because they love the country and this is where they want to raise their children, they all look like fools now,” said Buchanan. “They all look like people who obeyed America’s laws and followed policies and our customs and traditions, and the guys who went up and walked across the border or pushed their kids across the border, they triumphed. They succeeded. They’ve won.”

Buchanan called the executive action plan a “constitutional crisis,” and said Congress will  have to “contain and control Obama” until his presidency is over in two years.

“We have a president of the United States who says, I’m not going to enforce the laws that require me to basically deport and remove [illegals] from society and send [them] back where they came from, people who have broken into our country and broken our laws,” said Buchanan. “Yeah, you’d have something of a constitutional crisis.”

However, he doesn’t believe impeachment is the answer. Buchanan said there are not enough votes for that extreme action and “you don’t want to put [Vice President] Joe Biden in there.”

But he does believe that what Obama is doing is “an impeachable act.”

“That doesn’t mean that the Congress should immediately move to impeach him, but it’s very difficult to see how there’s any comity, any union, or any agreement in the next two years,” Buchanan told Hayworth.

And even though Obama knows he doesn’t really have the authority to enact his amnesty plan, and he won’t be able to get the legislation through the incoming Republican-controlled Congress, “he’s going ahead and like a dictator he’s doing it himself,” said Buchanan. “And he says, impeach me and be damned.”

Buchanan said that if he were advising Obama like he advised former Presidents Reagan and Nixon, he’d  remind him that his legacy will be as a president who broke the law and violated the Constitution.

Buchanan said he’d tell Obama: “You believe it’s going to be a good legacy, but I can tell you this, you yourself said you will be breaking the law and violating the Constitution. So that’s going to stick, that’s going to be a stigma around you, and I’ll tell you this, Mr. President, when some problems arise from these folks whom you’re giving an executive amnesty to in this country, people are going to turn and say that happened because the president of the United States gave them a blanket pardon.”

Buchanan said he’d also tell Obama that while he may feel the executive action “is going to be treated as some kind of Emancipation Proclamation,” it isn’t.
“By what authority does he decide 4 or 5 million get amnesty and 4 or 5 million don’t?” said Buchanan. “Is there something in the law that says that’s the right figure? There’s nothing in the law. He has no law to back up what he’s doing.”