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Under the Obama framework, the legislative branch is now being treated as little more than a debating society whose deliberations serve as footnotes to presidential action.
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| President Obama is a man for whom the founding legacy of the United States seems little more than a perpetual irritant.
This is the man, remember, who said on Chicago public radio in 2001 that one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that it didn’t move beyond the constitution’s limits on government power to “bring about redistributive change.”
This is the man who diminished the singular quality of the nation he governs by saying before an audience of international press, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."
This is the man who wrote “After all, if there was one impulse shared by all the Founders, it was a rejection of all forms of absolute authority ... Implicit ... was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or 'ism,' any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course ..." The founders, we can safely guess, might be surprised to hear that the idea of natural rights given by God should be taken as “a rejection of absolute truth.”
It should be less than shocking, then, that the president’s sagging poll numbers have combined with this disregard for the genius of the American system to produce a new campaign entitled “We Can’t Wait” – a plan of presidential action which sidesteps a combative Congress (elected overwhelmingly by the American people in 2010) to achieve Obama’s desired ends through executive orders and agency directives. He has already signed an executive order directing the FDA to investigate shortages of prescription drugs – a topic on which Congress has been deliberating throughout the year. Plans are also in the works for the White House to take unilateral action on student loans, mortgage refinancing and unemployment amongst veterans. Pretty brassy for a man who made his bones campaigning on “the smallness of our politics.”
Seeking to justify this exercise in activism, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told the press gaggle at the executive mansion earlier this week, “… There is inaction. There is a lack of action, so there is a need to move -- because we can move.” Put aside for a moment the fact that the president’s lead spokesman sounds like a two-bit Hemingway. The sentiment is perfectly logical – for a country that doesn’t have separation of powers.
In the United States, however, the formulation is deeply problematic. Either these are matters for the Congress or they’re matters for the president – they can’t be both. Yet under the Obama framework, the legislative branch is now being treated as little more than a debating society whose deliberations serve as footnotes to presidential action.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. From an unread stimulus bill to a sweeping government takeover of healthcare rammed through the Congress over public opposition, Obama has never shown much concern for process when it cuts against his impulse towards social engineering.
Obama, the self-styled constitutional scholar, may want to dust off his copy of “The Federalist Papers.” If he did, his pleas for a vigorous Congress might be tempered by Alexander Hamilton’s wisdom in Federalist #70: “In the legislature, promptitude of decision is oftener an evil than a benefit. The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties in that department of the government, though they may sometimes obstruct salutary plans, yet often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the majority.”
He may also want to note James Madison’s words in Federalist #51: “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.” In the same paragraph, Madison goes on to compare the strength of Congress with what he calls “the weakness of the executive.”
Scanning those pages may provide a much-needed dose of humility for a swaggering president – or at least a little consistency. This is, after all, the man who shot down Republican objections to the stimulus plan in the first days of his presidency with a curt “I won.” True enough, Mr. President. But perhaps next time you long for executive supremacy, you’ll remember that you’ve been forced into this corner because the American people decisively fired your legislative handmaidens. Translation: You lost. |
