Some Serious Pushback Against Obama's Imperial Presidency

Forbes ^ | January 26, 2016 | George Leef

[reaganaut1]

During Richard Nixon's presidency, Democrats repeatedly excoriated him for running roughshod over the Constitution's limits on executive power - and they were right to do so.

Nixon's view that presidential authority was almost limitless, summed up in his famous statement caught on tape, "If the president does it, it's not illegal," was completely at odds with the Constitution's provisions for the scope of executive power in Article II. The president does not get to change the Constitution to suit his desires. At least, he shouldn't.

Compared with Barack Obama, however, Richard Nixon was a minor leaguer when it comes to the use of the Oval Office to remake the law. Obama has again and again acted in ways that mock the Constitution's limits on the power of the presidency. Professor David Bernstein's recent book Lawless, which I discussed here, catalogues the most egregious of his violations.

During the last few weeks, I'm glad to say, several legal challenges have been mounted against Obama's unilateral actions: on immigration policy, on the sales of firearms, on his claim of executive privilege regarding the "Fast and Furious" gun operation, and on the decision to prevent construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

A medical analogy to these cases would be that it is like seeing a patient's immune system finally kick in to fight a terrible infection.

Obama's calculated political actions to change our immigration policy have been challenged as violating the Constitution's "Take Care" clause, which obligates the president to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The administration's 2012 Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program (expanded in 2014) is problematic because the president declared that he would stop deportation proceedings against immigrants who had entered the U.S. illegally.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Or to put it another way, he has less than a year left, so Federal judges now feel safe that they can rule against him without being pummeled to death with charges of RAAAAAACISM.

[CaptainMorgantown]

So many of these actions have to meet the hurdle of ‘standing’ in order to be heard in the federal courts. And for most of these cases, individual citizens do not have the ‘standing’ to challenge illegal actions by our government. Part of the reason for this is to prevent the system from being overrun by nuisance suits, but this also severely limits the ability of citizens in to hold their government accountable.

In some cases, like the immigration situation, state governments have standing and are fighting the good fight. In others, only Congress has standing to sue against encroachment on their powers. With a few exceptions, our Congressional leaders have been very slow and reluctant to defend Congressional powers against encroachment by this Executive branch.

[MeganC]

Isn’t it ironic that the Federal judges will dismiss cases of citizens vs. the FedGov for ‘lack of standing’ but they’ll uphold every single act of the FedGov vs. citizens no matter how poor the argument for jurisdiction is.

[SoFloFreeper]

very good article. too bad there is so little discussion on it...