Goodbye, legacy?

If President Barack Obama has any hopes of crafting a legacy as an effective president, apart from his race- and class-dividing first six years, he has two years in which to get it done.

But his renewed threats of the last week -- that he will take unilateral action to offer some type of amnesty to illegal immigrants -- would effectively sink that legacy.

It's true that Obama has wanted Congress to take action on the nearly 12 million-plus illegals for a while, but action from a Democrat-led Senate and a Republican-led House was going to be nearly impossible in an election year.

With Republicans leading the Senate and House for the 2015-2017 session, though, there was hope for some type of compromise legislation with the White House.

And Obama surely owed it to the American people to see what could be crafted with the new Congress it voted in last week, right?

Apparently not.

Although he hasn't announced anything yet, Obama is poised -- according to sources -- to announce a series of executive actions as soon as next week but by the first of the year that would affect 4 to 5 million illegal immigrants.

This ramped-up threat comes in the same week videos provided evidence from one of the architects of Obamacare that the administration knew it had to play upon the "stupidity of the American voter" and fool the Congressional Budget Office to get the Affordable Care Act passed.

That many Republicans warned about obfuscations in and around the health-care bill and its passage without examination on a straight party line vote in 2011 is little salve now.

Indeed, taken together, the Affordable Care Act and the likely immigration actions appear no different than a presidential nose-thumbing at the American people.

After last week midterms, in which the electorate as much as expressed a no-confidence vote in the Obama administration, the initial hope was that a humbled president and the new Congress could work together on actions involving trade policy, the Keystone pipeline and even immigration. Republicans vowed bills -- held hostage by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the current Congress -- would get aired and voted on.

A cynical move by the president on immigration, though, virtually guarantees the same us-against-them (White House vs. Congress) stance as has been in place since the 2010 elections produced the current (Senate vs. House) us-against-them standoff.

Worse, this is the same president who said he didn't have the authority to do what he now threatens to do.

"The most important thing that we can do is to change the law because the way the system works -- again, I just wanna repeat, I'm president, I'm not king," Obama said in 2010.

And in 2011, of his having a unilateral authority to stop deportations, he said, "That's just not the case."

Whether Obama is planning to act on his own designs or to placate the far left wing of his party, where he's comfortable, is not clear. But more than 100 Democrats in a letter urged him to move forward and include as many illegal immigrants as he could in his decision.

"It is ultimately the job of Congress to reform our broken immigration system by enacting legislation," the letter states. "But by failing to do their job -- and repeatedly interfering with your efforts to do your job -- congressional Republicans threaten to take our immigration system hostage and preserve a status quo that everyone agrees is unacceptable. Their failure to act must not inhibit your commitment to governing."

Obama's plans reportedly call for expanding deferred action for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children but also for the parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.

Tenets of the plan intended to solict wider support also supposedly include strengthening border security, giving some Immigration and Custom Enforcement officers raises and targeting serious criminals for deportation.

Though Obama's executive orders cannot give illegal immigrants citizenship, that's the path he wants to put them on, jumping them ahead of many people pursuing legal immigration.

He'll win friends from various countries south of the U.S. border, all right, but such a naked, aggressive, cynical action will hardly influence his Republican enemies. And just when the elections offered an olive branch of cooperation.

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