Whew, what a week! Failure to pass the Keystone Pipeline on Tuesday, an executive order granting amnesty for illegal immigrants on Thursday...what could Mary Landrieu's party have planned for her next? Will they take a tiny break next week for Thanksgiving or do they have too much work to do to prevent her from cracking 40%?
First off, it's not amnesty. These people that his orders affect are given no permanent residency, no pathway to citizenship, they're just told "Hey, look, for the next 3 years we're going to deport as many criminals as we can rather than wasting our time on lesser problems, so you can come out of the shadows safely
for 3 years provided you pay fines and back taxes". There's also some strengthening of DACA. Yes, he's hoping that within 3 years some very long path to citizenship is passed, but that's nothing more than a hope.
Second, the answer is nothing. Obama was going to do these executive orders regardless of how the senate elections went, and the keystone vote only happened because Landrieu quite literally begged Reid to death for
several years to allow a clean keystone vote, and he finally obliged.
