The tone of today’s Wall Street Journal on Obama’s proposed executive amnesty is striking: The editors’ main concern is that Obama’s illegal overreach might “empower the GOP’s yahoo wing.”
Obama and fellow Democrats, they argue, “want the GOP to dance to the Steve King-Jeff Sessions blow-a-gasket caucus.” The Journal’s advice to Republicans is to “stay cool and keep working on piece meal [immigration] reform.”
Notice the elegant phrase, “yahoo wing.” The Journal does not, you will note, describe the widespread GOP opposition to both the Gang of Eight Senate bill and Obama’s caesarism as, say, “fellow conservatives that we have honest disagreements with on immigration policy but agree with on many other core issues.” But, even worse than the sophomoric name-calling is the Journal's proposed response to Obama’s brazen illegality: The GOP is supposed to “stay cool” while Obama shreds the American Constitution.
So much for the paper’s supposed reverence for our constitutional system of checks and balances. The president violates the Constitution? No big deal, no reason to “blow a gasket,” just stay cool and keeping working to bring in more low-skilled labor.
Just who is a member of the “yahoo wing” of the GOP anyway? Who is “blowing a gasket” over Obama’s blatant disregard for the Constitution of the United States of America? It appears that the yahoos include a good chunk of the Republican congressional caucus; the editors of National Review, The Weekly Standard, The National Interest; columnists like Matthew Continetti, Thomas Sowell, and Ross Douthat; most of the campaign workers who just brought us a Republican Senate; and a whopping majority of ordinary Americans (as Kellyanne Conway’s survey research has constantly shown). The Journal's editors might be more persuasive if actually engaged in serious arguments with other conservatives rather than indulge their juvenile propensity for name-calling.