He then leapt on his horse and galloped away to warn another town about Executive Orders
being a thing that exists.
The difference between ex-Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Ted Cruz is that Palin pens her screeds for Breitbart, and Ted Cruz does it in Politico. The content is indistinguishable, which is why you can put titles on them like "Obama Is Not a Monarch" and pretend that you are a party deep-thinker thinking deeply
about these things.
Undeterred, President Obama appears to be going forward [on immigration]. It is lawless. It is unconstitutional. He is defiant and angry at the American people. If he acts by executive diktat, President Obama will not be acting as a president, he will be acting as a monarch.
Thankfully, the framers of our Constitution, wary of the dangers of monarchy, gave the Congress tools to rein in abuses of power. They believed if the President wants to change the law, he cannot act alone; he must work with Congress.
It's like we elected the spawn of Cliven Bundy and Wayne LaPierre to the Senate. Oh wait, we did. And now we have to listen to how the things Great Hero Reagan, Savior of the Republic did are now defiant angry diktats from a maniac gone mad with power.
He must work with Congress, says the guy who shut down the American government as retribution for the president not doing what Ted Cruz wanted. Then Ted Cruz goes on to explain the Federalist Papers to us, by which I mean he mentions them in passing in an effort to look like he's put some thought into these things.
Barack Obama is expected to unveil executive tweaks to immigration enforcement priorities very soonly now, which is why defender of the nation Ted Cruz is certain that our democracy is doomed unless Ted Cruz personally gets to throw barrels down the Capitol steps like Donkey Kong fending off the brutal usurper Mario. None of Obama's ideas appear at this juncture to be any more dramatic than the similar actions taken by past hard-right Republican presidential heroes to patch up immigration woes that Congress could not muster enough will to repair itself, and none of them seem to threaten the fabric of our republic, at least not as much as throwing words like diktat around with a straight face.
Republicans as a whole still haven't decided on the exact structure and scope of their planned tantrum, but it should be noted that where once the party took advice from Marco Rubio on how to handle immigration issues, that role has since been handed to the perpetually angry Steve King, and where once the party elected presidents willing to show slight amounts of sensibility on issues of who should be deported and how rapidly, we now get to listen to the op-ed-distributed constitutional theories of Ted Cruz on how all the Republican things that are now Democratic things are therefore illegitimate things and/or diktats and/or tyranny.
It gets old, you know. You can scream end-of-the-republic only so many times before you begin to look like you're not taking these things seriously. I realize that is not currently considered a strike against a politician, but there's going to be a problem when we can no longer distinguish between our nation's senators and the people making YouTube videos about how aliens are controlling our thoughts via chips embedded in most brands of pants. I suppose we'll have to tell the two groups apart the free market way, by simply trusting whichever of them touts the more lucrative sponsorships.