Timothy P. Carney
Washington Examiner
5/22/2011
…Presidential arrogation of power is nothing new. President George W. Bush’s lawyer John Yoo declared in a post-9/11 memo that no congressional “statute …. can place any limits on the president’s determinations” about how to fight terrorism, proclaiming such decisions “are for the president alone to make.”
But Barack Obama ran against this imperial mind-set. On war powers, he said, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
More broadly, he declared, “No more ignoring the law when it’s inconvenient. That is not who we are. . . . . We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers.”
Now that he’s president, Obama apparently believes the inverse: Stubborn rulers should not be subject to the whims of the law…
…Obama in 2009 threw out bankruptcy law and precedent when he handed ownership of Chrysler to his political patrons, the United Auto Workers, publicly and privately threatening the creditors who objected.
Obama’s National Labor Relations Board has gotten in the game by blocking Boeing from making its jets at its new factory in South Carolina.
This administration regularly flouts and bends its own ethics rules. Lobbyists fresh from Google and Goldman Sachs came to the White House and helped craft policies directly affecting their former employers — sometimes in concert with their old lobbyist colleagues. H&R Block’s chief executive officer joined the administration and drafted tax-preparation regulations that help H&R Block.
More importantly, Obama seems to regard the Constitution’s limits as quaint. We see it in his rhetoric and his actions…
Read the complete article at the Washington Examiner.
Related: The Obama administration will challenge Indiana’s attempt to defund on abortion at Althouse.
