Right Opinion Lawlessness and Spinelessness

Yesterday, Republicans once again reinforced my contention that the Obama administration’s modus operandi – as in “we’re going to do whatever we want and we dare you to stop us” – will remain unchallenged by the GOP. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told “Fox News Sunday” that Congressional Republicans believe Obama has abused the government’s separation of powers by using executive orders and sidestepping Congress to delay the employer mandate in ObamaCare. But because Congress lacks “legal standing” to present the case in court, and would have a “tough time” finding a plaintiff sufficiently injured by the delay to make a lawsuit viable, there’s nothing they can do.

That, in a nutshell, defines the spinelessness of the GOP. But it also defines the times. Other than conservative commentators such as Charles Krauthammer, who denounced the reality that unilaterally changing the law for nothing more than political purposes is the stuff of banana republics, or the charge led by conservative talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Michael Savage, where is the outcry? Even Fox News grants Obama some wiggle room, noting that he "used executive orders less than modern U.S. presidents – 167 times so far, compared to 238 for President Carter and 256 for President Reagan.“

So what? It’s not the quantity of executive orders that matters, it’s the quality. Obama is unilaterally and unconstitutionally re-writing laws duly passed by Congress, delaying the ObamaCare mandates, and granting Congress and their staffs special exemptions from the law. He has also ignored Congress altogether, as when he authorized his own version of the DREAM Act granting what amounts to indefinite amnesty to a subset of illegal aliens, attempted to make recess appointments while Congress was not in recess, and gutted the work requirement in the 1996 welfare reform act that had cut the welfare population in half prior to the current recession. Even more ominously, he is once again planning to use the EPA as a billy club for enacting an agenda so radical, it would effectively eliminate the possibility of opening a new coal plant in the country, despite the reality that coal still generates 44 percent of the nation’s electricity.

How does he get away with it? Three major factors abet such lawlessness. First and foremost is a Democrat party that has become so radical, it is now dominated by leaders whose worldview is aligned with anything that maximizes authoritarian government. This includes the maxim "by any means necessary” that facilitates the implementation of that authoritarianism. That is why they are willing to relinquish their own standing within the Constitution’s separation of powers framework that was created precisely to prevent Obama from doing what he is doing. One suspects the Founding Fathers never anticipated the odious combination of rank opportunism and cynicism such a willing relinquishment indicates. But those attributes are the essence of today’s power-above-all-else Democrat party.

That would be the same Democrat party labeled “centrist” by the second factor abetting Obama’s lawlessness. A hopelessly corrupt mainstream media has convinced large swaths of Americans it is Republicans who have become "radicalized.“ Such a label is completely undone by reality, as in the fact that there is nothing radical about a desire for limited government, fiscal sanity, Constitutional fealty, or a host of other positions routinely supported by an American majority – when they are separated from their political underpinnings. Most Americans would intuitively understand this were it not for a media more than willing to lie by both commission and omission to advance that same leftist agenda. The pernicious and dishonest effort in that regard is their ongoing willingness to smear anyone who challenges the president’s lawlessness, his policies, and the rest of the left-wing agenda, as racist, homophobic, nativist or misogynist.

Moreover, the willingness of major media outlets to abandon their fundamental role as a government watchdog facilitates that lawlessness. Americans old enough to remember Watergate know that that scandal was no more or less serious than Fast and Furious, the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, Benghazi, or the outright lies told to sell ObamaCare. Yet the hotel break-in and subsequent lying about it that brought down the Nixon White House has been seared into the historical record by the relentless pursuit of the same media who insist there’s no "there there,” regarding four dead Americans in Benghazi, the ongoing abuses of the IRS, a dead Border Patrol agent and hundred of Mexicans felled by Fast and Furious, and the cancellation of millions of insurance policies Americans were promised they could keep. As a result, the public remains confused at best, and completely disinterested at worst.

One is left to wonder how Democrats might have reacted if the mainstream had media dismissed Watergate as part of the left-wing “noise machine,” a euphemism they readily employ to rationalize their calculated lack of concern regarding the Obama administration’s villainy.

Yet as the adage “all roads lead to Rome” reminds us, the GOP must take a good deal of the blame here as well. While Mike Lee is likely correct regarding a lawsuit, it is utter nonsense to suggest the GOP is powerless to prevent the president from running roughshod over his oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. As National Review’s Andrew McCarthy explains, Congress has two methods to reign in an out-of-control president: the power of the purse and the power of impeachment. The Republicans’ latest capitulation on the debt ceiling reveals – yet again – the GOP has no interest in pursuing that avenue of attack, even though it retains a House majority that could effectively implement such a plan. As for impeachment, Republicans dismiss that idea as impractical, because Senate Democrats would never vote to convict.

Again, so what? If the president is breaking the law, isn’t it critically important to make the case to the public and let Democrats and the media defend such lawlessness? That’s what people genuinely interested in the rule of law would do. It is obvious the GOP is far more interested in the mid-term elections, and telling Americans what a disaster ObamaCare is, in the hopes that this “one trick pony” election strategy will help them keep the House and capture the Senate.

What if that plan fails? Or more to the point, if politics are more important to Republicans than the rule of law, what makes them any different than Democrats?

As I said in the opening paragraph, the Obama administration is more than willing to push envelope, and Democrats are more than willing to abet him, secure in the knowledge that, in the event a Republican administration ever assumes power, they could do a complete about face on everything they currently support. Such hypocrisy, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, is nothing new. That is why the same president who accused George Bush of “trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all, and that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m President of the United States of America” can govern one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with his own proclamation.

The American Spectator’s Jeffery Lord imagines the same abuse of the law embraced by “President Ted Cruz.” He conjures up a 2017 news story with the following lede: “President Ted Cruz, citing what he called ‘The Obama Precedent’ today unilaterally repealed Roe v. Wade, once again making abortion illegal in the United States.”

Despite every protestation to the contrary, that’s exactly the kind of precedent Obama is setting. If a Democrat president can unilaterally re-write or suspend laws, so can a Republican one. If one Congress can be ignored or sidestepped, so can another. If one president can use the Executive Branch and its Cabinet-level agencies to run roughshod over the public, so can another.

Perhaps Americans are too disengaged to be concerned. Or perhaps they too are willing to abet the undermining of our democratic republic, as long as the “right” people are in charge. Lord’s scenario ought to make the consequences of that short-sighteness clear. So should the rollout of ObamaCare. If not, an apathetic public will get exactly the kind of “fundamental change” in the United States the Obama administration is implementing. As the Weasel Zippers website so aptly puts it in excoriating the GOP, “If you do nothing about lawlessness, there is no law.”

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