The post on Friday regarding Obama’s lawlessness has generated some furious defense of Obama by one commenter, and even more furious pushback by other readers, An increasingly dangerous presidency.
The defense of Obama, that no court has found him to have violated the law, is both wrong and off point.
The problem with Obama is the completely political basis for his decisions whether to honor or ignore the law. For example, if granting a waiver helps him with political allies, he grants it; if not, not.
This is not the rule of law, or the good faith exercise of administrative discretion, it is the use of discretion for political purposes. That in many, but not all, instances he can get away with it because of the separation of powers and the hesitancy of the judiciary to get involved in administrative decisions in no way justifies the conduct.
Lawlessness includes a lack of predictability to enforcement of the law, and that is what we have in this administration.
The prior post was based on Charles Krauthammer’s column on lawlessness of the Obama administration.
Here Krauthammer expands on his point, via RCP:
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I’m talking about how the administration, particularly the president, seems to think that he has right to change duly passed statutes on his own, or to suspend whole parts of laws on his own. I mean, the constitution pretty clear, the president executes the law and the Congress passes the laws. So, for example, a few months ago Obama decided that he wanted to suspend, to postpone the employer mandate of his own law of Obamacare. You’re not allowed to do that. You have got to change the law in Congress if you want to do it. And he did it without hesitation.A year ago, he did some recess appointments, you are allowed to do it if the Senate isn’t in session. The problem was the Senate was in session, and the courts have so ruled. This is a very cavalier attitude. But the worst part was what happened a couple of weeks ago when the president was really stunned by the fact that there were all these cancellations of insurance policies. So you remember he held a press conference a couple weeks ago, and he told the insurers to reinstate the policies. There is only one problem with that.The policies were cancelled because under Obama’s own healthcare law it is illegal to issue a policy after the year 2013 unless it contains, these minimal requirements, these 10 elements that it has to have. For example, maternity care and all other stuff. So if you had a policy that was canceled, it’s because it did not satisfactory the minimumSo there is no way that an insurer can reinstate a [plan] because it would be illegal to do it. So obama’s own law is something that he ignores and he encourages insurers and state insurance commissioners to allow it to be violated. And the way he has been doing this, it’s sort of the cavalier attitude that I find absolutely astonishing.
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