Last week on these pages we documented the "Lawless in the White House" ways of Barack Obama (full article here). Included was an IBD list of thirteen separate grievances that only tell part of the story of abuse of the Constitutional limits of Presidential authority, and invention of new laws while ignoring existing law. In recent days, a bevy of columnists have also opined on the issue.
Charles Krauthammer said the lawless ways of Barack Obama are fitting of a "caudillo" rather than an American President. "That's banana republic stuff," he says and goes on:
"Such gross executive usurpation disdains the Constitution. It mocks the separation of powers. And most consequentially, it introduces a fatal instability into law itself. If the law is not what is plainly written, but is whatever the president and his agents decide, what's left of the law?"(link here)
George Will joined in in his most recent column in the Washington Post blasted the Obama Administration:
"Nowadays the federal government leavens its usual quotient of incompetence with large dollops of illegality."
Will further opines that the Obama Administration is full of:
"…small, devious people putting their lawlessness in the service of their parochialism and recklessly sacrificing public safety and constitutional propriety."
Will cites a harsh rebuke of the White House by the District of Columbia U.S. Court of Appeals involving Obama's Nuclear Regulatory Commission willfully "flouting the law" that binds the agency regarding a Yucca Mountain decision that is now more than two years delinquent. “It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case,” Will quotes from the scathing decision of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh. (link here)
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Nationally syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock delivered a frontal assault on the lawless ways of the "Obama Regime." Murdock concludes that in Obama's world:
"…the Constitution is for chumps, and the law is for losers."
Murdock was just warming up. Here's more:
"Slowly at first, then all of a sudden, the Obama Administration has devolved into the Obama Regime. Obama does whatever he wants. Those pesky impediments on his predecessors — namely, federal law, the separation of powers, and the Constitution — have proved as tough as tissue paper in containing Obama’s ambition to impose statism on America. From Obamacare to unions to telephones, it’s basically another day, another decree." (link here)
That Obama disregards – even disdains – the Constitution and the Law should come as no real surprise. While still a state senator in Illinois in 2001, he publicly criticized the Founding Fathers for creating a Constitution that he described as a "charter of negative liberties" that limited what "the federal government can't do to you."
While Americans have long understood that the Founders saw government at the biggest threat to individual Freedom, and cherish a Constitution that checked the power of government, not so with Barack Obama. He longed for the opportunity to "break free from the essential constraints" placed therein by the Founders that limit government's ability to accomplish what he sees as the most important objective – "the redistribution of wealth."
Whether you agree or disagree with the Obama agenda, every citizen who loves America should be deeply concerned with the abuse of power by this President and his Administration and the precedent that he will establish if allow to continue his wanton disregard of the Constitution.
Few on Capitol Hill have the stomach to even whisper the "i" word, though violating the Constitution certainly would seem the rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors." However, we are encouraged to know that at least some Members of Congress are seeking remedies short of impeachment to appeal to the Supreme Court to rein in the rogue President and preserve the Constitution.
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