Bob Bianchi appeared on Fox News Happening Now with Lis Wiehl and host Jon Scott regarding President Obama’s executive order on immigration. This case has reached the US Supreme Court on the legality and extent of using executive orders, and if they are in reality circumventing the role of Congress to make laws. It will be an interesting debate as executive orders have for long been approved, but so has the Congress’ right to make laws.
As a former NJ Prosecutor, I was part of the executive branch of government. My job was not to make laws, but “execute,” or enforce, them. In that role, I had wide discretion to emphasize what laws I would prosecute, and which ones I would not. But, these decisions were for practical reasons including the crime issues we were confronting, the resources we had, and our ability to target the most dangerous and serious offenders.
To me, it would abdicate our “separation of powers” for me to use this discretion to say, for example, “I don’t believe in prosecuting rape cases, so I will not do so.” My feelings about the law from a legal standpoint is not really relevant when I swore an oath to uphold the laws. What is relevant is executing the laws that I was given by the lawmakers, unless there were practical resource considerations at play that made that impossible.
To me, if you don’t like the law, change it. To simply not enforce it sets us up for an oligarchy form of government, and not a democracy where the people through their elected representatives in Congress are given that responsibility.
Here, there appears from the record that President Obama is acting for a different reason, that is, the refusal of Congress to change the immigration laws as he would like. As you can see from our clip, both me and Lis feel that this was an inappropriate reason and overstepped Congress.
Check it out and let me know your thoughts.