Brooks and Marcus: Obama Made Gridlock Worse With Exec Amnesty

Columnists David Brooks and Ruth Marcus argued that President Obama’s unilateral action on immigration will make gridlock in Washington worse on Friday’s “PBS NewsHour.”

Brooks stated, “the ones [legal scholars] who think it was an unprecedented grab of executive power are probably on the right side, but that’s me…gridlock is going to end some day…but what happened last night will make that harder and push that date further on. The sort of unilateral action the president took will make passing immigration reform harder and it will make other reform harder.”
 
Marcus agreed with Brooks about increased gridlock, but took a different approach on legality, saying that he was “a little bit overstating the case of the president overstepping his executive authority.” But, she added “that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. I have some concerns along the lines of what David has about what I call the constitutional prudence of what he did. I have fewer doubts of legality. My concern is how future presidents are going to use this precedent to do other things, to ignore other laws. But on immigration, maybe the time just had to come to act.” And “you could make an argument that the president was acting in a way to restore some faith in the ability of government to rectify injustices.”

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