Obama's Constitutional Anarchy

In arrogant and king-like fashion, President Obama engaged in his weekly flagrant violation of the Constitution, not once but twice.

Kayleigh McEnany

Kayleigh McEnany

It’s just another Thursday – in arrogant and king-like fashion, President Obama engaged in his weekly flagrant violation of the Constitution, not once but twice.

Despite the advent of a new year, Obama is at it again. Just hours before the ball dropped in Times Square, ringing in a new year and spawning new beginnings, the Obama opted to stick with old habit. As Americans toasted to 2016, the administration quietly released a 200-page proposed rule that erases and rewrites federal immigration caps set by Congress. The proposed executive order would bypass statutory caps on the number of foreign nationals authorized to work in the United States, unilaterally increasing the number of eligible foreign workers and ultimately replacing the will of Congress with executive fiat.

Unfortunately for the President, ignorance of the law is simply no excuse here, especially in the realm of immigration. For if the former constitutional law professor needed a crash course in separation of powers, it was given to him in no uncertain terms by the Fifth Circuit. Just last month, the Fifth Circuit issued a preliminary injunction against Obama’s previous immigration executive orders, which granted de facto legal status to some five million undocumented immigrants, calling the orders “manifestly contrary” to the Immigration and Nationality Act.

But the President knew full well that his recently struck-down executive orders ran afoul of the Constitution even before the court’s injunction. This is why he publicly denied 22 times that he had the power to grant widespread legal status to millions of illegal immigrants.

We are left to conclude that this is not ignorance but indifference. The President knows that he tramples on the Constitution when he rewrites law or unilaterally repeals it, but the sad truth is that he simply does not care. One driving force will always take precedence over our Constitution, our structure of government, and even the well-being of the American people: the President’s utopian liberal agenda.

Whether it is immigration or climate change or Guantanamo or, more recently, gun control, none will halt at the outer limit of executive power. King Obama knows best, and his humble servants – the citizenry – must yield to the all-knowing, all-powerful whim of the Leviathan.

Sponsored

The prideful Leviathan pounded his fist again on Tuesday, this time on gun control, announcing, “Congress still needs to act…. But we also can’t wait.” Rather than honoring the will of Congress as expressed in the Brady Bill, Obama opted to just “reinterpret” the bill in a way that is inconsistent with congressional intent but effective in accomplishing his ideological goals.

The Brady Bill currently requires all who “engage in the business of… dealing in firearms” to attain a license and perform background checks on buyers. Exempt from this provision are small-scale transfers of arms, personal collection swaps, or any other exchange outside of a business context. Rather than honoring the two categories outlined in the statute, the President intends to robustly re-interpret the business category and effectively nullify the non-business category, thus subjecting nearly every purchaser to a background check.

Whatever you think of the efficacy of such a policy (never mind that this would not have stopped the Virginia Tech shooter, the Isla Vista shooter, the Gabby Giffords shooter, the Aurora theater shooter, the San Bernardino Islamic terrorists, and the list goes on), the means by which this policy was achieved were subversive and antithetical to the Constitution.

Responding to the President’s plan to take executive action, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said, “When Congress doesn’t act, that’s a decision legislatively taken by one branch of the government. The president can’t just act because Congress doesn’t act.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan reinforced this conclusion:

Sponsored

While we don’t yet know the details of the plan, the president is at minimum subverting the legislative branch, and potentially overturning its will… His proposals to restrict gun rights were debated by the United States Senate, and they were rejected. No president should be able to reverse legislative failure by executive fiat, not even incrementally. The American people deserve a president who will respect their constitutional right — all of them. This is a dangerous level of executive overreach, and the country will not stand for it.

But executive overreach has always been the stated modus operandi of the executive branch. Recall the President saying way back in 2012: “When Congress refuses to act, Joe and I are going to act.” And then in 2014: “We are not just going to wait for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone.”

Indeed, this is Obama’s intent for 2016: executive overreach on steroids. Politico reports that the administration has prepared some 4,000 regulations for his final year in office, “many costing industry more than $100 million.” As Politico’s Timothy Noah describes it, “The calendar says there are 13 months left in Barack Obama’s presidency. But when it comes to exercising executive power, it’s more like five.”

No matter what side of the aisle you find yourself on, we should all stand resolute against this kind of executive tyranny. For the liberal idealists who applauded Obama’s executive action this week, ask yourself this: would you likewise applaud a Republican President who attempted to override significant chunks of the Affordable Care Act via executive order? No, you would have a constitutional conniption. No end justifies the means of trampling upon our founding document and its ascribed process for creating law.

But like a petulant child whose mother takes his lollipop, Obama kicks and screams when Congress denies him his wish. The good news for the American people, however, is that King Obama’s efforts at sidestepping Article I have failed once. They will fail again. And again.


Kayleigh McEnany is a conservative writer and commentator who appears regularly on Fox and CNN. She is currently in the third year of pursuing her J.D. at Harvard Law School. Kayleigh graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and also studied politics at Oxford University. You can reach her by email at Kayleigh@PoliticalProspect.com or follow her on Twitter: @kayleighmcenany.