The DACA Case Is a Test of the Administration’s Basic Competence
Updated at 2:30 p.m. EST on Wednesday, November 13, 2019
One distinguishing feature of the Trump administration is its ambitious, radical policy agenda.
A second is how absolutely incompetent it has been at putting that agenda into law.
Consider the “DACA cases,” which the Court will hear tomorrow.
These cases raise important human issues. But legally, they turn on an abstract question: Was Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to “rescind” the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or “Dreamers”) program legal?
[Read more: DACA’s fate and the Supreme Court]
This is an odd posture for this case to end up in. It frames the concrete issue—the lives of nearly a million young people who have grown up in this country—in the airless abstract language of administrative law and its dreaded mother document, the Administrative Procedure Act.
Since the DACA program was announced in 2012, conservatives have agreed on one thing: DACA is unlawful, a violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), an unconstitutional executive overreach that needed to be abolished as soon as possible. Getting rid of it was a top priority the day Sessions took office as attorney general. Nonetheless, he seems to have had no real plan
