By Thomas Sowell

The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet. Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States.

Such judges – perhaps including Supreme Court justices – would have been confirmed by Senate Democrats, and could spend the rest of their lifetime appointments ruling in favor of expansions of federal government power that would make the freedom of “we the people” only a distant memory and a painful mockery.

We dodged that bullet. But what about the rest of Barack Obama’s term?

Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past. Despite the Republican sweep of elections across the country last week, President Obama has issued an ultimatum to Congress, to either pass the kind of immigration law he wants before the end of this year or he will issue Executive Orders changing the country’s immigration laws unilaterally.

Does that sound like a lame duck president?

On the contrary, it sounds more like some banana republic’s dictator. Nor is Obama making an idle bluff. He has already changed other laws unilaterally, including the work requirement in welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration.

The very idea of Congress rushing a bill into law in less than two months, on a subject as complex, and with such irreversible long-run consequences as immigration, is staggering. But there is already a precedent for such hasty action, without Congressional hearings to bring out facts or air different views. That is how ObamaCare was passed. And we see how that has turned out.

People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama’s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs. You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do.

That Americans are producing a disproportionate share of what is called “the world’s output” and consuming what we produce – while paying for our imports – is not allowed to disturb Obama’s vision.

Resentment of the prosperous – whether at home or on the world stage – runs through virtually everything Barack Obama has said and done throughout his life. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to find the clues. You have to shut your eyes tightly to keep from seeing them everywhere, in every period of his life.

The big question is whether the other branches of government – Congress and the Supreme Court – can stop him from doing irreparable damage to America in his last two years. Seeing Obama as an incompetent and weak, lame duck president only makes that task harder.