Imagine the Repug/Fox/right-wing-hate-media storm if Barry "claimed the authority to disobey more than 100s of laws enacted since he took office."
Of course, with Repug full-court-press obstructionism since 2010, Boner's Boyz have blocked nearly everything, proposed totally unpassable bills, so Boner's Congresses are World Champion Do-NothingsImagine the Repug/Fox/right-wing-hate-media storm if Barry "claimed the authority to disobey more than 100s of laws enacted since he took office."
You mean what the article is about? I quoted it.
I asked you. Use your words. Tell me what outrages you. Not cruz.
You're assuming I am outraged. Maybe I just thought he brought up some valid points. No one yet has commented towards his points. Maybe bd but I never read his. No offense bd
oh so you don't care about it at all.
OK
Well, we already know he went silent. He was the Associate Deputy Attorney General in the DOJ during dubya. Did you hear him complaining then? Me neither.
Teddy is now pulling the "X state prosecutors" card to validate his opinion on policy, just like when he pulled the "X state attorneys" to validate his (incorrect) individual mandate opinion.
He's a JD, so he's fully aware that it's only uncons utional when the courts say it is. Heck, the SCOTUS is actually set to review the cons utionality of the "recess appointments" policy soon.
Pretty much. It's the same reason why some of his followers don't understand why he hasn't brought up the articles of impeachment yet.
.and the federal Defense of Marriage Act
Some of the confusion regarding the number of times that presidents of both parties have interpreted the laws congressed has passed to be able to enforce or not enforce parts or all of them is that Signing Statements are not the same thing as Executive Orders, but both of them put together reflect an executive's attempt
to do what he wants, in spite of or in interpretation of the laws regarding the issue at hand.
I hated when Bush did it; I hate it now. I was honestly surprised at WH's chart. Based on it, BO has about half of the number of executive orders as GB did, and I would have guessed it to be much higher.
the other thing of note from that chart, imo, was that all presidents are doing it pretty routinely, regardless of whether or not the congress is of their same party or not. That really suggests that it may be an administrative interpretation issue more than a partisan 'getting around the idiots in congress' issue.
confusion?
spread widely by right-wing propaganda machine:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama...tiveorders.asp
TR, Coolidge, FDR and Truman put them all in the shade going by sheer quan y, but it matters what you can get away with too.
Last edited by Winehole23; 02-03-2014 at 08:38 PM. Reason: pace, President Hoover
ElNono and Winehole23
Still not understanding what Executive Orders have to do with the article or his positions stated in the article. So here is the link of Obama's http://www.archives.gov/federal-regi...ers/obama.html
What exactly do you KNOW has been illegal, unConsitutional in Obama's Exec Orders or signing statements?
If you still fail to understand what Executive Orders have to do with Cruz' complaints, it is unclear to me how anyone can explain it any more fully.
You don't? It's pretty clear to me. This is an article ranting about the alleged abuse of Executive Power (and all that encompasses: clout, policy, discretion, orders, etc) in this administration. He isn't wrong, but coming from a guy that didn't say a word when such expansion of power was taking shape while he was part of another administration makes it at the very least pretty hypocritical and largely partisan (despite his claims to the contrary).
What I meant was the focus on Executive Order specifically.
That's a good point. I'm not wanting to be a Cruz cheerleader but don't really see 1. why focusing on Obama's predecessor will do anything; and 2. how he could have any impact on the Bush years for speaking out publicly against abuse of power-except giving someone else a job (his).
in the first graf: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics...ingly-lawless/
the "lawless n!gg@ President" is the kind in inflammatory, DISHONEST bull from Repugs that could inflame some racist, ignorant bubbas to take the law into their own gun-filled hands.
You're telling me he's right in prioritizing his cushy government job and political career over his principles? I would agree that's what he did, I wouldn't agree it's right. But he's just another opportunist politician, so it's not unexpected, tbh.
And focusing on Barry's predecessor should matter, because the expansion of Executive Power was one of the biggest issues during that administration, and because Teddy was part of that administration, in the DOJ no less.
I guess if Teddy is named AG in a potential Christie administration, then he will adjust his "principles" of use/abuse of Executive Power so it's no longer a concern. After all, he's done it once, why not do it twice?
The motif of the President as outlaw hardly originated with the current GOP, but it seems to have made itself at home there now . . . just as it was at home on the progressive left under GWB . . . and on the right under Clinton . . . and on the left under GHWB . . . and Reagan . . . and Ford . . . and Nixon .. and Johnson.
The Presidency Comes With Executive Power. Deal With It.
Obama's just doing what he's empowered to do
BY ERIC POSNER Share
In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama vowed to act on his own if Congress did not do its part. Republicans duly took the bait. “We don’t have a monarchy in this country,” said Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. “The abuse of power by the administration has only become more brazen,” said Senator Ted Cruz.
Obama has unsheathed the sword of executive power, and yet rather than use it to smite his foes, he seems intent on clipping hedges. He says he will raise the minimum wage for a few thousand employees of federal contractors, tinker with the pension system, trim red tape, cajole business leaders to fund pre-kindergarten education, and do something unspecified to help stop gun violence.
Obama begged Congress for help far more often than he vowed to go it alone. Obama’s significant acts of executive power—the Libya intervention, the refusal to defend DOMA before the Supreme Court, non-enforcement of the immigration law against certain groups, climate regulation, NSA surveillance, recess appointments, executive privilege, and so on—lie in the past.
So we have a paradox. In his first term, Obama humbly beseeched Congress for help and sang the virtues of bipartisanship while resorting to unilateral action whenever he needed to. Today, he announces his defiance of Congress yet seems uninterested in using his newly acknowledged executive powers to, for example, shut Guantanamo Bay or raise the debt ceiling on his own.
Be that as it may, it is worth understanding what is at stake in these debates. We all learned in school that the founders feared executive power and so gave policy-making authority to Congress. In fact, the founders feared a too-powerful Congress as well, and they sought to create a strong executive. But the idea that Congress makes law and the president executes it—and any deviation from this pattern is tyranny—is burned into our political culture.
This system of separation of powers was bersome from the start. The country did well in its first few decades probably because state governments led the way, and state government structure was far less rigid than federal structure, which finally collapsed with the Civil War. When the communications and transportation revolutions created national markets and new opportunities and threats in foreign relations, it was finally clear that the federal separation-of-powers system could not manage policy at a national level.
The problem was that Congress was an enormously clumsy ins ution. Its numerous members fiercely advanced their deeply parochial interests. Policies of great importance for one section of the country, or one group of people, could not be embodied in legislation unless logrolling could be arranged, which was slow, difficult, and vulnerable to corruption. As a public, deliberative body, Congress could not react swiftly to changing events, nor act secretly when secrecy was called for.
No one held a cons utional convention to replace the eighteenth-century cons ution with a twentieth-century one. Instead, political elites acting through the party system adjusted the government structure on their own. Congress created gigantic regulatory agencies and tasked the president to lead them. Congress also acquiesced as presidents asserted authority over foreign policy. The Supreme Court initially balked at the legislative delegations but eventually was bullied into submission; it hardly ever objected to the president’s dominance over foreign affairs.
This was not a smooth process. The rise of executive power sometimes hurt important interests and always rubbed against the republican sensibilities that Americans inherited from the founders. From time to time, Congress reaped political benefits from thwarting the president. But today Congress reacts rather than leads. It investigates allegations of corruption in the executive branch. It holds hearings to torment executive officials. It certainly doesn’t give the executive the budget he always wants, or pass every new law that he believes that he needs. But existing laws and customs almost always give the president the power he needs to govern. And when they don’t, Congress will sooner or later give him the power he wants. Witness the Dodd-Frank Act and the Affordable Care Act—two massive expansions of executive power.
In monarchies, the official position was that the king made policy but everyone understood that his ministers did. In our system, the official story is that Congress makes policy and the president implements it—such is the inertia of history. But the reality is that the president both makes policy and implements it, subject to vague parameters set down by Congress and to its carping from the sidelines. Presidents can defy the official story and assert the reality if they want. That is what the George W. Bush administration did, to its eventual sorrow. In hindsight, the broad assertions of executive power by Bush administration lawyers in signing statements, executive orders, and secret memos were naïve. They described, with only some exaggeration, the actual workings of the government, but their account conflicted with the official narrative and thus played into the hands of critics, who could invoke tyranny, dictatorship, and that old standby, the “imperial presidency.”
Democratic presidents have been shrewder. Bill Clinton and Obama have been just as muscular in their use of executive power as Ronald Reagan and Bush, but they resisted the temptation to brandish the orb and scepter. Whereas Republican presidents cite their cons utional powers as often as they can, Democratic presidents avoid doing so except as a last resort, preferring instead to rely on statutes, torturing them when necessary to extract the needed interpretation. Thus did Obama’s lawyers claim that the military intervention in Libya did not violate the War Powers Act because the U.S. bombing campaign did not amount to “hostilities” (the word in the statute). A more honest legal theory—one that does not require such a strained interpretation of a word—is that the War Powers Act infringes on the president’s military powers, but a theory like that would have provoked howls of protest.
In most cases, lawyers do not need to resort to such measures because Congress has already granted authority. The president’s power to raise the minimum wage comes from the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, which, in typically broad language, permits the president to set contract terms with federal contractors so as to promote “efficiency.” Far from being a bold assertion of executive power, this is the type of humdrum presidential action that takes place every day.
Congress gave the president the power to determine contract terms because Congress did not want to—practically speaking could not—negotiate those terms itself every time the U.S. government entered a contract. This principle explains why Congress gives the executive branch enormous discretion to determine health, education, environmental, and financial policy. Congress directed the financial regulators to implement the Volcker Rule, but it would be entirely up to those regulators to make the rule meaningful or toothless. Nor can Congress block Obama’s decision to effectively implement the Dream Act—which was not passed by Congress—by not enforcing immigration laws against those who would have benefited from the act.
Meanwhile, the founders’ anxieties about executive tyranny have proven erroneous. The president is kept in check by elections, the party system, the press, popular opinion, courts, a political culture that is deeply su ious of his motives, term limits, and the sheer vastness of the bureaucracy which he can only barely control. He does not always do the right thing, of course, but presidents generally govern from the middle of the political spectrum.
Obama’s assertion of unilateral executive authority is just routine stuff. He follows in the footsteps of his predecessors on a path set out by Congress. And well should he. If you want a functioning government—one that protects citizens from criminals, terrorists, the climatic effects of greenhouse gas emissions, poor health, financial manias, and the like—then you want a government led by the president.
Eric Posner is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1...-unexceptional
Last edited by Th'Pusher; 02-03-2014 at 08:51 PM. Reason: Added link
Dp
so good you had to post it twice.
not only did we hear you the first time, that's exactly what GWB said.
lol Tory Obama
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