In short, the Constitution's checks and balances -- which were specifically intended to prevent a would-be oligarch from amassing too much power -- have been shredded by Obama. And that's not what I say; it's what a progressive magazine informs us with some measure of pride.
The Old Obama had pledged to usher in a golden age of bipartisan cooperation, then spent the first two and a half years of his tenure trying to meet the opposition in the middle. But the New Obama was fed up. Disillusioned. And he was done letting Congress stonewall his agenda.
...According to one participant, there was a recognition that the time had come to consider an audacious new governing strategy: what could Obama do without Congress?
Eleven months later, on June 15, 2012, the president strode into the Rose Garden to make an announcement. For the last five years, congressional Republicans had been blocking the DREAM Act: a bill designed to provide a conditional pathway to citizenship for immigrants who were brought to America illegally as children. Pressed by Latino advocates to take action, Obama had spent 2011 repeating that “we are doing everything we can administratively” because “this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is not true.” But now the president was doing something that he’d previously deemed impossible, and that Congress had repeatedly forbidden...
...Barack Obama’s decision to reverse himself on the DREAM Act was not an isolated incident. Instead, it was the culmination of a dramatic and very deliberate makeover... that is poised to play a significant part in a potential second term, according to his advisers. “The president’s hope is that he and Congress get another opportunity to work together, and they see the folly in their efforts to date,” says Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “But what he’s not going to do, if Congress refuses to act, is sit on the sidelines and do nothing. That’s the path he’s taken.”
It is a transformation that could forever alter the way Washington works... Obama is drafting a playbook for future presidents to deploy in response: How to Get What You Want Even If Congress Won’t Give It to You. “Obama is the first president to use his unilateral powers so routinely, especially in the domestic sphere,” says University of Virginia presidential scholar Sidney Milkis, a self-described moderate Democrat. “And in some ways, that may be more insidious than what came before.”
...“Where Obama is different from all of his predecessors is that in the domestic arena, he has decided that his views trump both houses of Congress,” says constitutional lawyer Michael Carvin, who served in Reagan’s Justice Department and blames Obama’s legal philosophy for his new unilateral approach. “Liberal law professors use the Constitution to enforce their own policy preferences in an undemocratic way, and that’s exactly what Obama is doing here.”
Ladies and gentlemen, we are truly at a fork in the road.
On one path lies a return to a lawful, Constitutional Republic. On the other lies a slow descent into tyranny and a failed society. In fact, the latter path is the same fate that has befallen so many societies before us, in which leaders without virtue were corrupted by ambition and greed.
We have a simple choice in November. Which road will you choose?
No comments:
Post a Comment