George Will’s recent column “A Case for Self-restraint” targets President Obama’s recent unilateral approach to immigration reform. Will makes no mention of John Boehner’s decision not to allow a vote on the Senate’s bill on immigration reform, despite the possibility that it might pass. Nor did the House try to write its own bill, which would have sent the Senate bill to the conference committee. Will cites Madison’s expectation that the Congress, Executive branch and Supreme Court function as checks and balances, but he doesn’t mention Boehner and McConnell’s “just say no” political strategy to deal with any attempt by the Obama administration to get anything done. The minority leader filibustered virtually every attempt by the president to appoint federal judges until Senate majority leader Harry Reid was forced to resort to the nuclear option to get anybody appointed. Stay tuned for the Republican “We’ll get back at you” response when they take control of the Senate. The nuclear option will apply to much more than just federal judge appointments.

Will would like Congress to “regain its spine and self-respect”. Is George Will trying to be funny? Many presidents have acted without Congressional approval. Many presidents have acted unilaterally when it comes to immigration. George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan to mention, two. But they were conservatives so that’s all right with Will. Obama’s approach was to force a vote on immigration reform. He did not give five million illegal aliens amnesty as some conservative commentators would have their lockstep listeners and readers believe. He gave parents of children born in the United States three-year work permits. If you talk to a California grower, he or she must be thrilled by the decision. Who else would they get to work for the puny salaries they pay to pick their crops?

Instead of Bush and Reagan, Will harkens back to Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to stack the Supreme Court in 1938. Will doesn’t mention that, soon after, the Supreme Court ruled that Social Security was indeed constitutional. Roosevelt’s attempt to stack the court demeaned his legacy (only slightly), but it sent the Court a message, and they stopped trashing his attempts to curtail the Depression. Of course Will ignores Richard Nixon’s shenanigans: his burglarizing of Watergate; his enemies list; his dirty tricks unit, led by Donald Segretti. Reagan’s legacy in that respect still lives in the Andrew Breitbart’s of the party who bug senators' offices, distort speeches, and demean community activists by imitating a pimp, wearing his grandmother‘s fur coat. Will hopes the 2016 Republican nominee will promise “A return to democratic etiquette grounded in presidential self-restraint”. Really? This from the gerrymandering party that uses “S curves” to make sure that black voters don’t influence the election. Expect them to do the same thing to Hispanics if they aren’t able to “spin” their way to an improved election result in that demographic. Republicans also invented an election conspiracy where thousands of non-qualified voters were voting for democrats; in response to a non-problem they required hard-to-get identification cards, eliminated election day registration, and limited the number of days a citizen could vote in advance of the election. There’s little doubt their efforts were aimed at democratic voters: the poor, blacks, senior citizens and people who tend to ask for absentee ballots. The only self restraint you’ll see from a Republican president is when it comes to doing his job as we saw when Bush/Cheney ignored their terrorism expert’s efforts to warn them of an Al Qaeda attack when these terrorists had already attacked the Trade Center once before. House congressmen receive on the average $175,000 in salary, Cadillac health insurance, and a pension for life; yet their idea of legislation was under 200 bills, with many of them being symbolic such as those trying to limit the Affordable Health Care Act and the ridiculous “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi” bills.

George Will loves James Madison because Madison was all about states' rights and was opposed to the antics of Federalists such as Alexander Hamilton, but there would have been no Constitution if Hamilton hadn’t written most of the Federalist papers. They’re called the “Federalist” Papers for a reason. John Jay and Madison wrote some of them, but it was the pen of Hamilton that won the day. Once Madison assumed the role of the president it was a different story, just as his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, learned when he took office, and Jefferson was a lot more Machiavellian than Madison ever was.

Will takes a swipe at Harry Reid who according to him has done “more damage to the institution’s deliberating capacity” than any of the 1,950 senators since the Constitution was ratified (thanks to Alexander Hamilton).
Really? How about Joseph McCarthy’s paranoid nonsense that still lives on in the minds of the Tea Party and the Birthers and other right wing demagogues who don’t even know anything about the true motivation of the Tea Party in the first place? I’d say McConnell did more damage when he joined with his pal in the House to “Just say ‘no’” to any of Obama’s attempts to fill federal posts (many of which still haven’t been seated) and deal with the recession. Many Republican states refused stimulus money (Scott Walker to name one) because it wasn’t politically beneficial to accept it.

No, George, you can’t just ignore Richard Nixon or Reagan’s Iran Contra when you attempt to paint a president as “Caesarian”. Let’s at least look up Caesar before we even use the word, shall we? Julius Caesar got elected to the senate as a representative of the poor, and he was murdered because he tried to limit senatorial privilege. So . . . I guess Obama should take that clueless put down as a compliment.

Dave Schwinghammer's Fargo-esque mystery, SOLDIER'S GAP, is available on Authorsden or at Amazon.com, new and used.