RUSH: Looky here. Looky here, ladies and gentlemen. Jeffrey Toobin on CNN has just finished explaining that it is prosecutorial discretion that Obama will use to justify what he’s doing tonight. Ashleigh Banfield said, “If the president’s actions effectively nullify federal law, then they’re unconstitutional. But if they’re merely to channel enforcement resources to other areas, then it’s within his discretion to do so, right? Is the layperson’s version of that, if you’re going 70 in a 55 zone, the policeman might pull you over. But if you’re going 60 he might use that discretion and say, ‘I’m gonna let you go. I’m gonna go after the real speeders’?”
TOOBIN: Think about it in a different context. Colorado and Washington state have legalized marijuana.
RUSH: Yes.
TOOBIN: Marijuana is still illegal under federal law.
RUSH: Yes.
TOOBIN: But what the Obama administration has done has said effectively, “We are gonna put Washington and Colorado on probation. So we are not gonna prosecute marijuana cases, except in certain limited circumstances in those states to see how it goes.” Now, that’s not overturning the federal prohibitions on marijuana law. It’s an exercise of prosecutorial discretion saying, “We’re not gonna bring those cases for the time being.” That’s a similar thing to what’s happening with immigration now.
RUSH: That is a total distortion of what is happening tonight, and this is what infuriates me. I maintain this guy knows better. He is just being a good political foot soldier. But when the Constitution is involved, this being a good foot soldier ought not count for anything. The Constitution ought to be inviolate. It ought to be inviolate. There ought to be respect and reverence enough for the Constitution everywhere that wherever it’s violated, no matter what your politics, you’re called a violator on it.
But, no, these people are distorting themselves into all kinds of pretzel-like shapes in order to say that what he’s doing is legal. Let me run through this again. President Obama is claiming that he has prosecutorial authority, which he does, the executive branch does. What he’s saying is, “You know what? I’m not gonna prosecute illegal immigrants anymore. I’m gonna pick five million of ’em, I’m not gonna prosecute ’em anymore and I’m gonna tell the Border Patrol and ICE and everybody stand down, and then I’m gonna give ’em work permits. I’m not violating any law. I’m not creating new law. I’m just claiming that I’m not gonna prosecute ’em.”
He does not have the constitutional authority to do this. He’s claiming he’s got the power to declare criminal acts lawful. In Ashleigh Banfield’s example, okay, find somebody going 70 in a 55-mile-an-hour zone, if you don’t give them a ticket, it doesn’t mean 70 miles in a 55 zone is legal. But Obama is claiming that by not choosing to prosecute these five million, he’s turning them into legal residents, and he can’t do that. Only Congress can do that by another act of law. There is a statute. Obama cannot change the statute.
This is a key point. Just because he chooses not to prosecute these five million does not make them legal. And it does not make what they’ve done legal. And it does not open the floodgates for other illegals to be proclaimed legal. He simply doesn’t have the authority, and I maintain to you that Toobin has to know this. To declare that criminal acts are somehow lawful, that illegal aliens after tonight at eight o’clock, will now have a right to be here just because Obama’s chose not to prosecute them?
Not true, folks. He does not have that authority. He does not have that power, and no president before him has ever done this. Reagan didn’t do this. Bush didn’t do this. Furthermore, what Obama’s gonna do tonight, those who engage in this unprosecuted activity, the illegal immigrants whose violations we’re not gonna prosecute, they’re gonna be rewarded. They’re gonna be given benefits. They’re gonna be relieved from deportation. They’re gonna be given work benefits as if their illegal acts are some sort of valuable community service here.
This is wrong multiplied two or three times. This is an utter corruption, perversion of prosecutorial discretion. It’s blatant. He doesn’t have the constitutional or legal authority to do this. And these legal leftist analysts on cable TV stretching and bending themselves into these weird shapes in order to justify this should be ashamed. I maintain that they know exactly what’s going on here, and they’re politicizing it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: If Jeffrey Toobin were being honest, let me tell you what his analogy would be. You just heard Jeffrey Toobin on CNN say, “This is no different than a temporary suspension of the marijuana laws in Colorado and Washington, and we’re gonna see how it goes, and we’ll make a decision later on. We’ll see how it goes.” No, no, no. What Obama is doing in this example Toobin gives is not prosecutorial discretion in deciding not to stop busting people for an ounce of marijuana. No, no. The correct analogy would be Obama would give them a permit to buy some. That’s the correct analogy. Toobin has got this all wrong.
The bottom line is, folks, why in the world did Obama run around for the past whatever it was, year and a half or two years, claiming he didn’t have the authority to do this? Why did he run around saying he wasn’t an emperor? He’s the one that did it. Nobody put words in his mouth. He knows that what he’s doing is illegal tonight. He knows he doesn’t have the authority to do it, and so does Toobin. And to cite the marijuana laws, if Obama was gonna do in Colorado and Washington what he is doing with illegal immigrants, it wouldn’t be ignore people that smoke dope; it would be give them some. That’s the correct analogy.
Obama is gonna be bestowing benefits tonight. He is going to claim that he’s taking illegal aliens and converting them to legal simply by choosing not to prosecute them. That’s not it works, and he doesn’t have the authority to do that. Only Congress can change legal status like that with another enactment of law or an amendment to law or whatever. He cannot just unilaterally do this, and he knows it. And so does every one of his supporters from Josh Earnest to Toobin to whoever it is out there comporting themselves in weird pretzel-like shapes in order to justify this.
Prosecutors cannot write the laws. Okay, you’ve got a prosecutor. Let’s say, I don’t know, pick a law in your local county that somebody gets prosecuted for, and all of a sudden the prosecutor says, “You know what? I don’t have time. I don’t have the trouble, and I can’t do it. We’re not gonna prosecute this case.” That does not mean the law has been rewritten so that what action is being ignored has all of a sudden become legal. Prosecutors cannot write the law. And just because they choose which ones to prosecute or not prosecute doesn’t mean they’re rewriting the law, and it doesn’t mean that they have the ability to proclaim that something that’s illegal is now legal.
He simply doesn’t have this authority. There’s no way. You can stretch this, you can bend it, you can shape it, you can massage it, you can do whatever you want. You can have all of your political buddies line up and give it their best intellectual shot, and at the end of all that, it’s still illegal, unconstitutional, and not permitted. There is no halfway. There’s no, “Well, it might be.” There is none of that, folks. This is cut-and-dried. He’s violating the oath that he took. He swore to defend and protect the Constitution, the laws, that’s out the window. And he knows it.
Why run around for two years and claim to every Hispanic audience that was giving him the business about it. (imitating Obama) “Well, you know what? We have our laws, and I’m not an emperor. I can’t write my own law.” Well, he’s gonna write his own law tonight. He’s just gonna go (raspberry) to anybody that doesn’t like it. But this marijuana example, I’m telling you, the analogy, if it were to be complete, Obama, if he were going to do with marijuana and busts and the law what he’s doing with illegals, it would not be he’s just gonna ignore people that smoke dope. He would give them some tonight in violation of the law.
Anyway, let me get started on the phones ’cause if I don’t I’m just gonna keep going here, ’cause the brain is firing on all synapses.
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