Writing in The New York Times, Ross Douthat lays out the legal rationale President Obama will use to do unilateral amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants. Mostly it is based on the legal doctrine of prosecutorial discretion, the right prosecutors have to decide which cases to bring to trial.
The Justice Department prosecutors work for the President. If he tells them they won't be bringing cases for deportation, presumably the cases will not be tried.
While he's at it, why doesn't President Choom Gang tell his prosecutors to bring no cases for simple possession of marijuana? He can do de facto dope legalization with the stroke of a pen.
Let's suppose he decides that too many people of color go to prison. So he instructs his prosecutors to elect not to try most people of color who are arrested for Federal crimes.
Once he starts down this road and establishes a precedent, if it isn't overturned by the courts, we end up with a situation where the only actual federal crimes are those with which a President agrees, the only criminals tried are those the President doesn't like.
Paraphrasing Lewis Carroll, "When I enforce a law, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."
