Excited by power, Obama ignores legal restraints

(in other words, he's forsaken his oath as president; choosing to rule rather than govern)

--by Timothy P. Carney, May 22, 2011
The Washington Examiner

Excerpts:

President Obama launched a U.S. war in Libya two months ago with no congressional approval. Under the Constitution and under the War Powers Act, which allows the president to wage defensive wars for up to 60 days without prior approval, Obama probably broke the law.

Now that 60 days have passed since the United States joined the hostilities, Obama's war is more clearly illegal. But nobody should expect this to matter to a president with a long record of disregarding legal and constitutional limits on presidential and federal power.

The same media that pulled out every stop to vilify President Bush, bends over contortionist-like to condone his every flouting and affront to the constitution.

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.

...

Obamacare's linchpin -- a federal requirement that every person buy and hold health insurance -- is a fine example of Obama's disdain for the notion of enumerated powers. The administration's lawyers have their constitutional defenses in court, but those arguments are more semantical than sincere. The telltale is the blatant contradiction between the politicians' claims (it's not a tax!) and the lawyers' claims (it's only a tax!).

This list is just the tip of the iceberg. What's worse is the glaring hypocrisy of the Left...

It's not just the administration. Disdain for constitutional limits on federal power is widespread on the Left. The derogatory term "Tenther" was coined in 2009 (invoking the "birther" conspiracy theory that Obama is not an American citizen) to mock those conservatives and libertarians who want more deference to the 10th Amendment's declaration that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Advocating stricter adherence of the Constitution will get you called racist. Al Gore once said, in effect, that a "strict constructionist" is someone who sees blacks as three-fifths of a person.

This is the tool most often used by the Left; mock the opposition as being unreasonable or uncaring, and generate negative public opinion against it based on perception; in short, apply Alinksy Rule 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

The truth, however, is that the only way liberals can build themselves up (and their desire for a "just" society) is by tearing others down. See Liberal Truth #21.

A liberal can't consistently argue fact. A few will fall into his lap on occasion, but he will swiftly turn to personal attacks the moment his arguments give way beneath him. A liberal cannot see any truth that goes against his ideological grain. Such truths are swiftly absorbed, focus-grouped, polled, and reshaped to their own vision, design, and purpose.

Which is why the media, the Left, and Liberals in general can't see the truth of Obama. To repudiate Obama, on even so small a thing as the War Powers Act, would be to admit they are not the paragons of virtue they'd have us believe. They would have to admit that they are tainted. And no liberal can tolerate his ersatz halo to be seen as anything other than the real deal.

Obama is the worst president in modern history. Period. The most brazenly anti-constitutional, the most unapologetically anti-America.

No true-blue liberal will ever admit the truth of this. Say hello to Liberal Truth #2.