It’s About Time! Congressional Hearing on Obama Lawlessness
As we have been pointing out for years, President Obama has egregiously overstepped his constitutional authority on too many occasions to count. He either thinks that constitutional limits on his authority are of no consequence or, in the case of making new laws through fiat, Obama thinks he is a “one-man Congress.”
How bad is it? Even former liberal Vermont Governor and DNC Chairman Howard Dean, recently wondered aloud whether or not the president had stepped out of bounds with his decision to rewrite Obamacare! (He was right. But Obamacare is just the very tip of a very large iceberg.)
As you might expect, many members of Congress have had enough. And that’s why the House of Representatives held a critical hearing on Obama lawlessness this week, entitled “The President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws.”
Per The International Business Times:
Convinced that President Barack Obama is writing his own laws on issues such as health insurance and immigration reform, the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday will examine just how much latitude the nation’s chief executive has to do so.
That’s when the committee will hear from four experts during a 10 a.m. hearing on “The President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws.” The experts have a mix of legal, constitutional and health policy backgrounds.
Congressional Republicans have accused the president of circumventing the nation’s laws he disagrees with. They have specifically cited Obama’s actions on the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), which Republicans have tried almost 50 times to repeal, and also want to knock him for enacting policy initiatives on issues that failed to win Congress’ approval, such as the DREAM Act.
Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) set the tone for the discussion with his opening statement: “The Obama administration…has ignored the Constitution’s carefully balanced separation of powers and unilaterally granted itself the extra-constitutional authority to amend the laws and to waive or suspend their enforcement. This raw assertion of authority goes well beyond the ‘executive power’ granted to the President and specifically violates the Constitution’s command that the President is to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’”
During the hearing, the Committee heard from four top legal and constitutional experts (click the links below to read their written statements): Professor Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Law School; Professor Nicholas Rosenkranz, Georgetown University Law Center; Simon Lazarus, Constitutional Accountability Center; and Michael F. Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies, Cato Institute.
To a man, each of these experts, while focusing on different aspects of the “Obama way” in Washington and documenting their arguments in great detail, came to the same conclusion: This president is out of control.
Jonathan Turley’s explained in his opening remarks: “People of good faith can clearly disagree on where the line is drawn over the failure to fully enforce federal laws. There is ample room given to a president in setting priorities in the enforcement of laws. A president is not required to enforce all laws equally or dedicate the same resources to every federal program. Even with this ample allowance, however, I believe that President Barack Obama has crossed the constitutional line between discretionary enforcement and defiance of federal law.”
Strong words from a respected academic.
Of course among the most egregious examples of Obama lawlessness cited by these experts is the President’s shameless disregard for our immigration laws, and his steadfast commitment to enacting illegal alien amnesty by hook or by crook.
Nicholas Rosenkranz, for example, noted that the Congress has repeatedly considered and rejected the DREAM Act, a legislative initiative supported by the president that would “exempt a broad category of illegal aliens” from immigration law. Unlike Obamacare, says Rosenkranz, where Obama refuses to enforce a law he signed, in the case of the DREAM Act, “the President is complying meticulously — with a bill that never became a law.”
On June 15, 2012, the President announced that he would “simply not enforce the INA against the precise category of aliens described in the DREAM Act,” noted Rosenkranz. Who needs Congress? Not this president.
Now congressional hearings are important. And, as the nation’s most effective government watchdog organization, we welcome congressional attention to the president’s unconstitutional unlawful behavior. Better late than never on this issue, I suppose. Some Republicans are even beginning to talk of impeachment.
But we have been on the case since Day One. You can see our special reports on these topics on our website, look at the documents we uncovered through our investigations, or read our legal filings documenting the president’s abuse of office. And, of course, we have our New York Times Bestseller Corruption Chronicles to serve as your handy reference guide for this administration, which is off the rails and out of control.
And if you want more of the unvarnished truth about Obama scandals, the best place to get the latest news is at JW’s media education panels. And, as luck would have it, we have a very important “Amnesty Update” panel coming up next week.
Per usual, we have assembled a top notch panel of experts of our own, including Congressman Steve King (IA-04), U.S. House of Representatives; Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies and Rosemary Jenks, Director of Government Relations for Numbers USA.
The panel, which will be held Tuesday, December 10, 2013, from 10:30 to 11:30 am at JW headquarters, will examine the status of amnesty efforts in Congress and President Obama’s controversial decisions to suspend deportation for entire categories of illegal aliens.
I hope you can join us. The event is free of charge and open to the press and the public. (You can RSVP if you do plan to attend at jwevents@JUDICIALWATCH.ORG.) But if you can’t make it, then you can see it streamed live at
http://www.judicialwatch.org/livehttp://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/weekly-updates/weekly-update-we-want-the-truth/#story3
