Reply to Brian Beutler and Kevin Drum on Obama’s immigration order

Beutler and Drum doubt that Obama’s immigration order will set a precedent that a future Republican can exploit for the purpose of economic deregulation, as I argued in TNR. Beutler seems to doubt that (political) precedents can constrain political actors. Drum thinks that precedents can matter but doubts that they will matter in this case because the Obama order will set precedent for immigration law only.

I confess I don’t understand politics well enough to be able to predict whether Obama’s order will have a large effect or a small effect but I believe it will have some effect. Think, for example, of the centralization of power over regulatory agencies in the OMB under Reagan. Reagan took political heat for that decision but pushed it through not only because he was ideologically committed to deregulation but because deregulation at the time was popular among Democrats as well as Republicans. His successors, who maintained the structure Reagan put into place, did not take political heat. That is how precedent works. But, of course, its influence can be overcome by other factors.

It is easy to predict that in 2017, the hypothetical President Paul will argue that he can deregulate by non-enforcement because that is what Obama did, and Democrats who defended Obama are in no position to criticize him. Would such an argument work politically? One question is whether people are capable of making fine-grained distinctions between immigration enforcement and, say, environmental-law enforcement. Another question is just how different environmental-law enforcement really is from immigration enforcement. People who sift through environmental law will find great pockets of executive discretion, both in the statutes and as a matter of practice. But the influence of arguments like these, taking place in the arena of politics rather than a court of law, is hard to predict.