posted January 26, 2014 07:11 PM            

"You have a power to stop deportation for all undocumented immigrants in this country!" the young South Korean man yelled at President Obama during a speech on immigration reform last November in San Francisco. Waving away security guards, Mr. Obama turned and addressed Mr. Hong, himself undocumented. "Actually, I don't," the president said. "And that's why we're here."

"We've got this Constitution, we've got this whole thing about separation of powers," Obama continued. "So there is no shortcut to politics, and there's no shortcut to democracy."

The reality isn't so simple. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, was once skeptical of the aggressive use of presidential power. During the 2008 campaign, he accused President George W. Bush of regularly circumventing Congress. Yet as president, Obama has grown increasingly bold in his own use of executive action, at times to controversial effect.

The president (or his administration) has unilaterally changed elements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA); declared an anti-gay-rights law unconstitutional; lifted the threat of deportation for an entire class of undocumented immigrants; bypassed Senate confirmation of controversial nominees; waived compliance requirements in education law; and altered the work requirements under welfare reform. This month, the Obama administration took the highly unusual step of announcing that it will recognize gay marriages performed in Utah – even though Utah itself says it will not recognize them while the issue is pending in court.

Early in his presidency, Obama also expanded presidential warmaking powers, surveillance of the American public, and extrajudicial drone strikes on alleged terrorists outside the United States, including Americans – going beyond Mr. Bush's own global war on terror following 9/11. But more recently, he has flexed his executive muscle more on domestic policy.

In the process, Obama's claims of executive authority have infuriated opponents, while emboldening supporters to demand more on a range of issues, from immigration and gay rights to the minimum wage and Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

To critics, Obama is the ultimate "imperial president," willfully violating the Constitution to further his goals, having failed to convince Congress of the merits of his arguments. To others, he is exercising legitimate executive authority in the face of an intransigent Congress and in keeping with the practices of past presidents.

The course of Obama's final three years in office, in which he has promised continuing assertive use of executive action, will be shaped by this debate.

The tug of history

On the eve of Obama's fifth State of the Union message, on Jan. 28, the president faces a steep challenge. His job approval has plummeted to the low 40s, following the disastrous rollout of his health-care reform and public outrage over massive data collection by the National Security Agency. Unemployment is falling steadily but remains high, at 6.7 percent.

"We're 4-1/2 years into an alleged recovery, and most Americans still think we're in a recession," says William Galston, a Clinton White House veteran and scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Even though Obama will never face the voters again, he has plenty of incentive to boost his game. Now he's playing for his legacy, and the judgment of the history books. Politically, he's playing for the final national election of his presidency – next November's midterms, in which Democratic control of the Senate is at risk. Reclaiming the House from the Republicans is close to impossible. Divided government is Obama's near-certain reality for the rest of his presidency.

Still, keeping the Senate in Democratic hands remains critical to Obama's legacy: It will allow him to confirm presidential nominees – including most judges, who have lifetime tenure – with a simple majority after Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid engineered a rule change last November.

Restoring public confidence in Obama's trustworthiness and competence as an executive is also critical, as the president tries to move beyond the "Obamacare" fiasco and National Security Agency snooping. Republicans are already firmly lashing the health reform's woes to Democratic candidates' necks. But nothing will impress voters more than a sense that their personal financial situation is improving. Cue Obama's focus on what he calls "the defining challenge of our time," growing inequality and a lack of upward mobility. It will be a central theme in the State of the Union message, including a call for Congress to boost the federal minimum wage.

Early in the new year, White House officials were cautiously optimistic that the December budget deal may signal new momentum toward bipartisan cooperation, at least in future budgetary and fiscal matters. Republicans would rather keep the spotlight on Obamacare woes than risk public blame for another government shutdown or more brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, which the Treasury Department says will be reached in late February.

But one point is certain: It's a new day for Team Obama. John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Clinton and a turnaround artist, has put on his cape and swooped into the West Wing for a one-year tour as a counselor. The president has also brought back the highly regarded Phil Schiliro to oversee the continuing health-care rollout and made deputy communications director (and Capitol Hill insider) Katie Beirne Fallon his legislative affairs director.

But it's the arrival of Mr. Podesta that has Washington buzzing. He ran the Obama transition after his first election and then repaired to his think tank, the Center for American Progress, resisting entreaties to join the administration. Most important, his passion is climate change, and he's a big believer in executive action – by the president himself, as well as via agency rules and regulations.

"I think [White House officials] were naturally preoccupied with legislating at first, and I think it took them a while to make the turn to execution. They are focused on that now," Podesta told Politico last year before agreeing to his new White House gig. "They have to realize that the president has broad authority, that he's not just the prime minister. He can drive a whole range of action. They always grasped that on foreign policy and in the national security area. Now they are doing it on the domestic side."

The (un)limits of executive power

Starting with George Washington, American presidents have used executive orders, proclamations, and other techniques to wield power, usually without controversy. These moves can be as important as the Emancipation Proclamation, and as trivial as an executive order allowing federal workers to leave work early on Christmas Eve.

They carry the force of law, but are ill-defined. Legal scholars disagree even on whether there's a constitutional "bright line" that defines what a president can do on his own and what requires congressional action.

"It gets controversial when a president simply states that he's acting under the power granted to him by the Constitution and laws of the United States," says Phillip J. Cooper, author of the book "By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action."

Bush invited controversy with his aggressive use of "signing statements," written pronouncements during bill signings that explain the president's view of a law – including at times the constitutionality of some aspects of it. In his first presidential campaign, Obama decried Bush's practice, but as president, he has continued it.

In their use of executive orders, Bush and Obama are virtually tied: In his first five years in office, Bush issued 165 orders, versus 167 by Obama. But a bean-counting approach doesn't capture the scope of a president's approach to executive power.

"It's really the character of the actions, and their subject," says Jonathan Turley, a constitutional scholar at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "In my view, Obama has surpassed George W. Bush in the level of circumvention of Congress and the assertion of excessive presidential power. I don't think it's a close question."

Many of Obama's most controversial power plays have come through means other than executive orders. Here are some examples:

•Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This policy, announced by the Department of Homeland Security in 2012, came via a memorandum that directs authorities to exercise "prosecutorial discretion" in dealing with some young undocumented immigrants.

If they meet the criteria for eligibility, they are shielded temporarily from deportation and allowed to work. The DACA program enacted many of the goals of the failed DREAM Act legislation, though it does not create a path to citizenship.

Critics say that waiving deportation laws for more than a million people is not "prosecutorial discretion" – it's policymaking by executive fiat, usurping the role of Congress. Simon Lazarus, senior counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, disagrees, calling DACA "perfectly compatible with the president's discretion in the immigration area."

Ten immigration agents challenged DACA in federal court, saying the policy undermined their duty to enforce the law. Last summer the judge threw out the case on jurisdictional grounds, but suggested DACA was inherently unlawful.

Politics also infused how both sides handled DACA. For Obama, it was an obvious play for the Latino vote ahead of the 2012 election. For congressional Republicans, even if they could have attained "standing" to sue – a major problem in efforts to challenge executive action – acting to undo a policy that helps sympathetic young immigrants would have been bad politics. So they chose not to fight it.

•Obamacare. Last July, when the president delayed the mandate for large employers to provide health coverage for their employees by a year, his critics cried foul.

"Obama's not interpreting the law; he's changing the law," says Mr. Turley. "He's changing deadlines that were the subject of intense legislative debate."

The Obama administration also did an about-face on the requirement that members of Congress and their staff get their health insurance via the government exchanges, without the government subsidy they were receiving under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. Under the ACA, they would not have been eligible for subsidies – leading to fears of a brain drain from Capitol Hill.

Last August, the Office of Personnel Management issued a rule allowing Hill employees to keep their federal subsidy for health insurance. The plans offered through the exchanges qualified as "health benefit plans" for the purposes of the subsidy, OPM said.

•Gay marriage. Another bracing move by the Obama administration came in 2011, when the Department of Justice announced it would no longer defend in court the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that banned federal recognition of same-sex marriages. The Supreme Court went on to strike down part of the law last June, but that does not lessen the highly unusual nature of an administration declaring on its own that a law was unconstitutional, before the court had ruled.

•Recess appointments. In yet another aggressive use of executive action – bypassing the Senate in making recess appointments to key executive branch positions when the Senate is technically still in session – Obama may be on the verge of getting slapped down by the Supreme Court. On Jan. 13, the high court heard arguments over Obama's three controversial recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in 2012.

Looking across the landscape of Obama's bold record of executive action, Turley of George Washington University doesn't mince words.

"President Obama meets every definition of an imperial presidency," says Turley, who notes that he voted for Obama. "He is the president that Richard Nixon always wanted to be."

The Constitution states that the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Critics say that in decreeing changes to laws – such as the delay of the employer mandate under the ACA – Obama has repeatedly violated that constitutional command.

Others defend Obama, saying that the president's critics are using the Constitution as a political weapon. Mr. Lazarus says the critics "flout long-established Supreme Court precedent and they contradict the consistent practice of all modern presidencies, Republican and Democratic, to implement complex and consequential regulatory programs."

Indeed, Democrats defend Obama's changes to the ACA with a list of ad hoc changes the Bush administration made to the Medicare prescription drug program when it went into effect in 2006. But when he was asked directly about the delayed employer mandate in a New York Times interview last July, Obama didn't argue for the legality of his moves or raise the precedent of the rollout of Bush's drug plan. Instead, he lashed out at his critics.

"There's not an action that I take you don't have some folks in Congress who say that I'm usurping my authority," Obama said. "Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency."

Constitutional scholar Lou Fisher is baffled by Obama's personal response. He believes Obama was justified in delaying the employer mandate on constitutional grounds as well as by "the practical need to avoid harming the program through effective and premature implementation," as he put it in a December article in the Boston Review.

"He could have argued that you encounter things you don't anticipate" when implementing a major law, says Mr. Fisher, who spent 40 years at the Congressional Research Service as a specialist on separation of powers. "But no, he keeps digging himself in deeper."

Signature politics

The politics of executive power is risky. Wielding it often, instead of going through Congress, can look like a crutch. And it further poisons the well of already icy relations with Congress. Then there's the issue of an executive order's durability, and the reality of elections that, sooner or later, bring the opposition party into power.

"Executive orders can be undone very easily," says Mr. Galston, the former Clinton aide. "If you want to make enduring change, you have to work through the established institutions and procedures for making such changes."

Obama says he prefers getting congressional buy-in, rather than moving unilaterally. But getting Congress to act has become a Sisyphean task. Last year was one of its least productive on record; its most memorable act may have been failing to fund the government, leading to a shutdown.

Not that there's anything wrong with issuing executive orders as a legitimate function of the presidency, Galston notes.

"Within appropriate limits, the president ought to use them," he says. "You don't have to be a great and subtle reader of the Federalist Papers to know that Alexander Hamilton, the father of the executive, talked about it as the source of energy in the government."

But sometimes that energy can create its own momentum. Obama's frequent use of executive action has only whetted activists' appetite for more, squeezing the president from the left even as his critics scream tyranny and, along the fringe, talk about impeachment.

Remember Ju Hong, the young South Korean man who was invited to stand with the president during an immigration reform speech – and suddenly began heckling him? Obama's DACA move was huge and controversial, but for immigration reform activists, it was only a start. Why not just give every otherwise-law-abiding undocumented immigrant a free pass while Congress sorts out the law? some ask.

Obama clearly believes he can't do that, but what's not clear is whether he might decide he can waive deportation for another group, such as the parents of the young DACA beneficiaries.

On the issue of inequality, Obama is urging Congress to raise the federal minimum wage – a campaign that has boomeranged back on the president: Progressives are lobbying him to use his executive authority to raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers, but he hasn't responded. Some liberals in Congress openly question whether he's more talk than action.

On gay rights, Obama has long faced pressure to sign an executive order banning workplace discrimination against gay, lesbian, and transgender federal contractors. But he has resisted, saying he would rather Congress pass the broader Employment Non-Discrimination Act. ENDA would prohibit workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation by most employers, but the legislation is stalled.

On Guantánamo, Obama was outmaneuvered by Congress after he signed an executive order early on ordering the controversial detention center closed. And so it remains open. But in the eyes of some legal experts, Obama is failing to take creative advantage of his power as commander in chief in dealing with the camp.

"Win, lose, or draw, it is time to get around Congress," writes Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman at Bloomberg.com. "And if ordinary politics won't do the trick, going to the courts may be the best option – because it is the only one."

Checks and imbalances?

Obama prefers to pick his fights and the timing of them carefully as he wields executive power. And for members of Congress who want to stop him, the remedies for perceived overreach are limited. Lawmakers who feel the president has flouted the laws they have passed have trouble getting "standing" in court to sue the executive branch.

Some try anyway. On Jan. 6, Sen. Ron Johnson (R) of Wisconsin filed suit to challenge the administration's decision to subsidize the health insurance of members of Congress and their staff, against the letter of the ACA. Sen. Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky is filing a class-action lawsuit against the National Security Agency over its bulk phone-record collection.

At the recent House Judiciary Committee hearing on presidential power, witnesses presented other options. "The ultimate check on presidential lawlessness is elections and, in extreme cases, impeachment," said Nicholas Rosenkranz, a law professor at Georgetown University.

Another witness suggested that Congress become more assertive. "Congress has lots of power, if it chooses to use it," said Lazarus of the Constitutional Accountability Center. "The power of the purse is an enormous power, and I think that if I were you I would find ways to influence policy in using the Congress's powers, which you're not doing."

In addition, public opinion could dampen the president's enthusiasm for taking matters into his own hands. In a Christian Science Monitor/TIPP poll taken Jan. 4-7, Americans said they did not favor a president taking executive action when Congress is gridlocked. In general, 41 percent of Americans approved of executive action in such cases, with 55 percent disapproving.

On expanding gay rights, 43 percent approved of the president acting on his own, while 53 percent disapproved. On the question of shielding new categories of undocumented immigrants from deportation, 33 percent approved of presidential action, and 63 percent disapproved. On raising the minimum wage for federal contractors, 38 percent wanted Obama to act, and 58 percent didn't.

Obama's final mark

Year 6 holds the key to the rest of Obama's presidency. Can he regain the trust of the American people? Will the ACA begin to work? Can Democrats hold onto the Senate?

Obama's three immediate predecessors all endured crises in their second terms. Presidents Reagan and Clinton recovered politically and left office with strong economies. Bush did not. Solid economic performance in the next year would go a long way toward helping Obama recover, though presidents have limited ability to affect the economy on their own.

What can Obama do to overcome the problems of Year 5?

"The only thing in this image-saturated age is a real accomplishment," says Jeremy Mayer, a public policy professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. "It has to be something concrete; it can't be oratory. Oratory cannot save him anymore."

If Obama can say that 10 million Americans have health insurance who didn't have it when he was inaugurated, that's something. Ditto a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, or an end to the Syria conflict. Foreign policy is often the refuge of second-term presidents.

Some Republicans see an opportunity to move on immigration reform this spring, though in piecemeal fashion, which is OK with Obama as long as the bills accomplish his broad objectives – including a path to citizenship.

But if that effort fails, 2014 could be the year of executive action. On Jan. 3, Obama announced two executive measures aimed at making it easier to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill. Podesta's arrival at the White House may foreshadow action on climate change.

posted January 28, 2014 08:53 PM            

I could be wrong but this looks like Bush signed some 290 EOs, and Obama more like 170. Clinton and Reagan both in the high 300s, Eisenhower over 500.

Of course his term isn't over yet but as I've pointed out before, quite a lot of GW's were classified which means he could have ordered some very nasty things indeed and we won't know for another almost 20 years...this is also critical because the courts can strike down EOs easily but classified ones, not so much.

posted January 29, 2014 07:07 AM            

quote:

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Executive Order 13292 was an executive order issued by United States President George W. Bush on March 25, 2003, entitled "Further Amendment to Executive Order 12958, as Amended, Classified National Security Information." The Executive Order modified the manner in which sensitive information was handled at the time as set out by President Bill Clinton's 1995 executive order.

Clinton's order set declassification deadlines for classified material and made it harder for politicians to classify information. Bush's order appears to allow much more information to be classified and for longer periods; the wording is hard to decipher in some areas[specify]. It also appears to give more power over classification to the Offices of the President and Vice President, but the wording used was not properly defined in the listing of relevant definitions now consolidated into their own section in Part 6 of the Executive Order.

Among the various changes made to the 1995-based regulations, Executive Order 13292 notably:[1]
eliminated the 1995-based order’s standard that information should not be classified if there is “significant doubt” about the need to do so;
treated information obtained in confidence from foreign governments as classified;
authorized the Vice President, “in the performance of executive duties,” to classify information originally;
added “infrastructures” and “protection services” to the categories of classifiable information;
eased the reclassification of declassified records;
postponed the starting date for automatic declassification of protected records 25 or more years old from April 17, 2003, to December 31, 2006;
eliminated the requirement that agencies prepare plans for declassifying records;
canceled the order requiring the Archivist to create a “government wide database of information that has been declassified,” and instead requires the “Director of the Information Security Oversight Office ... [to] coordinate the linkage and effective utilization of existing agency databases of records that have been declassified and publicly released”; and
permitted the Director of Central Intelligence to block declassification actions of the ISCAP, unless overruled by the President.

---

Executive Order 12958 and the amendments incorporated into it, including Executive Order 13292, were revoked by President Barack Obama in the issuance of Executive Order 13526.-->

Issuance

As a component of the Obama Administration's initiative to improve transparency and open-access to the Federal Government and the information it produces formally introduced upon taking office in late January 2009[2] and as a result of an agency-wide review and recommendation process ordered in May of that same year,[3] the issuance of EO 13526 was ultimately prompted by several factors.

One factor was the large backlog of documents scheduled to be automatically declassified on December 31, 2009 and how to deal with that reality.[4] Another factor was delivering on a campaign promise.[5]

These latest regulations, at the time, went into full effect on June 25, 2010 except for sections 1.7, 3.3, and 3.7, which were effective immediately on December 29, 2009.[6][7] [8]

Significant changes

EO 13526 restated the authorized list of designees who can originate classification, in effect rescinding any previous designations made by officials or agency heads to subordinates.

posted January 29, 2014 02:24 PM            

Bush issued Executive Orders related to National Security...where he has the duty to keep the country and citizens safe...

and you attempt to equate that with...

O'Bomber issuing Executive Orders to implement an agenda he can't get through Congress.

The Marxist Messiah is an arrogant, lawless, Socialist Progressive twit who should be impeached, convicted, removed then indicted, tired, convicted and imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the US Constitution.

posted January 29, 2014 02:33 PM            

Lately a weakened President Obama has fashioned a new attitude about consensual government: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” Obama boasted Tuesday as he convened his first cabinet meeting of the year. At least he did not say he intended to govern by “pen and sword.” If Obama used to sigh to supporters that he was not a dictator who could just implement progressive agendas by fiat, he now seems to have done away with the pretense of regret.

Obama has all but given up on the third branch of government since he lost control of it in 2010: “And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.”

There are lots of creepy things about such dictatorial statements of moving morally backward in order to go politically “forward.” Concerning issues dear to the president’s heart — climate change, more gun control, de facto amnesty, more massive borrowing supposedly to jump-start the anemic, jobless recovery — Obama not long ago had a Democratic supermajority in the Senate and a strong majority in the House. With such rare political clout, he supposedly was going to pass his new American agenda.

Instead, all he got from his Democratic colleagues was more borrowing and Obamacare. In the case of the latter, the bill passed only through the sort of pork-barrel kickbacks and exemptions to woo fence-sitting Democratic legislators that we hadn’t seen in the U.S. since the 1930s. And for what? Obamacare (be careful what you wish for) is proving to be the greatest boondoggle in American political history since Prohibition. If Obama sincerely wished to work in bipartisan fashion with Congress, he probably could easily get a majority vote to build the Keystone XL Pipeline, or a backup sanction plan against Iran in case his own initiatives fail.

Note as well that Obama says he will bypass Congress for “our kids.” Politicians usually cite the “kids” when promoting something that is either illegal or unethical. Meanwhile, apart from Obama’s support for late-term abortion, no president has waged a greater war against those under the age of 30 — passing on to them an additional $9 trillion in debt, socializing the economy and presiding over near-record youth and minority unemployment rates, taxing far poorer youth who will not use much health care to pay for more affluent baby boomers who will, or floating easy federal student loans to facilitate mostly liberal universities’ jacking up tuition at well above the rate of inflation (currently a $1 trillion bubble).

We are reentering Nixonian times, or perhaps worse, given that a free press at least went after Nixon’s misdeeds and misadventures. Now it has silenced itself for fear of harming a once-in-century chance for a fellow progressive’s makeover of America. We live in an age when a CNN moderator interrupts a presidential debate to help her sputtering candidate, and when a writer for the often ironic and sarcastic New Yorker sees no irony in doing a fawning interview with the president, tagging along on a shakedown jet tour from one mansion of crony capitalists to the next — as Obama preaches to the head-nodders about inequality and fairness in order to ensure that the bundled checks pour in.

Without the media acting as a watchdog, the administration has with impunity found the IRS useful in going after political opponents. When Obama’s IRS appointees were exposed, he for the moment called their deeds outrageous; when the media did not pursue the outrage, he wrote it off as a nothing story.

The media certainly thought it was nothing, given that none of the obsequious Washington press corps will be unduly audited or indicted. But the administration has also monitored Associated Press reporters. Most of what it initially said about the National Security Agency snooping proved untrue — including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s flat-out lie to Congress while under oath, when he testified that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans. All we know for now about Benghazi is that everything the administration alleged about the murders was false — from why Americans were there, to what prompted the violence, to why no help was sent before or during the attack, to the aftermath promises to hunt down the perpetrators.

The filmmaker and arch-critic of Barack Obama, Dinesh D’Souza, is now under indictment for improper campaign contributions. If he deliberately violated campaign-finance laws and compounded the violation by conspiring with others, then by all means he should face the full force of the law. The problem, though, is that even if D’Souza proves to be guilty as charged, others with far greater culpability — but with the correct political views — have not met the same degree of administration scrutiny.

Note, for example, what D’Souza did not do: He did not, as an Obama insider in the heat of the reelection campaign, leak classified information about vital national-security secrets like the Stuxnet virus attacks, the bin Laden raid, the drone protocols, or a double agent in Yemen in order to bolster the anti-terrorism credentials of the president; he did not, as a high-level Obama official, lie under oath to Congress about the NSA program; he is not a former Democratic governor who defrauded thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. Apparently none of that will get you arrested by this administration.

Mr. D’Souza also did not, as did Obama himself, have a soon-to-be-jailed felon sell him a lot next to his own house at below-market rates, without paying gift taxes on it, in exchange for perceived political favors. He did not pass illegally into the United States and reside here illegally by habitually lying on documents about his resident status. He did not go to the polls with clubs to intimidate voters. He did not bundle $500,000 to buy an ambassorship to Norway without knowing much of anything about Norway. He did not pitch green ideas to friends now in the Obama administration in order to land millions of dollars in federal loans that he would default on.

He did, though, make a movie critical of Barack Obama, and this is most likely what brought him under administration scrutiny, as did the activities of a video maker arrested for producing a politically incorrect video about Islam, or those of unduly audited Tea Party groups or Hollywood conservatives who have criticized the president. All of that, in this age of pen and phone, can get you arrested, audited, or on the IRS watch list.

Note the ripple effect, as partisans appreciate a new climate and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to even scores and advance the cause. The governor of New York announces that there is no place in his state for those whom he derides as “extreme conservatives” — only to be seconded by the new mayor of New York City. (Imagine the governor of Utah suggesting to liberal residents that their support for gun control, late-term abortion, and gay marriage might be good reasons for them to leave the state — and being seconded by the mayor of Salt Lake City. Or imagine a Republican president arbitrarily deciding that he does not like the DREAM Act component of a recently passed comprehensive immigration-reform bill, and so simply choosing to ignore it and deport students who are illegal aliens anyway.)

The first black senator from South Carolina since Reconstruction is blasted by a state NAACP official as a “dummy,” only to have that slur seconded by the national organization. On MSNBC, one newscaster hopes Sarah Palin ingests feces and urine; another takes a jab at Mitt Romney for having an African-American adopted grandchild; still another labels radio personality Laura Ingraham a “**** ” — all convinced that the periodic presidential sermon about a new civility empowers their crudity and deters critics.

As the president’s polls dance around a 40 percent approval rating, we are now told in the New Yorker interview that Obama believes that his race may be the cause of his unpopularity. Apparently, Obama believes that he is increasingly distrusted not because of Benghazi, or the AP, IRS, NSA, or Fast and Furious scandals, or the new $9 trillion in national debt, or the new normal of 7 percent unemployment, or the lies about Obamacare, but because his father was African.

Consider the logic: Apparently after twice electing Barack Obama, a public that is 89 percent non-African-American suddenly, in 2014, five years after his first inauguration, discovered, and now is angry, that its president is half black. Consider the box into which the president of the United States has put the public. He seems to be saying that to the degree that he is elected twice and polls over 45 percent, Americans are let off the hook as non-racist. To the degree that he falls below 45 percent in the polls, he is not sure that we aren’t racist. So will we please regain his trust, and not be called racist, by voting for his candidates in the 2014 midterm elections?

posted January 29, 2014 02:39 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by jwhop:
How perfectly in character for you.

Bush issued Executive Orders related to National Security...where he has the duty to keep the country and citizens safe...

and you attempt to equate that with...

O'Bomber issuing Executive Orders to implement an agenda he can't get through Congress.

The Marxist Messiah is an arrogant, lawless, Socialist Progressive twit who should be impeached, convicted, removed then indicted, tired, convicted and imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the US Constitution.

Randall has it right. O'Bomber thinks he's Emperor, not president.

---

posted January 29, 2014 04:34 PM            

"Executive Order 13292 was an executive order issued by United States President George W. Bush on March 25, 2003, entitled "Further Amendment to Executive Order 12958, as Amended, Classified National Security Information." The Executive Order modified the manner in which sensitive information was handled at the time as set out by President Bill Clinton's 1995 executive order.

On the other hand, the Marxist Messiah O'Bomber is attempting one man rule of America by bypassing the Congress of the United States AND changing the laws Congress passes on his own whims.

Clearly unconstitutional...

posted January 29, 2014 08:29 PM            

Exactly, [it is] all about the party of power. I am heartily sick of defense for the sake of party. Also, ~ offense~ for the sake of party.

posted January 29, 2014 08:30 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Catalina:
How do you guys know what the nature of classified Orders is? Crystal gazing?

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posted January 29, 2014 11:10 PM            

However, screeching and shrieking about Bush signing National Security Executive Orders..which is well within Presidential authortity and attempting to compare those against O'Bomber's illegal executive orders to bypass Congress is not going to cut the mustard. Neither those O'Bomber illegalities or his assuming legislative authority to change laws Congress passed are Constitutional.

If Bush had done anything like what O'Bomber IS doing and HAS done, little leftist heads would have exploded.

Therein lies the hypocrisy of the rabid fringe leftists in America.

posted January 30, 2014 12:28 AM            

He also tried to Order that many of his Decrees not be declassified even longer than 25 years...why?

Which makes your calling him lily white patriot of the century empty. I didn't see anything in the attempts to reverse extended classification that mentioned those recent orders, or did I miss it when I blinked?

Imperial may apply to all our recent Presidents but some people want to pretend it started 5 years ago. No score.

posted January 30, 2014 09:51 AM            

You don't know what's in those National Security Executive Orders but "suppose" it must be bad. You then go even further and say you "doubt" members of Congress even know what's in those Executive Orders Bush signed. Trash, hogwash and codswallop.

Yes, we're all sure Bush signed Executive Orders to direct Monsanto to poison Americans with genetically altered foods. To believe that or anything like that, one must be near PVS...Permanent Vegetative State. Most leftists already qualify.

I know leftists...Marxists, Socialist Progressives believe every secret of the US should be delivered directly into their little leftist ears. Common sense dictates leftists, who don't have the best interests of the US in mind and are therefore untrustworthy shouldn't be told if their hair was on fire. As for me, I wouldn't trust a leftist with the contents of my grocery shopping list...let alone National Security Secrets of the United States.

But let's get back to the case of the lawless Marxist Messiah who says he's going to use his pen to sign Executive Orders altering laws passed by Congress and make up new laws without Congressional approval or even a vote by Congress.

He's a lawless little thug wannabe dictator and as a president, he wouldn't make a small pimple..a zit on the ass of George W Bush.

Ted Cruz: The Imperial Presidency of Barack Obama
In the nation's history, there is simply no precedent for an American president so wantonly ignoring federal law.
By Ted Cruz
Jan. 28, 2014

Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president's persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. On Monday, Mr. Obama acted unilaterally to raise the minimum wage paid by federal contracts, the first of many executive actions the White House promised would be a theme of his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

The president's taste for unilateral action to circumvent Congress should concern every citizen, regardless of party or ideology. The great 18th-century political philosopher Montesquieu observed: "There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates." America's Founding Fathers took this warning to heart, and we should too.

Rule of law doesn't simply mean that society has laws; dictatorships are often characterized by an abundance of laws. Rather, rule of law means that we are a nation ruled by laws, not men. That no one—and especially not the president—is above the law. For that reason, the U.S. Constitution imposes on every president the express duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

Yet rather than honor this duty, President Obama has openly defied it by repeatedly suspending, delaying and waiving portions of the laws he is charged to enforce. When Mr. Obama disagreed with federal immigration laws, he instructed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the laws. He did the same thing with federal welfare law, drug laws and the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

On many of those policy issues, reasonable minds can disagree. Mr. Obama may be right that some of those laws should be changed. But the typical way to voice that policy disagreement, for the preceding 43 presidents, has been to work with Congress to change the law. If the president cannot persuade Congress, then the next step is to take the case to the American people. As President Reagan put it: "If you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat" of electoral accountability.

President Obama has a different approach. As he said recently, describing his executive powers: "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone." Under the Constitution, that is not the way federal law is supposed to work.

The Obama administration has been so brazen in its attempts to expand federal power that the Supreme Court has unanimously rejected the Justice Department's efforts to expand federal power nine times since January 2012.

There is no example of lawlessness more egregious than the enforcement—or nonenforcement—of the president's signature policy, the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Obama has repeatedly declared that "it's the law of the land." Yet he has repeatedly violated ObamaCare's statutory text.

The law says that businesses with 50 or more full-time employees will face the employer mandate on Jan. 1, 2014. President Obama changed that, granting a one-year waiver to employers. How did he do so? Not by going to Congress to change the text of the law, but through a blog post by an assistant secretary at Treasury announcing the change.

The law says that only Americans who have access to state-run exchanges will be subject to employer penalties and may obtain ObamaCare premium subsidies. This was done to entice the states to create exchanges. But, when 34 states decided not to establish state-run exchanges, the Obama administration announced that the statutory words "established by State" would also mean "established by the federal government."

The law says that members of Congress and their staffs' health coverage must be an ObamaCare exchange plan, which would prevent them from receiving their current federal-employee health subsidies, just like millions of Americans who can't receive such benefits. At the behest of Senate Democrats, the Obama administration instead granted a special exemption (deeming "individual" plans to be "group" plans) to members of Congress and their staffs so they could keep their pre-existing health subsidies.

Most strikingly, when over five million Americans found their health insurance plans canceled because ObamaCare made their plans illegal—despite the president's promise "if you like your plan, you can keep it"—President Obama simply held a news conference where he told private insurance companies to disobey the law and issue plans that ObamaCare regulated out of existence.

In other words, rather than go to Congress and try to provide relief to the millions who are hurting because of the "train wreck" of ObamaCare (as one Senate Democrat put it), the president instructed private companies to violate the law and said he would in effect give them a get-out-of-jail-free card—for one year, and one year only. Moreover, in a move reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's looking-glass world, President Obama simultaneously issued a veto threat if Congress passed legislation doing what he was then ordering.

In the more than two centuries of our nation's history, there is simply no precedent for the White House wantonly ignoring federal law and asking private companies to do the same. As my colleague Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa asked, "This was the law. How can they change the law?"

Similarly, 11 state attorneys general recently wrote a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying that the continuing changes to ObamaCare are "flatly illegal under federal constitutional and statutory law." The attorneys general correctly observed that "the only way to fix this problem-ridden law is to enact changes lawfully: through Congressional action."

In the past, when Republican presidents abused their power, many Republicans—and the press—rightly called them to account. Today many in Congress—and the press—have chosen to give President Obama a pass on his pattern of lawlessness, perhaps letting partisan loyalty to the man supersede their fidelity to the law.

But this should not be a partisan issue. In time, the country will have another president from another party. For all those who are silent now: What would they think of a Republican president who announced that he was going to ignore the law, or unilaterally change the law? Imagine a future president setting aside environmental laws, or tax laws, or labor laws, or tort laws with which he or she disagreed.

posted January 30, 2014 12:26 PM            

As to Obama "whining" that evabody hates him cos he's black, he also said some people like him cos he's black, and that is racist too. I don't think he is talking about people in general but the antagonistic propaganda used against him. But you are entitled to stand solid in your belief that there is no racism in America if it makes you happy.

If you don't know there's some bad smelling substance in the Bush Executive Orders, you shouldn't have brought them up to offset criticism of the Marxist Messiah's unconstitutional actions in bypassing Congress and acting like a banana republic dictator.

Antagonistic propaganda is not being used against the Marxist Messiah by me or elected Republicans. Everything I've said about O'Bomber is true, it's factual and what he's done and is doing is on the public record for you O'Bomber Kook-Aid drinkers to see for yourselves...if you were interested in the truth.

Further, I don't know any republicans who attack the Marxist Messiah because he's black. More blither, blather, bloviation and bullshiiit.

posted January 30, 2014 04:51 PM            

I came back to GU to see if I could go away.

This whole thread is a bunch of nonsense. There is no "imperial" Presidency. There isn't even a legitimate question there. Just a rhetorical stunt designed to incite more anti-Obama-ness in the populous.

posted January 30, 2014 08:00 PM            

So here's the Attorney General of the United States...the top law enforcement official of the federal government's Justice Dept admitting he can't find any reason why the Marxist Messiah unilaterally rewriting the O'BomberCare law is constitutional. Quite an admission.

January 30, 2014
Holder Fail: AG can't explain why Obamacare executive orders are constitutional
Thomas Lifson

Yesterday was a bad, bad day for the Attorney General of the United States. Senator Mike Lee twice asked Eric Holder to explain the constitutional basis of President Obama's executive orders suspending parts of Obamacare, and the AG fumbled badly, essentially claiming the dog ate his homework. Joel Gehrke of the Washington Examiner:

Attorney General Eric Holder couldn't explain the constitutional basis for executive orders such as President Obama's delay of the employer mandate because he hasn't read the legal analysis -- or at least, hasn't seen it in a long time.

"I'll be honest with you, I have not seen -- I don't remember looking at or having seen the analysis in some time, so I'm not sure where along the spectrum that would come," Holder replied when Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, asked him to explain the nature of Obama's constitutional power to delay the mandate.

Lee had based his question on a standard legal test, first described by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who said the president's authority to issue executive orders is strongest when he does so with the backing of Congress (category one), more dubious when he issues an order pertaining to a topic on which Congress has not passed a law (category two), and weakest when the executive order is "incompatible with a congressional command" (category three), to use Lee's paraphrase.

Holder assured Lee that Obama's team accounts for Jackson's three-part analysis, but said he couldn't use that test to explain in any detail what kind of authority the president wielded when he delayed the employer mandate.

This is a very serious matter. For a president to issue orders for which he has no constitutional authority is the gravest possible abuse of his office. And Holder's assurance that President Obama prefers to "work with Congress," and only issues executive orders when he can't get his way by "working with Congress," is itself outrageous. Congress has the power to enact legislation; the president does not. If Congress chooses not to enact a law that the president wants, that does not empower the president to legislate via executive order.

If Obama were not the first black president, and if the mainstream media were not in his camp, this would be impeachment fodder. But alas, equal justice for all is just a faint memory for the political establishment at this point in time. As Sen. Lee put it:

it is clear the president has "usurped an extraordinary amount of authority within the executive branch."

"This is not precedented," he concluded. "And I point to the unilateral delay, lawless delay in my opinion, of the employer mandate as an example of this. At a minimum, I think he owes us an explanation of what his legal analysis was."