Nation of laws must rein in Obama

02.15.2014

A few days ago, Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard wrote me with a new assignment to write for the European paper he co-edits:

“Would you write something about a disturbing phenomenon — the fact that Obama rules by decree and neglects the Constitution. How can this go on? Nixon was a complete amateur compared to this would-be Kim Jong-Un. It looks like a coup d'etat. Nobody talks about it in Europe.”

So that's what America looks like from 4,000 miles away.

Given the lack of context “over there,” my overview had to start with the basics of Barack Obama's presidency: numerous unconfirmed “tsars,” sweeping executive orders and massive amounts of regulation. “I've got a pen and I've got a phone” is the way the president recently described his tools of power, noticeably omitting whether he also had a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

For many Americans, living through the Obama era day by day, executive order by executive order, our nation's transformation becomes so much enveloping static. Yes, there are shrieks and screams (over ObamaCare's rollout, for instance), but mostly people seem to shut out the background noise of an aggressively collectivizing government doing business. Obama's poll numbers dip, yes. White noise ensues.

Obama is seizing powers that belong to the legislative branch. He's not the first president to do so; not by a long shot. That's also part of the ambivalence problem. Obama fits an accepted historical mode of abuse exemplified, for example, by the even more dictatorial FDR.

What distinguishes Obama's fiats in our time, however, as Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told CNSNews.com, is that Obama “has repeatedly made use of executive orders to change statute, to change law, to change legislation enacted by Congress.”

A president can't do that. The crisis exists because the legislative branch is letting him.

During a December hearing before a House Judiciary subcommittee on “The President's Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws,” liberal law professor (and onetime Obama voter) Jonathan Turley stated: “The problem with what the president is doing is that he's not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He's becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid.”

What to do with a president who rewrites his own laws, enacts legislation that has failed (repeatedly) to pass into law, and creates legislation through executive agency regulation?

The boldest proposition on the table so far — not moving, I will add — is for Congress to stop funding executive orders that upset the Constitution's “balance of powers.” This is an obvious “check” to restore “balance.”

But Obama's systematic assaults on constitutional governance require more than defunding, and more than static. They require, first and most urgently, a full airing. Impeachment, which may begin with an impeachment inquiry, is the means the Constitution provided us. It offers the way “forward,” as the president might say, to re-establish that America is a nation of laws, not men.

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