Obama administration has far surpassed efforts of past presidents to implement policy by executive fiat, paying little mind to constitutional limits and the rule of law. President Obama clearly would like to rule from his citadel through executive decree; to undermine the Second Amendment in the name of “gun safety”; to sit back and allow his army of czars to take the nation over a regulatory cliff; to open America’s borders to more illegal immigration and provide amnesty by going over the head of Congress; to interfere with state election integrity efforts to his partisan advantage; and to impose his leftist agenda in a host of other areas yet to be revealed.
“The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States.”
“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”
“He shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
~U.S. Constitution
The audacious acts President Barack Obama has taken during the first year of his second term confirm that he will take extraordinary executive action to achieve his political ends without regard for the other branches of government.
The Imperial Presidency of Barack Obama far exceeds past episodes of constitutional overreach by previous presidents. As U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) put it in a January 28, 2014 Wall Street Journal commentary: “In the nation’s history, there is simply no precedent for an American president so wantonly ignoring federal law.”
President Obama has displayed an astounding lack of respect for the U.S. Constitution, the other branches of government and the American people. Barack Obama is undermining the U.S. Constitution and turning it into what the Founding Fathers feared most — a mere “parchment barrier” being ripped to shreds by a power-hungry chief executive — what they referred to as a “monarchist.” In the words of Thomas Jefferson: “To appoint a monarchist to conduct the affairs of a Republic is like appointing an atheist to the priesthood.”
President Obama’s monarchical proclivities are most apparent in his refusal to accept the process of working to build consensus to pass legislation in Congress. He blusters that if Congress won’t act as he sees fit, he will. As he told a Joint Session of Congress during his 2014 State of the Union Address: “I’m eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still – and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation…that’s what I’m going to do.”
It is clear that Obama and his supporters are pushing the American people to accept an all-out assault on representative democracy and the rule of law. Obama’s allies in the liberal media have helped legitimize the president’s monarchical behavior, and some in the media have boldly ordained his extra-constitutional executive actions as “visionary leadership.” Illustrative of this is an inflammatory commentary on CBS News Sunday Morning by the Georgetown University law professor Michael Seidman. Host Charles Osgood set up the professor’s dismissal of the Constitution with this question: “Is the U.S. Constitution truly worthy of the reverence in which most Americans hold it?” Professor Seidman responded:
“ I’ve got a simple idea: Let’s give up on the Constitution. Our greatest Presidents had doubts about the Constitution, and many of them disobeyed it when it got in their way.”
Using a variety of techniques and strategies, President Obama has effectively followed Professor Seidman’s advice and ignored the Constitution and “rewritten” the law. For example, Obama’s appointees to the National Mediation Board (NMB) changed union-election rules that had been in place for 75 years under the Railway Labor Act so that union certification would now require only a majority of a company’s employees who vote in a union-organizing election rather than the majority of all employees.
Obama’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) also abused the rulemaking process by overturning decades of regulatory precedent and court decisions to create de facto laws. Acting without statutory authorization after Congress rejected the “card-check” bill supported by President Obama — which would have eliminated secret-ballot elections for union members — the NLRB took unprecedented bureaucratic action to change the rules determining which group or “unit” of employees can vote in a union election. Obama’s NLRB now allows unions to form cherry-picked bargaining units of their supporters, in effect creating micro unions within a company. These are just a few, I could go on for days!
