A Bang or a Whimper?

It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

 - Barack Hussein Obama, 2008 victory speech

As cynical modern Americans, we expect politicians to lie, and certainly never to keep their promises.  Not so Barack Obama!  He promised change, and indeed, change is what he has delivered.

Unfortunately, not only are they changes in the wrong direction, they are so profoundly wrong that it's an open question whether it's possible to recover from them.  In fact, with his lawless and unconstitutional amnesty plan, that's the entire point:

“Immigration reform is probably the biggest issue of the 21st century,” Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR) reportedly said at an “Immigration Day Action” event this weekend. “It will decide who is in charge of this country for the next 20 or 30 years.”

This isn't a political opinion, it's simple math; study after study has shown that immigrants, legal and illegal, vote Democrat over Republican by 2 to 1.  Thus, every three new immigrants is one more net vote for Democrats.

We've previously observed that, if America's electoral demographics was the same as it was in 1980, Mitt Romney would have won with a larger landslide than Ronald Reagan.  Instead, Barack Obama was re-elected.  Why?  Because America now has many more immigrants and much larger numbers of minorities now than there were then.

If the massive, overwhelming flood of amnestied illegals were the only thing Barack Obama did as President, he would still have changed this country unrecognizably.  But it's not.  Consider how he went about his amnesty plan: after six years of repeatedly arguing that he didn't have the power to unilaterally amnesty anyone, he suddenly decided that tada!  He did.

The Constitution created three supposedly co-equal branches of government in the hopes that when one branch overstretched its bounds, the other two could rein it in.  Certainly Congress has not passed an amnesty bill; the House of Representatives has passed a bill banning federal funds from being spent on amnesty, but it remains to be seen whether the Senate will also.

As far as the third branch of government, a federal judge has issued an emergency stay of Obama's plan, pointing out that if amnesty went ahead, "The genie would be impossible to put back into the bottle."  Has this court ruling stopped amnesty?  No: DHS is continuing right ahead with letting contracts to support it, and the Justice Department is trying to talk another federal judge into issuing a stay of the stay.

By American tradition, this situation should never have arisen, or if it did, it ought to bring about impeachment.  The President is transparently claiming authority that not only doesn't he have, that he himself admitted he didn't have until about 5 minutes ago!  If this isn't a high crime, it's at least a misdemeanour.

Yet there is no talk of impeachment.  Congress doesn't even have the nerve to shut down the government by refusing to authorize spending until the amnesty is stopped.  This, despite the American voters overwhelmingly indicating just last November that they want Mr. Obama's agenda stopped!

Why don't Republicans do what they were elected to do?  Quite possibly, they're afraid.  There is probably nothing more fundamentally un-American than using government power to oppress your political opponents, but there are innumerable documented instances of exactly that, from the notorious IRS stonewalling of Tea Party nonprofits to the Justice Department abusing campaign-finance regulations to threaten with prison Dinesh D'Souza, a documentarian who makes films critical of Mr. Obama's policies.

But that sort of strongarm tactic is only used against famous people, right?  Nope: Two nobodies in Oregon had their bakery business shut down by homosexual activists after they refused to provide a "wedding" cake for a homosexual union that violates their religious beliefs.  People great and small have lost their jobs over taking conservative political positions.

Is it any wonder that, more and more, people are reluctant to donate to conservative political groups for fear of an IRS audit and / or public pillorying?  Mr. Obama has set out to create a world in which conservative views have no power and no voice, and it looks like he's accomplished it.

Viewing the trends over the past few decades since Reagan, it's impossible to avoid the impression that conservatism is bound for the dustbin of history, just as the Left wishes it to be.  Even when "our guys" win, they immediately abandon their conservative principles and start voting with the Left, whether it be on abortion or everything else.

We are fast reaching the point where the only question remaining will be, will conservatism go out with a bang, or with a whimper?  America as we have always known it certainly seems to be coming to an irreversible end, when even supposedly conservative elected officials with an overwhelming electoral mandate refuse to use their power to further conservative ends.