Obama promises to push beyond ‘executive authority’

July 25, 2013 by Joe Saunders 12 Comments and 0 Reactions

Does this president understand limits?
During a largely empty speech on the economy Wednesday (not even bootlicking USA Today thought it was front-page material in the print edition), President Obama vowed to use pretty much every power the Constitution gives him – and some it doesn’t – to have his way outside the democratic process.
“In this effort, I will look to work with Republicans as well as Democrats wherever I can. … But I will not allow gridlock, inaction, or willful indifference to get in our way,” Obama said at Knox College in Illinois, according to the Daily Caller.
“Whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it.”
(By the way, does anyone remember way back in 2009 when the then-new president appointed Vice President Joe Biden was appointed chairman of the White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families? There was a press release about it and everything. You can read it here. It even released its first annual report, back in 2010. There hasn’t been a second.)
The Daily Caller said it’s “unclear how Obama will push his economic plan through executive actions.”
But Obama made it pretty clear how he intends to try.
“Where I can’t act on my own, and Congress isn’t cooperating, I’ll pick up the phone and call CEOs, and philanthropists, and college presidents — anybody who can help — and enlist them in our efforts,” Obama said.
“Where I can’t act on my own” means when the constitutional limits on executive power have been pushed to the breaking point. “Congress isn’t cooperating” means pesky voters have elected representatives who don’t like the direction the president wants to take the country and are doing their duty to oppose it.
Obama is undeterred. He’ll call “CEOs, and philanthropists and college presidents” to get his way (though where the college presidents fit in is questionable).
That’s not democracy as practiced in the world’s oldest constitutional republic – and a former constitutional law professor should know that. That’s banana-republic thuggery.
But the end is in sight, as Obama himself noted when he said he wanted to spend “every minute of the 1,276 days remaining in my term” working to help the middle class.
That’s not so long now, is it?
Thank God – and the Republican Congress of 1947 – for the 22^nd Amendment.