Living Under Obama’s Czars
Rule by “czar” became the template for Obama’s first-term presidency. Now secure in his second term, President Obama has embarked upon another vast expansion of
federal executive power going beyond the mere use of czars to give certain “advisory groups” unprecedented power. These panels are not the typical public-relations devices
presidents have used frequently in the past to give the appearance of activity when the president did not want to act. To the contrary, Obama’s new panels are designed
for action, they have teeth, and they employ sophisticated manipulation of the media and political constituencies and even spy on citizens to prepare the way for more
extraordinary Obama executive actions.From the beginning of his presidency, President Obama vastly expanded the practice of recent past presidents of investing extraordinary powers in top-level presidential appointees that have not been confirmed by the U.S. Senate as required by the U.S. Constitution and who sit outside the normal chain of command in the administrative structure of the federal bureaucracy. In 2011, Judicial Watch released a first-of-its-kind comprehensive report on the Obama czar scandal, entitled “President Obama’s Czars”in which we identified 45 presidential appointments that could be considered “czars”(http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-releases-comprehensive-special-report-on-president-obama-s-45-czars/). That Report came to several important conclusions:“The issue of presidential czars raises questions in four fundamental areas of governance: the constitutionality of policy czars; thedegree to which the U.S. Senate is circumvented in the appointment of policy czars; the political controversy that results from avoiding theSenate’s vetting process; and issues concerning the overall transparency of a government that operates through a system of czars.”
The constitutional objection to many czars is that the activities of these “policy advisors”run afoul of the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which requires that the U.S. Senate must confirm an appointee who exercises certain executive authority. Some czars effectively act with the authority of Officers of the United States despite having never being confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
