“It’s the duty of the president. He must always uphold the law,” John Yoo, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley and former U.S. deputy assistant attorney general said, adding that the only exceptions in doing so are if laws are unconstitutional or if prosecuting them can be reasonably deemed not viable.
Illegal immigrants wait in line to get passports outside the Mexican Consulate in Houston in August, after the Department of Homeland Security began accepting applications to allow them to avoid deportation.
Two law professors, including one who served in the Bush Justice Department, have published a paper charging that President Obama violated the Constitution with his directive to law enforcement not to deport illegal aliens.
In the paper entitled, “The Obama Administration, the Dream Act and the Take Care Clause,” authors Robert Delahunty of the University of St. Thomas [Minnesota] and John Yoo, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley and former U.S. deputy assistant attorney general, blast Obama’s moratorium on deporting certain illegal immigrants. The professors dismissed the idea that the decision on whether to deport illegal immigrants who are arrested for minor infractions is a matter of prosecutorial discretion.
“If there’s one case and it’s left to the prosecutor, well that’s fine, but what Obama did was take a million cases and leave it up to prosecutorial discretion,” John Yoo told FoxNews.com. “The only reason it’s under [Department of Homeland Security Secretary] Janet Napolitano’s discretion is because Obama had made his decision. If she’s doing it under her own, she would have to be fired.”
An abstract for the paper debunks the claim that the president has the Constitutional authority to not enforce civil laws crafted and passed by Congress.
[…]
