Reason No. 6, sufficient unto itself:
As George F. Will said recently:
When on Jan. 9, 2009, Barack Obama swore to defend the Constitution, he did not mean all of it.
(George F. Will, "Obama's selective defense of the Constitution," washingtonpost.com, October 10, 2012)
Mr. Will goes on to explain how the president abuses the Recess Clause of the Constitution to appoint important federal officials without the advice or consent of the United States Senate.
Mr. Obama's disdain for constitutional limits on his office, meaning at this moment, him, is one of a piece with his general disdain for the rule of law. There are too many examples to remember or list them all, but Mr. Will reminds us of three: The president "unilaterally rewrote laws pertaining to welfare, immigration and education."
Without legal authority, his administration now routinely waives work requirements in the welfare-reform act signed in 1996 by President Clinton.
Without legal authority, his administration gives two-year deportation waivers and work permits to favored classes of illegal immigrants. Writes Michael Barone: "It's a policy that tests well in the polls. The problem is that Congress, even when controlled by Democrats, refused to relax immigration policy in this way." (Michael Barone, "A Law Unto Himself," nationalreview.com, October 11, 2012)
Without legal authority, his administration now waives state compliance with much of No Child Left Behind.
His campaign has designed its online system to accept contributions from foreign donors and donors who wish to give more than federal law allows. (See "Reasons" of October 11.)
His administration is pressuring defense contractors to violate WARN, a federal law that requires them to send notices of pending layoffs. Why? Because sending out the notices in October -- that is, obeying the law -- would be inconvenient to his reelection campaign.
Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, accuses the president of CDD: Constitutional Deficit Disorder.
Primary symptoms: disdain for constitutional limitations on power, disgust over the text's original meaning, constipation, and dry mouth.
More from Mr. Barone:
Barack Obama was a lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. But he seems to take the attitude familiar to me, as an alumnus of Yale Law School, that the law is simply a bunch of words that people who are clever with words can manipulate to get any result they want.
In public speeches, he has defended such policies by shouting, "We can't wait!" The results are good, or at least politically convenient, so why be held back by a bunch of words written on paper?
The Constitution was written by men who had a different idea. They wanted a government bound by the rule of law. Do we?
I certainly want a government bound by the rule of law, and I trust you do too.
One august body that does not, at least when the issue is immigration, is the Houston Chronicle editorial board. It characterized the adminnistration's immigration order as "an end run around Congress" -- better (sigh) if it had not been necessary -- not for what it really was, a brazen violation of federal law and the U.S. Constitution.
Adherence to the rule of law matters only when you accept legal outcomes with which you disagree. Mr. Obama does not.
President Obama has been willing to do these unlawful and unconstitutional things while facing reelection. We can only imagine, in horror, what he might be willing to do when freed from the constraints of public opinion.
Voting against him is not enough. You must speak to your friends. You must contribute to his opponent.
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