Obama Presidency A Lengthening Legacy Of Lawlessness

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

Leadership: President Obama's approval numbers are now hitting record lows, yet his critics are often written off as simple-minded "Obama haters." It doesn't wash. The problem is a pattern of presidential lawlessness.

 

Last time we checked, the Constitution requires the president to "faithfully execute the law." That's no editorial opinion, but Article 2, Section 3, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, which states that "(The President) shall take care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

 

Our founders conceived and established in that document three co-equal branches of government to preserve our individual liberty and restrain the unlimited power of government. But this president and his administration have routinely ignored the divisions of power between the presidency, the Congress and its legislation, and the Supreme Court and its rulings.

 

Constitutionally, the president has the authority to check the legislative branch by recommending legislation to be passed by Congress or through the presidential veto. But he cannot legislate through executive fiat and he can't pick and choose which parts of the law he will comply with or decline. Nor can he defy judicial rulings from the highest court in the land.

[Valin]

@Geee

 

 

 

Can Obama write his own laws?

Charles Krauthammer

 

(Snip)

 

But such niceties must not stand in the way of an administration’s agenda. Indeed, the very next day, it was revealed that the administration had unilaterally waived Obamacare’s cap on a patient’s annual out-of-pocket expenses — a one-year exemption for selected health insurers that is nowhere permitted in the law. It was simply decreed by an obscure Labor Department regulation.

 

(snip)

 

Which followed hundreds of Obama*care waivers granted by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to selected businesses, unions and other well-lobbied, very special interests.

 

Nor is this kind of rule-by-decree restricted to health care. In 2012, the immigration service was ordered to cease proceedings against young illegal immigrants brought here as children. Congress had refused to pass such a law (the DREAM Act) just 18 months earlier. Obama himself had repeatedly said that the Constitution forbade him from enacting it without Congress. But with the fast approach of an election that could hinge on the Hispanic vote, Obama did exactly that. Unilaterally.

 

(Snip)

 

The point is whether a president, charged with faithfully executing the laws that Congress enacts, may create, ignore, suspend and/or amend the law at will. Presidents are arguably permitted to refuse to enforce laws they consider unconstitutional (the basis for so many of George W. Bush’s so-called signing statements). But presidents are forbidden from doing so for reasons of mere policy — the reason for every Obama violation listed above.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Lawmaker, regulate thyself

Another Obamacare exemption

Debra J. Saunders

8/19/13

 

(Snip)In an effort to inject some reality into the Beltway, Grassley introduced an amendment to the Affordable Care Act to require that members of Congress and their staff get their health care from the new Obamacare exchanges. "Congress should live under the laws it creates. That includes Obamacare," Grassley explained.

 

Enter Washington reality: The rules don't apply to the governing class.

 

(snip)

 

Worse, the Office of Personnel Management didn't stop there. Its new proposed rule also would allow each member of Congress to "determine whether an employed individual meets the statutory definition" of "congressional staff." The OPM's rationale was that there is "no existing statutory or regulatory definition of the term 'official office.' " Like "official office" is an exotic cipher.

 

(Snip)

 

 

Just a thought.

[Draggingtree]

Sadness: Feckless, Marxist ideologue, fan of Islam is literally ruining the lives of American I’ve Got the Obama Blues

By Alan Caruba (Bio and Archives) Wednesday, August 21, 2013

I have a case of the Obama blues, a nagging depression that is exacerbated daily by having to listen to the endless lies he tells about everything when he isn’t blaming Congress, the Republicans, and everyone else for the horrid state of the economy and his rejection of the leadership America demonstrated through both World Wars and since.

 

Listening to Obama say that he intends to ignore Congress and selectively not enforce the laws it passes is such a serious threat to the Constitution and to our most fundamental freedoms that it is impossible not to be depressed by this grossly incompetent, historically ignorant, and pathologically narcissistic president.

The old go-along-to-get-along GOP senators and representatives undermine the other elements, chiefly the Tea Party Republicans elected to bring a stop to Obama’s http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/57349

[Draggingtree]

How 'Lawless' Is Obama?

By Ruth Marcus - August 21, 2013

 

WASHINGTON -- Conservatives are in high dudgeon about what they see as President Obama's arrogant lawlessness. He has usurped congressional authority and violated his duty to faithfully execute the law, they contend, by ignoring statutes with which he disagrees and summarily rewriting the problematic parts of those he likes.

 

"Under President Obama, inconvenient or unpopular legal requirements have repeatedly been swept aside by executive fiat," Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn wrote in National Review.

 

There is an undeniable element of political theater here. Contrast the howls of Republican outrage at Obama's move to delay enforcement of the employer mandate for a single year with reaction to Mitt Romney's heralded plans, on Day One of the Romney administration, to grant waivers from Obamacare to all 50 states.

 

After all, Obama's moratorium came in the service of taking care that the law is implemented smoothly.

Romney's goal was to dismantle it by, well, executive fiat.

 

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/08/21/how_lawless_is_obama_119659.html

[Draggingtree]

August 23, 2013

Why the Law Does Not Matter to Obama
Donald Sensing
August 23, 2013

Understand that this federal court ruling means exactly nothing:

Appeals Court: Obama Violating Law on Nuke Site
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been violating federal law by delaying a decision on a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

By a 2-1 vote, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered the commission to complete the licensing process and approve or reject the Energy Department's application for a waste site at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

In a sharply worded opinion, the court said the nuclear agency was "simply flouting the law" when it allowed the Obama administration to continue plans to close the proposed waste site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The action goes against a federal law designating Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste repository.

"The president may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections," Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a majority opinion, which was joined Judge A. Raymond Randolph. Chief Judge Merrick B. Garland dissented in the case.

Does this ruling bind this president from doing what he wants to do? Of course not. No one in America has both the power and the determination to hinder Obama from doing whatever he wants.

 

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/10301

[Draggingtree]

Americans Must Stand up to High Lawlessness, If We Are to Last as a Law & Order Nation

 

Obama’s Puerile Molestation of the Constitution is Gruesome & Exceptionally Dangerous

 

By Kelly OConnell (Bio and Archives) Sunday, August 25, 2013

It has become painfully clear that Barack holds an al a carte theory of American law—to be taken piece by piece, but not by whole. For example, he clearly does not consider the Constitution binding, unless its’ mandates already fit into his plans.

 

For this reason it is inevitable that when Obama taught “constitutional law” as an unpublished, non-professor instructor, he would have used the theory of evolving “living law.” (see Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart) Therefore, when we observe Barack as making legal decisions of the cuff, he uses the style of lex animata, or the living law. In effect, an elected office holder becomes the very embodiment of what the Founders fought against—much to their grave-turning horror.

I. What is the Rule of Law?

America has often been referred to as a land where the king was dethroned and law was put in his place. But what is the Rule of Law? The ancient Greeks, such as Aristotle, and the Romans understood that the law had to stand above any king. And, for example, Bernard Levinson finds the first constitution in ancient Israel—see The First Constitution: Rethinking the Origins of Rule of Law and Separation of Powers in Light of Deuteronomy. Over the centuries since, the http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/57428