6:00pm: Sportsline with Tony Caridi

The Imperial Presidency

President Obama’s executive action last week shielding more than four million illegal immigrants from deportation is the latest unilateral act by a White House that is further advancing an imperial presidency.

Ross Douthat, writing in the New York Times, said Obama “has been much more aggressive than Bush in his use of executive power to pursue major domestic policy goals—on education, climate change, health care and now most sweepingly on immigration.”

What has prompted this slide toward monarchy and away from a constitutional republic?   Douthat says there are three reasons:

First, the public has come to expect a “single iconic figure into whom desires and aspirations and hatreds can be poured.”  Second, the Congress’ growing partisanship reduces the opportunity for compromise, thus forcing the hand of the President.  Third, Presidents increasingly have growing ambitions to be transformative.

It would be unfair to project what the late Senator Robert C. Byrd would have said about President Obama’s executive action on immigration, but it’s worth noting that Byrd was a staunch defender of the separation of powers.

For example, Byrd fought vehemently against a 1996 law giving the President line-item veto power over the budget.   When President Clinton—a fellow Democrat—used the authority to strike $287 million in planned military construction projects, including funding for an Army National Guard facility at Camp Dawson, West Virginia, Byrd fumed.

“We don’t live under a king in this country,” Byrd is quoted as saying in his autobiography, Child of the Appalachian Coalfields, “and I don’t propose ever to live under a king.”

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the line-item veto in 1998.  Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “This act gives the president unilateral power to change the text of duly enacted statues.”

President Obama’s executive order on immigration is even more egregious because there’s been no Congressional authority extended.   The Senate and the House of Representatives pass laws and the President is required by the Constitution to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Part of the Obama administration’s argument is that previous Presidents have taken similar action.  That’s hardly a compelling case.  It’s tantamount to saying, “others have violated the separation of powers, so I can too.”

But beyond that, the Washington Post says Obama is just plain wrong.  The Post gave White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest Four Pinocchios in their Fact Checker column for saying that George H.W. Bush expanded protections to 1.5 million illegals.

The Founders, in their great wisdom, created an equal balance among the three branches. That concept was forged out of fear of the abusive power of England’s monarchy.  We’ve guarded that balance judiciously over the years, but we now find ourselves tilting too far toward the chief executive, who seems more than willing to use the power.

 





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