Oh, for the best, expect the worst, some preach your name, some die of thirst, the way of knowing which way it's going.

Oh, for the best, expect the worst.

Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Podcast. Today is Tuesday, September 5, 2017. I am John Podhor, it's the editor of Commentary, the 72-year-old monthly of intellectual,

and the ProBody, Political Analysis, and Cultural Commentary from a conservative perspective. Join us at CommentaryMagazine.com where we give you a few free reads, and then ask you to subscribe.

1995 gets you a digital subscription, 29.95 gets you an all-access subscription, including our beautiful monthly magazine in your mailbox 11 times a year. With me is always a Greenwald, our senior editor, Hi Abe.

And Noah Rothman, our associate, our high-knowa. We are sitting with fancy, fancy, new microphones that come right up to our mouths instead of us having to lean into the mic, so maybe our sound will improve.

People have been complaining on Twitter and other places that we fade in and out, that we back out and in, and we do this, and we do that.

So we bought some, it looks a little like a, like if the, if the show stranger things, if the kids had a radio studio, that's, that's what, that's what things are looking like in here.

So we were speaking about an hour after the formal revelation by Attorney General Jeff Sessions of the rescinding of the DACA program that was, that was sort of incented into being by,

by, accepted into being by Barack Obama with no legislative oversight or permission on the policy that he couldn't wait.

We couldn't wait for the actual constitutional processes by which laws are made to, to, to, to get in the way of good, nice, positive policy.

And so it's complicated, set of details. The policy's been rescinded, no new applications will be accepted, and there is a six month moratorium on the policy, thus giving Congress six months to act before it is done away with entirely and the 800,000 people, more or less.

According to Noah, who just made a, just made a hand gesture because we're, we're going to do some psych gags here on, on, on the podcast.

Some, some, something like 800,000 people who are in this system as undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children by illegal alien parents, and thus have been given the right to apply for,

given essential amnesty to work and live in the United States. The policy is going to be ended unless Congress formally writes a law that will allow it to continue or allow them to stay over the next six months, right? Pretty much.

Okay. So there are various questions here. One of them is, how do we feel about this as a matter of fairness and prudence and what's best for American, all of that, and the other, of course, is what the politics of this very complicated set of decisions are, which say, there are very few people who are serious thinkers of that immigration or about, you know,

the constitution of the populace of the United States that would look at the, at the specific people who are, who are part of this program and say, they shouldn't be here, they have no right to be here, they should be thrown out, they should be deported.

All evidence we have, all sort of research that we have and NOAA goes into this on a very good post on our website right now, are that they are productive members of society, they actually have college degrees to a greater extent than everybody else and are living well and productively.

However, that doesn't mean that it's right for the president to write a law. Presidents don't write laws, they are supposed to enforce laws, sign them into existence and then enforce them, they're not supposed to write them unilaterally.

And though I've said this about how most serious thinkers don't think that this is something you want to do, I'm not sure that's true in populist terms about why it was that the president, when he was on the campaign trail, hit this so hard and hit, you know, deporting and getting rid of 11 million people and all of that.

My guess is that a lot of the Trump base, you know, the hard Trump base would be totally happy to see the dreamers deported.

No, no, is making a face.

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