As I argued in Faithless Execution, the principal constitutional duty of the chief executive is to execute the laws faithfully.
President Obama, by contrast, sees his principal task as imposing his post-American “progressive” preferences, regardless of what the laws mandate.
In his latest harangue against Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and other Americans opposed to his insistence on continuing to import thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria and other parts of the jihad-ravaged Middle East, Obama declaimed:
When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.
Really? Under federal law, the executive branch is expressly required to take religion into account in determining who is granted asylum.
Under the provision governing asylum (section 1158 of Title 8, U.S. Code),
an alien applying for admission must establish that … religion [among other things] … was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant.
