George Will: Obama's Abuses of the Law and Constitution Worse Than Nixon's

Indeed, and not forsooth.

[A]t last week’s news conference [Obama] offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.

Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”

He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. . . . It looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”

...

In a 1977 interview with Richard Nixon, David Frost asked: “Would you say that there are certain situations . . . where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation . . . and do something illegal?”

Nixon: “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Frost: “By definition.”

Nixon: “Exactly, exactly.”

Nixon’s claim, although constitutionally grotesque, was less so than the claim implicit in Obama’s actions regarding the ACA. Nixon’s claim was confined to matters of national security or (he said to Frost) “a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude.” Obama’s audacity is more spacious; it encompasses a right to disregard any portion of any law pertaining to any subject at any time when the political “environment” is difficult.

Obama should be embarrassed that, by ignoring the legal requirement concerning the employer mandate, he has validated critics who say the ACA cannot be implemented as written. What does not embarrass him is his complicity in effectively rewriting the ACA for the financial advantage of self-dealing members of Congress and their staffs.

...

If the president does it, it’s legal? “Exactly, exactly.”

I can't quote the whole thing so just Read the Whole Thing. The part about Congressional staffs -- Obama has now, by executive lawmaking power hitherto unknown -- undone the provision that Congressmen and their staffs would be subject to the law just as any citizen. That was a major concession required to get this thing passed (barely) -- and here is now undoing it, by resort to his purported ability to "tweak" the law so long as he does not change its "essence."

I will say again: Obama by his own actions has declared that this law may be changed in part or in whole by unilateral executive action. We will remember.

The media continues to not be interested at all in this major unilateral change to the Constitution.

Instapundit has more, including this column by Donald Sensing. Sensing thinks the law is now essentially a nullity.

Obama decides what the law is, and when, and if.

Obama can do this not because the Constitution or law authorize it. Most definitely they actually prohibit it. He is getting away with it because there is no one who can stop him and almost no one who wants to stop him. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, in the Democrat party is in the slightest interested in reining in Obama's expansion of executive diktat because they know what few of the rest of us are awakening to: the Democrats are never going to lose that executive authority again. Let me be clear, with a promise to elucidate another day: there is never going to be another Republican president. Ever.

Well that's chilling.

But then, not to keep sounding like a communist, but every corrupt system contains the seeds of its own destruction.

So we've got that going for us.

D'Oh! Austin in Texas writes:

Reading the comments on the Washington Post site is hilarious.

"How dare you compare Nixon and Obama?! Obama never bugged his opponents!"

It's like they're actively avoiding reality instead of ignoring it.

They've been trained to their whole lives. They've been taught that doing so constitutes virtue and intelligence.

They now deny reality as part of their involuntary reflex system -- the same way you can't help but read words placed in front of you. You don't choose to read anymore; the brain is conditioned to make words out of squiggles automatically, in background.

posted by Ace at 02:11 PM

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