Gutierrez, who meets often with the president, is implying that Obama, before Labor Day and by executive order, will grant de facto amnesty to five million illegal immigrants.
They will be granted work permits and permission to stay. With his pen and his phone, Obama will do what Congress has refused to do.
There is a precedent. Obama has already issued one executive order deferring the deportation of "dreamers," children brought into the United States illegally by their parents before 2007.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions is on to what is afoot. "We must prevent the president's massive amnesty from going forward," he says, and urges legislation to block an executive amnesty. But this divided Congress is not going to pass any such law. Nor would Obama sign it.
Still, would Obama dare deliberately ignite a nationwide firestorm by declaring an executive amnesty for 5 million illegal immigrants?
Why not? Consider the risks -- and the potential rewards.
On the downside, an Obama amnesty would polarize the country, imperil red-state Democrats and cause even allies to conclude he had become a rogue president who adheres to the Constitution and rule of law only so far as they comport with his agenda.
And what is his agenda? As he has said: to transform America.
Obama wants history to rank him among the transformational presidents like Lincoln, FDR and Reagan. And what better way to transform America than to ensure her evolution from a Western and predominantly Christian country into that multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic, borderless land Teddy Roosevelt inveighed against as nothing but a "polyglot boarding house for the world"?
Obama did not like the America we grew up in.
As he told that closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco in 2008, that America was too full of life's losers who "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiments."
What would be the political benefits to Obama of an amnesty?
It could weld Hispanics to the Democratic Party, would be wildly popular with the ideological and Christian left, and quietly welcomed by those Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans who have silently supported amnesty and secretly want immigration off the table in 2016.
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