Krauthammer!

Charles Krauthammer, in an important article, offers this terrific analogy regarding the "naked lawlessness" of Obama's executive order on illegal immigration:

Imagine: A Republican president submits to Congress a bill abolishing the capital-gains tax. Congress rejects it. The president then orders the IRS to stop collecting capital-gains taxes, and declares that anyone refusing to pay them will suffer no fine, no penalty, no sanction whatsoever. (Analogy first suggested by law professor John Yoo.)

It would be a scandal, a constitutional crisis, a cause for impeachment. Why? Because unlike, for example, war powers, this is not an area of perpetual executive-legislative territorial contention. Nor is cap-gains, like the judicial status of unlawful enemy combatants, an area where the law is silent or ambiguous. Capital gains is straightforward tax law. Just as Obama’s bombshell amnesty-by-fiat is a subversion of straightforward immigration law.