Energy and immigration share a pivotal but too easily overlooked concern for the US. Both issues, moralized sickeningly by advocates of governmental solutions for every problem, invoke principles of constitutional governance.
When President Donald Trump announced on Sept. 5 phaseout of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, response from the opposition was predictable. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California called Trump's move "a deeply shameful act of political cowardice and a despicable assault on innocent young people in communities across America." By Pelosi's standards, that scolding was mild. When Trump last March fulfilled a campaign promise with an executive order rescinding the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the former speaker went transcendent. "Shocking!" she exuded. "Almost sinful, really sinful to be so degrading of God's creation."
Judgmental strain
Pelosi represents a judgmental strain of political liberalism with which American voters, to judge by recent election results, have grown weary. Practitioners preach more than they argue. They assert their own righteousness, condemn dissent as self-evidently unrighteous, and-with excessive help from bedazzled news media-limit debate. The pattern is regrettable. It smothers issues needing ventilation, some of them at least verging on parallel moral questions.
The DACA and CPP controversies are complex. Fairness and decency stipulate that people raised in the US ought not be deported for having entered the country with parents or other guardians devoid of immigration credentials. But legitimate differences exist over how to resolve the attendant legal issues. Similarly, common sense warrants efforts to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, which contribute in some measure to observed warming. On that issue, too, differences loom about the nature and extent of the hazard and about how best to address it.
In the US, democratic processes should find popularly acceptable answers to tough, multidimensional disputes such as these. The proper forum is Congress because Congress makes law.
DACA and the CPP didn't come from Congress. In both cases, former President Barack Obama decided lawmakers weren't doing what he believed they should do and made what amounts to law by proclamation. With DACA, he stretched the accepted doctrine of prosecutorial discretion beyond reason to exert his will. With the CPP, his administration claimed control over energy decisions and set constitutionally adventuresome requirements for state governments.
Obama's attempted enlargement of executive authority challenge the doctrine of separation of powers and cannot be justified on grounds of his confidence in the rightness of his ambitions. The US has a president, not a monarch. US citizens determine the rightness of the president's ambitions, partly in presidential elections and especially through Congress. DACA and the CPP both bear the taint of presidential expansionism. That's no less a moral problem than are the threat of capricious deportation or reluctance to address global warming.
With his plan for DACA, Trump in fact tries to minimize disruption to affected people while giving Congress 6 months to find a legislative solution. Calling him "cruel," as Obama did on Facebook, ignores much.
Congress must answer the call. Political difficulty does not excuse inaction. A legal crisis involving immigration is at hand. Congress needs to resolve it. Doing so would have the added benefit of restoring institutional prerogatives under presidential assault since long before Obama took office. That alone should help unify lawmakers with differing political views.
Improving energy policy
Repair of congressional function also would improve energy policy-making. Proper energy choices balance the economic, environmental, and strategic interests of Americans who buy energy and pay taxes. Those interests should be openly arbitrated by representatives answerable to voters and willing to spurn the demands of extremists, rent-seekers, and corporate insiders. They are too important and too diverse to be left to executive fiat.
The US needs a legislature able to grapple constructively, if not always tidily, with complex political problems. Immigration and energy show that when Congress won't act, some presidents will. From the resulting constitutional strain, the republic also needs relief.