Editor's Note:
This is a very important column. Read it carefully and ask yourself two questions:
1 Does this column describe the situation accurately and
2.Do you approve of the direction the column says that Mr. Obama is going or do you disapprove?
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PULL QUOTE:
The
U.S. has a system of checks and balances. Mr. Obama is rebalancing the
system toward a national-leader model that is alien to the American
tradition.
To
create public support for so much unilateral authority, Mr. Obama needs
to lessen support for the other two branches of government—Congress and
the judiciary. He is doing that.
Mr.
Obama and his supporters in the punditocracy are defending this
escalation by arguing that Congress is "gridlocked." But don't overstate
that low congressional approval rating. This is the one branch that
represents the views of all Americans. It's gridlocked because voters
are.
================================
If we learned anything about Barack Obama in his first term it is that when he starts repeating the same idea over and over, what's on his mind is something else.
The
first term's over-and-over subject was "the wealthiest 1%." Past some
point, people wondered why he kept beating these half-dead horses. After
the election, we knew. It was to propagandize the targeted voting base
that would provide his 4% popular-vote margin of victory—very young
voters and minorities. They believed. He won.
The
second-term over-and-over, elevated in his summer speech tour, is the
shafting of the middle class. But the real purpose here isn't the
speeches' parboiled proposals. It is what he says the shafting of the
middle class is forcing him to do. It is forcing him to "act"—to
undertake an unprecedented exercise of presidential power in domestic
policy-making. ObamaCare was legislated. In the second term, new law
will come from him.
Please
don't complain later that you didn't see it coming. As always, Mr.
Obama states publicly what his intentions are. He is doing that now.
Toward the end of his speech last week in Jacksonville, Fla., he said:
"So where I can act on my own, I'm going to act on my own. I won't wait
for Congress." (Applause.)
The
July 24 speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., has at least four
references to his intent to act on his own authority, as he interprets
it: "That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle
class, I'll use it." (Applause.) And: "We're going to do everything we
can, wherever we can, with or without Congress."
Every
president since George Washington has felt frustration with the
American system's impediments to change. This president is done with
Congress.
The
political left, historically inclined by ideological belief to public
policy that is imposed rather than legislated, will support Mr. Obama's
expansion of authority. The rest of us should not.
The
U.S. has a system of checks and balances. Mr. Obama is rebalancing the
system toward a national-leader model that is alien to the American
tradition.
To
create public support for so much unilateral authority, Mr. Obama needs
to lessen support for the other two branches of government—Congress and
the judiciary. He is doing that.
Mr.
Obama and his supporters in the punditocracy are defending this
escalation by arguing that Congress is "gridlocked." But don't overstate
that low congressional approval rating. This is the one branch that
represents the views of all Americans. It's gridlocked because voters
are.
Take
a closer look at the Galesburg and Jacksonville speeches. Mr. Obama
doesn't merely criticize Congress. He mocks it repeatedly. Washington
"ignored" problems. It "made things worse." It "manufactures" crises and
"phony scandals." He is persuading his audiences to set Congress aside
and let him act.
So
too the judiciary. During his 2010 State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama
denounced the Supreme Court Justices in front of him. The National
Labor Relations Board has continued to issue orders despite two federal
court rulings forbidding it to do so. Attorney General Eric Holder says
he will use a different section of the Voting Rights Act to impose
requirements on Southern states that the Supreme Court ruled illegal.
Mr. Obama's repeated flouting of the judiciary and its decisions are
undermining its institutional authority, as intended.
The
three administration nominees enabled by the Senate's filibuster
deal—Richard Cordray at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Thomas
Perez at the Labor Department and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy—open a
vast swath of American life to executive authority on steroids. There
won't be enough hours in the day for Mr. Obama to "act on my own."
In
a recent Journal op-ed, "Obama Suspends the Law," former federal judge
Michael McConnell noted there are few means to stop a president who
decides he is not obligated to execute laws as passed by Congress. So
there's little reason to doubt we'll see more Obamaesque dismissals of
established law, as with ObamaCare's employer mandate. Mr. Obama is
pushing in a direction that has the potential for a political crisis.
A
principled opposition would speak out. Barack Obama is right that he
isn't running again. But the Democratic Party is. Their Republican
opponents should force the party's incumbents to defend the president's
creeping authoritarianism.
If
Democratic Senate incumbents or candidates from Louisiana, Alaska,
Missouri, Arkansas, North Carolina, Montana and Iowa think voters should
accede to a new American system in which a president forces laws into
place as his prerogative rather than first passing them through
Congress, they should be made to say so.
And to be sure, the other purpose
of the shafted middle-class tour is to demolish the GOP's standing with
independent voters and take back the House in 2014. If that happens—and
absent a more public, aggressive Republican voice it may—an unchecked,
unbalanced presidential system will finally arrive.
A
final quotation on America's system of government: "To ensure that no
person or group would amass too much power, the founders established a
government in which the powers to create, implement, and adjudicate laws
were separated. Each branch of government is balanced by powers in the
other two coequal branches." Source: The White House website of
President Barack Obama.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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