On my regular radio date with Hugh Hewitt, we discussed much of the current political scene, including the President's threat of unilateral amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants:
HUGH HEWITT: Are you surprised that the President is going to jam down the legalization of four and a half million Americans via a stroke of his pen?
MARK STEYN: No, I'm not. I think a lack of seemliness has characterized this President's attitude to this office, and to the Constitution since he took office. You and I have talked about the difference between America and the rest of the English-speaking world before. I always say to you the difference is you guys wrote it all down. In Canada, whatever it is, paragraph 3 of the Constitution says "Executive power shall be vested in Her Majesty." And that's all. All the rest is codes and conventions. There's nothing about a prime minister. In the Canadian Constitution or the Australian Constitution, that office isn't even mentioned. And it depends on gentlemen respecting the codes and conventions. You fellows wrote it all down, but in the end, that, too, depends on gentlemen respecting the codes and conventions. And this guy is now going to ride a coach and horses through that. And the question is... what is Congress actually going to do about it? Or are they just going to have, be left in the ground with King Barack's coach tire treads over their bodies as he goes galloping off in the distance?
The Democratic Party is increasingly comfortable operating in a post-Constitutional landscape:
MS: What unites them is a kind of belief in a post-Constitutional order where, if it happens to be ideologically, philosophically congenial to Democrats, they don't care. And that's actually what ties them in with this fellow Gruber... The end justifies the means. And that's true of immigration, that's true of health care, that's true of Keystone, that's true of the whole thing - everything for those guys.
HH: Dr. Gruber has been a guest on this show a couple of times, and I put the transcripts, I pulled them out of the transcript pile and they're over at hughhewitt.com. I'm not particularly surprised by what he said, Mark Steyn. Are you?
MS: No, I'm not - because I think a sort of technocrat's condescension is built into the liberal project... That's the other reason why they're impatient with old fashioned stuff like laws and constitutions, because I think I say this, I can't remember whether I said it in my new book or the previous book, but I've certainly said it in one of my books. Buy them all, and you'll be sure to have the one I say it in... If you have an hereditary monarchy, somewhere deep inside, those fellows understand that the only reason they're sitting on the throne is because of an accident of birth. When you have people like this who actually believe they are smarter than anybody else, and know what's best for everybody else, there really is no limit. That's psychologically a kind of unhealthy person to be wielding power in a free society...
HH: But they don't really know anything. They never had a plan for anything. It's no wonder it's a serial fiasco. They don't know anything. And it's that unmerited arrogance that is so maddening...
MS: I think it's that, to go back to Rumsfeld's line about known knowns and unknown unknowns and all the rest of it, which is actually a very sharp and sophisticated way of looking at the world.
HH: It was.
MS: These guys don't know what they don't know. And that's why it doesn't matter whether it's governmentalizing one-sixth of the economy, or deciding that they're going to go into Libya, or deciding what they're going to do about the Islamic State. They don't know what they don't know, so they don't care about what they don't know.
We end with a glimpse of what might have been - a new singing senator (not of the Larry Craig variety). You can find the entire interview here.