The Barack Obama administration has bypassed Congress and passed what amounts to the DREAM Act by executive fiat (link).

The Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and have since led law-abiding lives. The election-year initiative addresses a top priority of an influential Latino electorate that has been vocal in its opposition to administration deportation policies.

The policy change, announced Friday by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants who have lived in fear of deportation. It also bypasses Congress and partially achieves the goals of the so-called DREAM Act, a long-sought but never enacted plan to establish a path toward citizenship for young people who came to the United States illegally but who have attended college or served in the military.

The full announcement from Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano is here. Marco Rubio - author of a "conservative" version of the DREAM Act - comments here. His concern is that it's only a "short term answer to a long term problem" and that Obama went around Congress, not to the fact that Obama just passed amnesty.

Who's to blame?
As I've said for a couple of years: "if a bear steals your food at night, who are you going to blame, the bear, or the person whose job it was to keep bears out of camp?"

The Democrats are the bear: they're just doing what they do. The people to blame are those who could have stopped this but didn't and non-Democratic Party leaders who support the DREAM Act. That includes those like Rubio, Susana Martinez, Jon Kyl, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and many other politicians. It also includes those right-leaning pundits and bloggers who failed to oppose it or who supported it. And, it especially includes the pretend-patriots in the Tea Parties. If they were different people, it would have been fairly easy for them to have blocked what Obama did and to have made the Democrats and the media look very bad over their support for the DREAM Act. Instead of caring about something as fundamental and vital as immigration, they concentrate on far less important topics like spending. And, instead of helping DREAM Act opponents like me, they've tried to undercut me.

What to do?
One way to stop this executive decision is for Congress to roll it back as unconstitutional, and for that large numbers of people will have to contact their representatives.

However, the way to actually win is to intellectually defeat proposals like the DREAM Act: to show why they're wrong and to discredit its supporters.

There are over 180 posts on the DREAM Act page going back to 2003; there are over 70 posts on the related PIIPP page going back to 2004; I've tweeted over 600 times about it over the past two years; I've left dozens of comments about it around the web. I didn't do that just as a hobby. My goal with that was to block what happened today. But, I can't do it alone.

If I'd gotten a lot of help with that, it would have been possible to block today's action. If you want to keep things from getting even worse, help me help you.

UPDATE: Per the Daily Caller, Rep. Steve King was on the Mike Huckabee radio show and said:

"I will tell you that - I'm not without experience on this - I'm prepared to bring a suit and seek a court order to stop implementation of this policy... I have done it once in the past successfully when then-Governor Tom Vilsack thought he could legislate by executive order - and the case of King vs. Vilsack is in the books. And that individual, by the way, is now the Secretary of Agriculture. I wonder if he’s not counseling the president on his legal proceedings."

That's good news, and if successful it would do solve the issue in the first sentence of the last section. However, from the political perspective it might give Obama what he might be after: for the GOP to appear to be meanies. Obama could say, "I tried to pass the DREAM Act, but the GOP blocked me."

The way to prevent that from having much impact is what the rest of the last section is about: intellectually defeating proposals like the DREAM Act by showing how they're bad for the U.S. That has to be done, whether King's lawsuit succeeds or fails.