President Barack Obama will be "playing with constitutional fire' if he uses an executive order to suspend up to 5 million deportations of illegal immigrants, says former Judge Andrew Napolitano.
"When he suspends deportations, and when he imposes his own conditions on those suspensions, he's effectively rewriting the law. And that violates his oath to enforce and uphold the law as it's been written," Napolitano said Monday on Fox News Channel's
"The Kelly File."
"When he says I will not enforce the law because I don't like it or because I'm impatient that doesn't wash under the Constitution," the legal analyst said. Obama is expected to sign the legislation within weeks because he said he has lost his patience with Congress for not passing comprehensive immigration legislation.
"He can't rewrite the law," Napolitano said. A president can use "prosecutorial discretion" to suspend some prosecutions to reallocate resources, "But he cannot suspend a statute."
Every president since Dwight Eisenhower has suspended some deportations, Napolitano noted. But they looked at a statute and gave a different interpretation than had previously been used.
"President Obama does not reinterpret a statute," Napolitano said. "He takes a statute and says, I'm going to disregard it. I'm going to give you a better one."
The judge admitted that Obama's reasons for wanting to help those affected may be laudable, but "His oath is not to his heart; his oath is to the Constitution."
Liberal constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley has said that while he agrees with Obama's ideas, he risks a "constitutional crisis" if he continues using executive orders. Turley has testified before Congress, scolding members for ceding their authority to Obama.
Napolitano agreed, telling host Megyn Kelly, "Future presidents will rely on this behavior if he gets away with it."
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