January 7, 2013
-By Warner Todd Huston
President Obama’s supporters love to call him the “cool” President, a “no drama” guy, and generally like to claim he is unflappable in office. Whatever the truth of that claim, there is one thing for sure: he doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Like following the law. During his four years in office this president has shown he couldn’t care less about the laws he’s supposed to be governed by as president.
This lawlessness started all the way back before he even became president. It was widely discussed in 2008 that he blatantly violated campaign donations laws by refusing to put in controls on his website that would prevent illegal, foreign donations. And we’ve only just learned as 2013 began that his 2008 campaign was levied the largest fine ever imposed on a presidential campaign for violations of campaign laws. In January the nation learned that the FEC fined Obama $375,000 for campaign reporting violations.
Once he became President, Obama immediately began misuse his powers to control Washington’s regulatory machinery to pay back pals and warp rules for ideological reasons. This president generally wields his regulatory powers with kid gloves to pay off supporters while at the same time that velvety hand holds a cudgel to smite foes.
One of his very first moves when he was swept into Washington, for instance, was to begin a program to give big payoffs to his union masters.
His first move was to put a union operative in as the head of the Department of Labor. Hilda Solis had been a union stooge her entire career and that stoogery only increased when Obama took office and quickly put her in charge of the DoL. This is significant because the DoL is supposed to be an unbiased arbiter between labor and the business sector. Installing Solis as the Sec. of Labor signaled a move to turn the DoL into an adjunct of Big Labor instead of an unbiased arbiter and Solis quickly moved to use the DoL as a weapon against the business sector.
Immediately Obama changed union reporting rules that cut unions slack in reporting their financial situation to the government. No more would unions be expected to account for themselves. Instead, unions would be given all the cover they needed to hide funds and expenditures from both government and union rank and file members.
This wasn’t his only pay off to unions. He’s continued to bend rules, vacate laws, dismantle transparency regulations, and turn a blind eye to union violations during his whole time in office.
Obama has also used Executive Orders to skirt both Congress and the law. Take for instance, Obama’s attempt to implement the Disclose Act through the back door using an EO. The Disclose Act was an effort that failed in Congress but Obama thought he could just ignore Congress and implement it anyway.
This fits with Obama’s announced policy that he would go around Congress whenever he feels like it.
Obama has also engaged in a strong campaign to misuse the Department of Justice for political purposes. His emplacement of Eric Holder as Attorney General was only the first move to turn the DoJ into a weapon against Americans he doesn’t like. Writer and former DoJ lawyer J.Christian Adams has chronicled the extensive damage Holder’s DoJ has done to the country with his and Obama’s politicization of the department.
In fact, the DoJ has been so ideologically pro-active that this month the federal government has been told to reimburse the state of South Carolina for court costs the DoJ unnecessarily caused as it illicitly attacked the state over its voter ID laws.
Obama has used the Environmental Protection Agency as a weapon repeatedly, as well. In only the latest example we find that a federal court has determined that the EPA overstepped its boundaries by idiotically claiming that water is a “pollutant” in order to force its will on state officials.
Another example of Obama’s disinterest in following the law was his responsibility to report his upcoming regulatory changes, the last report of which was due in October but wasn’t bothered with until December — conveniently after the election. The earlier April report he never issued at all.
Then there was Obama’s convenient change to the way the federal government defines poverty. Obama changed it so that poverty can never be shown to have gotten better. His new reporting scheme will forever define poverty as getting worse despite its actual condition either ways.
Obama also recently made a move to eliminate an embarrassing metric in the gathering of statistics issued by the Internal Revenue Service that shows how many Americans are moving, from where, and where to among the states. One can only assume the gathering of this metric was ended so that the steady flow out of highly taxed, deep blue states can no longer be tracked. In this way, Obama can help tax-hogging Democrats hide the fact that their policies are causing their states to lose citizens as those put upon folks move away to more prosperous, and usually lower taxed, states.
Sadly, no president before Barack Obama has violated the law, warped the regulatory scheme, and used his power to as ideologically as often as he has. None.
Suffice to say, there are many, many, many more examples like those I’ve listed here. There have been so many that it would take a book — or several — to chronicle all Obama’s ideological changes and violations of the law committed since 2008.
In fact, a few have made the attempt to elucidate that record.
To name just two, the aforementioned J. Christian Adams wrote a book titled Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, detailing the abuse of power at the DoJ.
Another good book on Obama’s lawlessness is Phil Kerpen’s Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him.
Obama’s lawlessness is so voluminous that even the book titles about the subject can’t be short! And he isn’t done yet, either. Thanks to the American electorate, he has another full four years to indulge his lawlessness.
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.