The rule of law should count
for something in America, but Obama is the pick and choose president. "I’ll
take a little of this; I’ll take a little of that. But I don’t like this,
so I won’t deal with it."
He decides which laws he’ll
enforce and which ones he’ll ignore. For example, the president has decided
that DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by a majority in Congress
in 1996 and signed into law by President Clinton, is not worth fighting
for. So Obama has instructed Attorney General Eric Holder to halt any attempt
to fight off challenges to this law.
DOMA, which was passed in opposition to same sex marriage, is still
the law of the land. But apparently not to our "pick and choose president"---who
is presumably trying to throw red meat to his far left base.
Meanwhile, as Obama jettisons
any support for DOMA, he ignores court rulings against his crown jewel---Obamacare---which
has already been declared unconstitutional, but he’s ignoring those rulings.
The founding fathers in
their brilliance set up a system of checks and balances. Knowing that we
human beings by nature are prone to do wrong---especially if we have too
much power---the founders worked hard to make sure that no one group or
no one individual would be able to lord it over the others.
But Obama makes up his own
rules, it would seem.
Article II, Section 3 of
the Constitution says of the president, "he shall take Care that the Laws
be faithfully executed."
I guess the "pick and choose president" has overlooked that clause.
If the president doesn’t
like a law that Congress has duly passed and has been signed into law,
there are remedies to try and counteract that law. But the president can’t
just arbitrarily pick and choose which laws to apply and which ones not
to apply.
He’s the president, not
a dictator.
This is America, not a Banana
Republic.
Perhaps, we should have
listened more carefully when he said in late October 2008, "We’re just
five days away from fundamentally transforming America" (emphasis mine).
Fundamentally transforming
America?
The Constitution be damned.
Obama does what he pleases.
Judge Robert Bork was a
former Yale professor. He was also a best-selling author, who was famously
torpedoed in 1987 in his bid to become a Supreme Court justice. He had
been nominated by Ronald Reagan. He was so well-qualified that one authority
said he was the most qualified candidate to be nominated to that position
in half a century. However, because he believed the Constitution should
be taken as the founding fathers intended, and not as a "thing of wax"
(to borrow a phrase from Thomas Jefferson), the Left pulled out all the
stops, lied about him, and did everything to keep from serving on the Court.
Tragically, they succeeded.
I interviewed him once on
the subject of judicial activism. He made this point to me: "I’ve seen
some writings saying that the Framers did not intend that we should be
bound by their understanding of what they had done. I can think of few
more preposterous statements. Why they argued and deliberated and carried
on and negotiated and so forth to get the words just right, if they didn’t
think anybody would be bound by them, is a mystery. It doesn’t make any
sense at all."
If this were a conservative
doing what Obama is doing, I don’t think we’d hear the end of it.
Rush Limbaugh made the point recently that should Sarah Palin be president
in 2013, what if she said something like this: "I don’t like Roe v. Wade.
So I’m just throwing it out. From now on, abortion is illegal in America.
I have spoken."
Similarly, Newt Gingrich said that if a conservative did what Obama
has done, s/he could be open for impeachment charges.
The ultimate remedy
for this is in the ballot box. You would think that with the recent shellacking
the president received he would have learned his lesson. But noooooo.
I guess you can take the
politician out of Chicago politics. But you can’t take Chicago politics
out of the politician.
Truly, Barack Obama is the
"pick and choose president."
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