Why Barack Obama Doesn't Care About The Law

By Donald Sensing

 

Understand that this federal court ruling means exactly nothing.

 

Does this ruling bind this president from doing what he wants to do? Of course not. No one in America has both the power and the determination to hinder Obama from doing whatever he wants.

As I was discussing Obama's totalist ideology this week with a relative, I pointed out that Obama could ask a parallel question of the federal courts that Josef Stalin asked when it was suggested to him that he should treat Russian Catholics better to gain favor with the Pope as the Nazi threat loomed: "The Pope!" Stalin exclaimed. "How many divisions has he got?"

And so with President Obama and federal courts' rulings: they have no means of enforcing their rulings. As any intemperate two-year old knows, you can do anything you want until someone compels you to stop. And so Obama can order whatever he wishes until he is compelled to stop.

The courts lacks the means of such compulsion. That leaves the Congress to rein in the executive. (Please excuse me while I erupt in peals of derisive laughter.) Congress's only authority to rein in a president consists of two things:

• Withhold funding for departments and agencies under executive authority, or
• Impeach him. 

That's it. (In 1834, the Congress voted to censure President Andrew Jackson. Jackson correctly declared that there was no Constitutional authority for it and basically told the Congress they could either impeach him or get stuffed, although he put it a little more pithily.)

Since those are the only two options available, and since the Congress is controlled by the Democrats (the Republican majority in the House meaning nothing here), neither loss of funding nor impeachment will ever be used to restrain this president.

The goal of the entire Democrat party is to be the permanent, sole political authority in the country. This is the actual transformation that Barack Obama promised to great applause in his 2008 campaign. And we are getting transformed good and hard:

[I]nstead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party. Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about.

 

Obama can do this not because the Constitution or law authorize it. Most definitely they actually prohibit it. He is getting away with it because there is no one who can stop him and almost no one who wants to stop him. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, in the Democrat party is in the slightest interested in reining in Obama's expansion of executive diktat because they know what few of the rest of us are awakening to: the Democrats are never going to lose that executive authority again. Let me be clear, with a promise to elucidate another day: there is never going to be another Republican president. Ever.

The media will not examine Obama's imperialist manner because they do not want to. They agree with it. The courts are literally unable to enforce their rulings contra this administration; Obama ignores them at will and without consequence. The Republicans are dominated by the Political Class and lack the numbers, influence, collective will and ideological conviction to rein in the administration even if they had the ability to do so, which they don't.

For example, immigration:

...after Congress had unequivocally rejected another piece of immigration reform, the so-called DREAM Act, that the president had supported, he simply instituted it unilaterally, as though he had the authority to declare an amnesty himself. He then did away with criminal-background checks for those to be amnestied, also on his own authority.

 

This is a president who knows that he does not need to make anyone "happy," that there in fact is no political base that must be appeased or pleased - where else will the base go? The president of the United States is now quite literally a dictate-er: he orders what he wishes and implements what he chooses.

There is no check or balance any longer, not even the Congress's power to control the federal purse. There is no federal purse to control. There are only years-long series of continuing resolutions and special appropriations, all funded with trillions of dollars of borrowed fiat money that no creditor anywhere in the world expects will be repaid. President Obama has a government credit card with no debt limit. The power to spend is the power to control, and that is what he is doing.

 

Update: George Will, "Obama’s unconstitutional steps worse than Nixon’s"