A manager once warned me to never create a rule I knew would be universally ignored. (He was talking about a company rule against smoking anywhere on the campus.) Your power, he said, is only in the minds of those you lead. Once they all decide to ignore you on one thing what makes you think they’ll obey you on anything else?
Obama has now created a rule so dumb that it is universally ignored. His power in all things is now called into question.
A good rule to follow. It has often been said that Americans were by habit law abiding people prior to prohibition of alcohol. That was too much, people ignored it and many say that a new culture of disregard for the law began at that point. Richard Nixon of course said on TV that we can’t have people deciding what laws to follow and what laws not to follow all the while he was himself doing exactly that. Now we have a government which totally disregards the law while expecting the citizens to somehow obey the law even as they have made the laws so complex and contradictory that even a lawyer cannot figure out what they mean in many cases. I was trying to explain to a young neighbor last week that it is now IMPOSSIBLE to actually be a law abiding citizen no matter how hard you try. I don’t think she ever fully understood what I was saying.
In short, if you were genius enough to be able to learn and decipher all the laws you could not obey one without breaking another in the process.