Several years ago I wrote that President Obama wanted to transform America.
With his re-election and his first-term policy “victories” — Obamacare, the stimulus package, and the bailouts of the banks and auto industry — one would have to conclude that from a purely Machiavellian perspective, Obama and his team are transforming America.
And Obama is off to a fast start in his second term. During so called “fiscal cliff crisis,” he managed to ram through Congress a tax increase on those he deemed “rich” while he and his allies maintained they were protecting the middle class.
What Obama neglected to mention was, that as part of the fiscal cliff deal, he and Congress allowed a temporary cut in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare to expire, and the middle class got a paycheck surprise in mid-January, resulting in lower take home pay.
The payroll tax increase comes at a time when workers’ paychecks already are under fire from rising health care premiums and energy costs. For many in the middle class, the payroll tax increase is big enough to offset any recent pay raise.
And make no mistake about it, what Obama can’t get done legislatively in Congress he will attempt to accomplish by executive order or recess appointment. Case in point: The Obama administration’s memorandum from the Department of Homeland Security last June telling United States immigration officials how they should “enforce the nation’s immigration laws against certain young people who were brought to this country as children and know only this country as home.”
What the Obama administration managed to do by executive fiat was implement major elements of the DREAM Act, a bill giving legal status to illegal immigrants who entered the United States as children and are nearing adulthood.
Versions of the bill have been introduced in both Democratic-and- Republican-controlled Congresses, but none has had the votes to be passed into law.
Obama himself has admitted that he doesn’t have the constitutional authority to implement the DREAM Act: “The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting, I promise you, not just on immigration reform. But that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions,” he told a group of Hispanic activists July 25, 2011.
But when you get past the Obama rhetoric, the long and short of is, Obama is trying to use executive orders to implement laws that Congress hasn’t passed.
In other words, the Obama administration is circumventing Congress and, in the opinion of many, the Constitution. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident when it comes to Obama’s executive branch power grab.
Late last year, the Obama administration issued waivers of the No Child Left Behind Act if states would implement national education standards not authorized by Congress. “Congress hasn’t been able to do it, so I will,” Obama announced.
Then of course there are the president’s recess appointments to his administration when the Senate wasn’t actually in recess — some of which have backfired.
Recently, a three-judge panel ruled the recess appointments Obama made to the National Labor Relations Board are illegal, leaving the board without a quorum to let it operate. The ruling must have been a major shock to Obama’s “imperial presidency.”
Will this setback stop Obama’s attempt to place more power in the executive branch?
I doubt it.
Marc Rotterman is a senior fellow at the John Locke Foundation.