George Will
President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.
Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”
He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. . . . It looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”
Serving as props in the scripted charade of White House news conferences, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: “Wheredoes the Constitution confer upon presidents the ‘executive authority’ to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?” The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: brevity. Because there is no such authority.
Obama’s explanation began with an irrelevancy. He consulted with businesses before disregarding his constitutional dutyto “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That duty does not lapse when a president decides Washington’s “political environment” is not “normal.”
When was it “normal”? The 1850s? The 1950s? Washington has been the nation’s capital for 213 years; Obama has been here less than nine. Even if he understood “normal” political environments here, the Constitution is not suspended when a president decides the “environment” is abnormal.
Would it be actually possible that Obama would (as many have suspected or feared) use his self-proclaimed executive ultimate-power to simply ban the next Presidential election for his replacement?
President Nixon had ONE major unconstitutional crisis.
Obama has many.
Virtually everything he does is unconstitutional.
His ”recess” appointments while Congress was in session.
His wars.
His drone killings of American citizens.
His NSA privacy abuses.
His IRS re-election assist.
And on and on.
bburris
I hope he doesn’t do that, but I think, he would not get away with it,
unless all the people are asleep,
@ilovebeeswarzone: That may not stop him from trying….
Scott in Oklahoma
yes but that would not work I hope the tolerance has limit,
bye
When you’ve lost George Will……………………………………………
@retire05: Can’t lose what you didn’t have. In 201o he said Admin was” spreading dependency.” In 2012 he called it a “failed Presidency.”
As you know, Will is one of America’s most respected Conservative journalists, as well as a long suffering Cubs fan.
bburris #1 Absurd
burris #1. It is certainly possible that Obama could try to do so. Just because it would be unconstitutional doesn’t seem to make a difference to our dictator(wannabee). As has been well understood, when a new law is desired, it is presented to Congress. They either pass it or they don’t. If they do pass it (even over a veto) then it is the law. If they don’t pass it, then it is not a law. Ah, but then along comes a dictator that doesn’t think that’s the way it should be. If he doesn’t like the law, he just ‘gives an order to disobey it’ or, as in the case of Obamacare, just change it to what he prefers. Don’t bother with congress, they are just a distraction. The US government was set up as it was to make new laws ‘relatively’ difficult to get passed therefore reducing the total number of laws that citizens have to deal with. The president is not given any authority in the constitution to put any new law into effect without it having been passed by the congress. You would think that a Constitutional Professor (wannabee) would know that. What he is doing is treason.
@Richard Wheeler:
very accurate description, wouldn’t you say?
the CONGRESS MUST MAKE SURE BY NULLIFYING HIS EXECUTIVE POWER
OF SIGNING ANYTHING FROM NOW TILL HE HAS DONE HIS TERM,
IT COULD BE DONE, IT’S THE ONLY WAY,
HE THINK HE IS IMMUNE FROM BEING REMOVE FROM OFFICE,
IF EGYPT DID IT, IT’S POSSIBLE EVEN MORE HERE,
DEMOCRACY IS NOT JUST A WORD,IF IT’S NOT OBEY BY LEADER IT’S NO MORE VALID DEMOCRACY, THE LEADER THAN MUST BE REMOVE
AND HIS WHOLE PARTY ALONG WITH HIM ,BECAUSE THEY FAIL
TO EXPOSE AND WILLINGLY PARTICIPATED IN THE DEMISE OF THE PEOPLE,EVEN HALF OF THAT PEOPLE,
MARK LEVINE AND HIS BOOK; THE LIBERTY AMENDMENT,
HE EXPLAINED SO MUCH at HANNITY YESTERDAY,
GEORGE WILL
GREAT POST THANK YOU.
YOU GAVE US A LOT IN IT,