Who Needs Congress?

According to the New York Times, sometime last fall Obama decided to use presidential power more aggressively – even unconstitutionally – to overcome what he perceived to be the infirmities of a gridlocked Congress. No matter that during the first two years of his kingly reign he had bullet-proof majorities in both houses of Congress when he frittered away a golden window of opportunity to set the country on a sound economic path. Instead he consumed two years and political capital making sausage in an ill-starred effort to hijack the largest and most sophisticated healthcare system in the world – a project that earned him few kudos and which only barely survived constitutionality by Alice in Wonderland judicial logic.

Projecting a “man on the move” image in a catchy slogan, Obama decided that he would push the presidential power envelope for the last two years of his reign under the aegis of “We Can’t Wait.” Every time Congress would divert from his timetable to engage in posturing for their constituency or devote energy to ideological repartee, Obama would begin looking for ways to do an end run in order to comport with his new “man of action” persona. No matter that his by-passing Congress caused the Framers of the Constitution to spin in their graves when he did violence to the document that has guided American governance for almost 225 years. Obama warned, “If Congress refuses to act, I’ve said that I’ll continue to do everything in my power to act without them” – a power conspicuously unstated in the Constitution.

I wrote at length in an earlier blog about Obama’s constitutional abuses, but it’s worth restating that the genius of the Founders’ design of divided government was to make it difficult to get things done. Therefore, citizens and politicians who wring their hands and bemoan the “gridlock” in Washington are obviously ignorant that gridlock was a design feature in order to entangle in debate the abuses the Founders knew future Congresses and Presidents would heap upon the backs of citizens.

Nevertheless wrapping himself in the mantle of the “man of the people,” Obama pronounced with Solonic virtue:

Without a doubt, the most urgent challenge that we face right now is getting our economy to grow faster and to create more jobs…. we can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will.

Yet clueless about how jobs are created and how an economy grows, he pushed a Socialist big-government command and control agenda for Congress to enact that even members of his own caucus scoffed at. Without term limits, Congress is loath to jeopardize its reelection chances by moving to the left of the people as the President would have them do – a lesson Congress recently learned by the disappearance of Pelosi’s Kool-Aid drinkers in the 2010 election. There was no way for Obama to get the money needed to finance his highway-schools jobs bill without Congress, so that idea thankfully went nowhere.

He was more successful by-passing Congress in getting his cronies in key government positions to help enact elements of his radical agenda. The first step was to neutralize the constitutional “advise and consent” role of the Senate by simply calling some key positions “czars,” allowing their appointment without a Senate confirmation process.

As for those appointees who couldn’t forego Senate confirmation and who got stalled in the process, Presidents have been known to wait until Congress goes on a break, during which he appoints their guy in a recess appointment. In one case, Obama didn’t even give Congress a chance to stall his nominee. He picked Donald Berwick and gave him a recess appointment to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services even as Congress was preparing to hear his confirmation justification. Berwick was among the most controversial candidates Obama could have put forward, and when he learned the congressional dossier was incriminating, Obama decided a “dead of night” recess appointment was the only way Berwick would become Administrator, albeit temporarily.

But Obama doesn’t always wait for the Senate to leave town in order to make a recess appointment. Last winter, Republicans held brief but legitimate Senate sessions for the express purpose of preventing His Majesty from making recess appointments. He made them anyway. Obama appointed Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Board and three others to the National Labor Relations Board. He didn’t do it legally; but given his status as Maximum Leader, he simply declared the Senate pro forma sessions a Republican sham and handed down his verdict that the Senate was not in session. Obama had spoken.

Anyone with an IQ above room temperature should understand that independent bodies in divided government set their own rules of procedure and no other independent body may violate them. Harry Reid developed pro forma sessions to an art form during the administration of Bush 43 to prevent him from circumventing confirmation hearings to make recess appointments. However, Reid was remarkably silent when Obama ridiculed the tactic and brushed aside the rules of the chamber that Reid is in charge of as the Democrat Majority Leader. You’d think Reid would take umbrage with Obama’s interference. By trivializing Senate rules, Obama trivialized Senate relevance and Senate integrity, not to mention Reid himself – something the slow-witted Reid never comprehended.

In announcing the recess appointment of Cordray and the three NLRB members, Obama threw down the gauntlet at the feet of Congress and standing under a “We Can’t Wait” banner, officious declared,

… when Congress refuses to act and – as a result – hurts our economy and puts people at risk, I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them. [Where is that in the Constitution?] I’ve got an obligation to act on behalf of the American people. And I’m not going to stand by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people that we were elected to serve. [Where is that in the Constitution?] Not with so much at stake, not at this make-or-break moment for middle-class Americans. We’re not going to let that happen. I refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer. [Where is that in the Constitution?]

The 55 men who met in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 to design our government required even the most mundane appointments of the President to have the approval of the Senate. The purpose was to assure the President didn’t have a free hand to put his cronies in power without oversight. If a President couldn’t get the Senate to approve his nominee, even a qualified nominee, he simply was not appointed and the President submitted another candidate. No trickery to by-pass the will of the Senate was employed in the early days of the Republic. Here’s why.

Article II, Section 2, paragraph 3 of the Constitution says:

The President shall have power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

In the days before cell phones and email, it was essential for the President to fill offices that became vacant in order to keep the offices of the government running. But pay close attention to what the Constitution says “… vacancies that may happen DURING THE RECESS …” If the vacancy occurred during congressional recess, there was no practical way to call the Senate back into session, many of whom were on their farms and would have to spend weeks or months of travel returning to Washington. So the Constitution provided for temporary appointments that expired at the end of the session, restoring the Senate’s authority to approve the appointment.

The vacancy filled by Berwick and Obama’s four other people did not occur during recess. They occurred before recess and Obama waited until the Senate was out of town, in the case of Berwick. However, the Senate was never out of town, according to its rules, when Obama recessed Cordray and others, but he appointed them anyway – illegally.

Obama has ignored the constitutional role of Congress in other ways.

Without the authorization of Congress, he increased the regulation of greenhouse emissions when no provision of the law authorized him to do so. He unilaterally waived the No Child Left Behind Law for two dozen states because he grew tired of waiting for Congress to revise the law’s requirements. Another dozen states have pending waivers.

As discussed in last week’s blog, Obama unilaterally enacted the provisions of the DREAM bill because Congress had failed to pass it into law. In effect, Obama said “I’m going to act as if the bill became law and act accordingly.” He is both President and Congress.

In February 2011, Obama issued an Executive Order instructing the DOJ to suspend enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act. It is federal law and bars recognition of same-sex marriages on constitutional grounds. He once advocated DOMA, but when polling showed his support was working against him, his thinking “evolved” [his term] into opposition to DOMA and he unilaterally subverted the will of Congress.

Earlier this month Obama illegally waived the work requirement of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families legislation which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Absent the work requirement, welfare rolls predictably began to swell. Already there are a record number of American receiving food stamps.

Throughout his presidency, Obama has shown disdain toward the constitutional restraints on his inclination to act as a monarch, not an elected head of a republican government. He wants to limit our salt and fat intake, dictate our medical treatments, and outlaw incandescent light bulbs to manage our energy consumption, and require school children to get a minimum amount of physical activity. His meddling in individual choice is what makes him such a dangerous threat to individual liberty. Earlier this year, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) delivered a series of floor speeches accusing Obama of acting “more and more like a king that the Constitution was designed to replace” and implored colleagues of both parties to push back against his “power grabs.” Have you seen anything to suggest our elected congressional members took any of Grassley’s comments to heart? I haven’t.

Nowhere has Obama’s imperial presidency showed its colors so completely than in its interference in state attempts to purge voter rolls of illegal voters. You’d think that Democrats would be as concerned as Republicans to have voter rolls accurate. Not so in the swing states where Latinos make a sizable block of voters, some illegally – Florida (15%), Texas (20%), Arizona (16%), Colorado (13%), California (18%), Nevada (15%). and New Mexico (41%).

With Florida Governor Scott working to clean up his rolls – along with Governors of other states – Attorney General Holder asked the Senate Judiciary Committee, “Do we want to be the first generation to restrict the ability of American citizens to vote? Huh? Cleaning up voter rolls is restricting American citizens from voting. Holder went on, “We have a bad history in that regard . . .”

Well then let’s start having a good history in that regard – like purging illegals from the rolls.

By national law (aka Motor Voter Law) Governor Scott is required to, “systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters. This is for purposes of “ensur[ing] that accurate and current voter registration rolls are maintained.” It doesn’t get any plainer than that, does it?

Yet the federal government is growing increasingly bolder in interfering with state elections that don’t go “their” way – like the 2000 debacle in Palm Beach County Florida, land of “hanging chads,” where poll officials claimed voters planned to vote for Candidate X but the ballot looked like they were voting for Candidate Y and the voters got so confused they didn’t vote for either guy. What followed were armies of fools peering through magnifying glasses at dimpled chads attempting to augur the will of allegedly confused voters so the poll captains could cast the vote for the candidate with the deepest dimple. Federal interference in the Florida 2000 election became the butt of Saturday Night Live jokes, making the residents of Palm Beach County appear incapable of following the instructions of a “paint by the numbers” assignment.

Notwithstanding Eric Holder’s inane comments of restricting voter rights, when Florida voting officials compared voter lists with the Social Security Death Index (you go to jail if you continue to receive Social Security checks after the payee is dead) guess what? They found that 51,308 registered voters had inconveniently died but were registered to vote. Wonder how many kept voting? Can you still vote in “life after death”?

Foolishly thinking the federal government might have an interest in helping clean up illegal voting, Florida asked Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security for a copy of its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) national citizenship database. Everyone knows Janet Napolitano wants to do the right thing, right? Yeah, sure. Homeland Security dragged its feet in Florida’s request, as well as requests from Colorado, Michigan, and North Carolina. Ken Detzner the Secretary of State for Florida has nine months of emails that prove conclusively the Obama’s DHS has no intention of providing information that would purge criminals and illegals from voter rolls. Why? You guess.

So Detzner said, “Hey, why don’t we compare drivers’ license rolls to voter rolls – it’s not an optimum solution, but what the heck, drivers’ licenses contain citizenship information, so let’s see what it reveals.” Lo and behold, a side by side match showed 182,000 illegal were registered voters. That’s what Janet Napolitano and Obama were hiding.

To be fair, some of the people who were illegal when they got licenses, obtained legal status afterward. So let’s cull those out. SAVE could have made this easier, but Napolitano wasn’t into helping states purge voter rolls. Without the help of SAVE, this was a big job, so a statistically-significant sample of 2,600 random names were drawn from the 186,000 possible aliens and criminals who were on the voter rolls of Florida. The sample showed 500 (19%) had become naturalized, 104 (4%) were alien illegal voters of whom 56 (2%) had feloniously voted. If this sample was extrapolated to the universe of 186,000 then 7,280 were illegally registered and 3,920 voted illegally – which is a felony.

But 3,920 illegal votes aren’t that many, some would argue. Well, maybe not in Chicago, but one illegal vote is one too many outside of Obama’s home town. Consider once again a repeat of the charade of the 2000 Florida election which was so close that for days the news photos showed bug-eyed poll judges staring through magnifying glasses looking for the slightest evidence that Palm Beach County residents got confused when candidate names and lines pointing to his punch holes didn’t line up within one angstrom unit. Bush won by 537 votes. (Subsequent vote counts showed a wider margin.) But given an election as close at that one, should we be concerned about 3,920 illegal votes? I think so.

Instead of helping Florida and the other states clean up their election rolls, Obama unleashed his attack dog, Eric Holder, to sue the states to prevent their compliance with federal election laws. Obama said Florida’s statewide voter roll purge violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act, even though only five of Florida’s 67 counties are affected by the 1965 Act. Detzner explained: “As for the role of the supervisors of elections in Florida’s five covered counties, they are simply administering a law that the Department of Justice has duly pre-cleared. Darn those facts! They’re always getting in the way of politics.

So as its next trick, Holder said Florida can’t clean its voter roll within 90 days of a federal election, which excludes clearing rolls within 90 days of the August 14 congressional primary. Let’s see … the November 6 election is within 90 days of the August 14 primary, which is within 90 days of July 4, which comes within 90 days of Valentine’s Day, which is within 90 days of Christmas. I got it! No voter roll cleanup is possible since The Flood. Noah, did you get that?

This led Secretary of State Detzner to write to DOJ:

The practice DOJ now appears to be endorsing is as follows: the federal Department of Homeland Security may, for months, violate federal law and deny Florida and other states access to the SAVE database so that the federal Department of Justice may then assert that the resulting delays in a state’s election-integrity efforts violate the time periods established in another federal law.

Immigration sideshows recently launched by Obama are intended to help Obama, not immigrants. What Obama really wants from you Spanish-speakers is your vote, not your well-being.

The sooner you wake up and realize that, the sooner you and all of us can tell the candidates for President, Congress, or dog-catcher that we are citizens, not votes, and they’d best begin treating us as citizens or start looking for a real job – one that requires work, not periodically showing up for a sound bite or photo op.