From
the Merriam Webster Dictionary:
Impostor:
One that assumes a false identity for the purpose of Deception.
But
Wicked men [and women] and IMPOSTORS will go from Bad to Worse,
Deceiving
and leading astray others
And
being Deceived [by Satan] and lead astray themselves.
(2
timothy 3:13, AMP)
The
Presidential Oath of Office:
I
do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the
office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my
ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United
States.
Obama
has repeatedly broken his Oath of Office.
In
fact he has shown complete DISDAIN
For
the Constitution of the United States, by his Illegal Executive
Orders.
This
makes him an Impostor, because he never intended
To
follow his Oath of Office, to defend the Constitution.
He
should be Impeached but the Democrats continue to Defend him;
They
are godless, Socialist, Secular Humanists like Obama.
In
doing so the Democrats also Violate their Oath of Office.
Additionally, Obama has shown himself to be a Compulsive LIAR!
He repeatedly LIES.
Leaving one to wonder is he ever tells the TRUTH?
And this LIAR is negotiating a monumentally important "DEAL"
With Iran who is bent on the Destruction of Israel and America,
As MANDATED by the Koran.
This article first appeared in the June issue of Townhall Magazine.
"You
know I taught constitutional law for 10 years, I take the
Constitution very seriously,” then-Sen. Barack Obama said while
campaigning in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on March 31, 2008.
“The
biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George
Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch
and not go through Congress at all,” Obama continued, “and that’s
what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States of
America.”
More
than six years later, we now know that Obama never had any intention
of taking the Constitution seriously. Instead, he has violated its
core provisions at every turn, launching unauthorized wars, rewriting
legislation without Congress’ input, and even creating brand new
laws out of whole cloth.
When
Obama first uttered the phrase, “If Congress won’t act, I will,”
he functionally declared war on the U.S. Constitution. And unless
Republicans start standing up to Obama’s lawlessness, our republic
may never be the same.
EMBRACING
BUSH’S WAR POWERS
Obama made his 2008 promise to “reverse” Bush’s power grab after a supporter questioned why Obama had voted for reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2006 after he had promised to vote against the legislation when he was a U.S. Senate candidate in 2003.
Obama made his 2008 promise to “reverse” Bush’s power grab after a supporter questioned why Obama had voted for reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2006 after he had promised to vote against the legislation when he was a U.S. Senate candidate in 2003.
In
classic Obama fashion, Obama denied all responsibility for his vote.
Instead he blamed Bush for issuing executive orders that ignored the
limits of existing federal law. Now, six years later, Obama is still
presiding over much the same National Security Administration spying
program that he once pronounced a “grave threat” to civil
liberties, and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility that he said
threatened America’s “moral stature in the world,” is also
still running strong.UNAUTHORIZED
WARAdditionally,
not only has Obama embraced the war powers he once derided Bush for
claiming, but he has expanded them substantially.
After
the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Bush went to Congress for an
Authorization for Use of Military Force that he then used as
justification for attacking Afghanistan. And a year later, Bush again
went to Congress for another AUMF, this time seeking permission to
attack Iraq. You can be for or against one or both of these wars, but
you cannot argue that Bush did not “go through Congress” before
starting them.
Obama,
on the other hand, doesn’t believe that he needs to seek permission
from Congress before he attacks another country.
Before
launching Operation Odyssey Dawn against Libya on March 19, 2011,
Obama secured authorization from both the Arab League and the United
Nations. But at no point did he ever push for a debate, or vote, in
the United States Congress.
Now
it is true that presidents have taken military action without
specific authorization from Congress in the past. In 1986, for
example, President Reagan also bombed Libya. And in 1998, President
Clinton launched cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan.
But
those actions were both brief and limited responses to specific
terrorist attacks on Americans. Reagan bombed Libya for a single day
as punishment for their involvement in a bombing of American
servicemen in Berlin. Clinton’s cruise missile attack was also
limited to a single day and was in direct response to the bombings of
American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Obama’s
attack on Libya, however, lasted seven months, one week, and five
days. Countless Libyan military personnel were killed during the
campaign, as well as more than 60 civilians according to the United
Nations Human Rights Council.
But
unlike Reagan and Clinton, who were responding to specific attacks on
Americans, Obama acted without any provocation. Libya had not
recently attacked America, and was not threatening to, when Obama
started bombing the country.
There
simply is no constitutional justification for Obama’s unilateral
bombing of Libya. Which is why top lawyers at both the Pentagon and
the Justice Department told Obama he had no legal right to attack
Libya as broadly as he was planning without authorization from
Congress.
But
instead of deciding the issue democratically, Obama overruled his
lawyers and ordered the DOJ to write a new legal memo justifying his
decision.
WHEN
PRESIDENTS CAN ACT
Presidents have tested the boundary between the executive and legislative powers since the birth of the Constitution. Few tested it as boldly as the 33rd president, Harry Truman, who authorized his Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer to seize the nation’s steel mills at the height of the Korean War.
Presidents have tested the boundary between the executive and legislative powers since the birth of the Constitution. Few tested it as boldly as the 33rd president, Harry Truman, who authorized his Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer to seize the nation’s steel mills at the height of the Korean War.
The
day after Truman issued Executive Order 10340 effectively
nationalizing the nation’s steel industry, lawyers for Youngstown
Sheet & Tube Co., along with lawyers from five other major steel
companies, immediately filed suit.
Less
than a month later, in Youngstown
Sheet & Tube Co. v Sawyer,
a 6-3 majority ruled against Truman’s seizure, holding that he had
no legal authority to seize the nation’s steel mills. Writing for
the majority, Justice Hugo Black explained, “The President’s
power, if any, to issue the order must stem either from an act of
Congress or from the Constitution itself.”
Black
went on to note that if Truman wanted to avoid a strike, the
Taft-Hartley Act, which Truman had attempted to veto, specifically
created a mechanism for him to do so. But Truman completely ignored
that route.
Instead,
Truman issued an order that Black said, “sets out reasons why the
President believes certain policies should be adopted, proclaims
these policies as rules of conduct to be followed, and again, like
a statute,
authorizes a government official to promulgate additional rules and
regulations consistent with the policy proclaimed and needed to carry
that policy into execution.” [emphasis added]
“In
the framework of our Constitution,” Black continued, “the
President’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed
refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker. The Constitution limits
his functions in the lawmaking process to the recommending of laws he
thinks wise and the vetoing of laws he thinks bad. And the
Constitution is neither silent nor equivocal about who shall make
laws which the President is to execute.”
In
other words, it does not matter how many executive orders a president
issues. All that matters is that each executive action must have a
basis in either the Constitution itself, or an act of Congress.
Unfortunately,
far too often, Obama has chosen to completely ignore Congress, and
instead act as lawmaker. The following are just a few of Obama’s
most egregious constitutional transgressions.
FORCING
COMMON CORE ON OUR NATION’S SCHOOLS
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 may have passed both chambers of Congress with broad bipartisan support, but since implementation it has become steadily unpopular.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 may have passed both chambers of Congress with broad bipartisan support, but since implementation it has become steadily unpopular.
Conservatives
hate the law because it dramatically expands the size and scope of
the federal government and inflicts millions of hours of additional
paperwork on local schools. Liberals don’t like it because it ties
federal funding to standardized tests and allows some parents to
choose where their children go to school.
Under
NCLB, public schools must take yearly standardized tests to determine
what percentage of students are meeting state standards. And each
year, the percentage of students in each school district who meet
those standards must go up. By 2014, 100 percent of all students are,
by law, required to meet those standards.
But
a 100 percent passage rate was never possible. And as more and more
schools were deemed “failing” under NCLB, pressure grew on
Congress to amend the law.
Obama
could have easily worked with Democratic majorities to rewrite NCLB,
or axe it entirely, during his first two years in office. Instead, he
chose to focus on health care and cap and trade.
So
when Republicans took control of the House in 2011, it was too late
to write Common Core into NCLB’s standards.
Instead,
on August 5, 2011, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced he was
inviting states to apply for waivers from NCLB, but only if those
states agreed to first implement Obama’s preferred education
policies, including Common Core. This was a wholesale runaround
Congress.
“It
is one thing for an administration to grant waivers to states to
respond to unrealistic conditions on the ground or to allow
experimentation and innova- tion,” Brookings Institution Director
for Education Policy Russ Whitehurst wrote at the time, “It is
quite another thing to grant state waivers conditional on com-
pliance with a particular reform agenda that is dramatically
different from existing law.”
GRANTING
AMNESTY TO ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama told Univision host Jorge Ramos, “I cannot guarantee that it is going to be in the first 100 days. But what I can guarantee is that we will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support.”
In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama told Univision host Jorge Ramos, “I cannot guarantee that it is going to be in the first 100 days. But what I can guarantee is that we will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support.”
Of
course, we now know that Obama’s first year in office came and went
without any immigration reform. Same with the second year. And the
third. By Obama’s fourth year in office, he was again campaigning
for the White House, and he needed something to distract from his
broken immigration promise.
So
on June 15, 2012, Obama announced his Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals policy for illegal immigrants. Under DACA, those who could
produce some evidence that they came to the U.S. before they were 16
and had been in the country for at least five years would be given
“deferred action” status, which allows them to obtain a work
permit, get a social security number, and a driver’s license.
These
provisions just happened to almost exactly mirror the Development,
Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (more commonly known as
the DREAM Act) that failed to pass the Senate and never even got a
vote in the House in 2010.
How
could Obama simply enact a law that Congress never passed?
Obama
claimed that he has the “prosecutorial discretion” to deport or
not deport whomever he wishes.
And
it is true, presidents have always enjoyed the authority to favor
some immigrants over others for foreign policy, political, or
humanitarian reasons. But those acts of limited discretion were
always done on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis. They were not a
wholesale prescriptive rewrite of immigration policy, let alone one
that had been specifically rejected by Congress.
If
Obama’s DACA program is legal, then there is nothing stopping him
from granting full amnesty to every illegal immigrant in the country
yesterday, today, or tomorrow.
REWRITING
OBAMACARE FOR POLITICAL GAIN
Like Bush’s NCLB, Obama’s Affordable Care Act has only gotten more unpopular as it has been implemented. Looking to minimize this unpopularity, Obama has repeatedly delayed key aspects of the law, even though he has no authority to do so.
Like Bush’s NCLB, Obama’s Affordable Care Act has only gotten more unpopular as it has been implemented. Looking to minimize this unpopularity, Obama has repeatedly delayed key aspects of the law, even though he has no authority to do so.
First,
on July 2, 2013, the Treasury Department issued regulations delaying
Obamacare’s job killing employer mandate until the end of 2014. But
Section 1513(d) of the ACA clearly states, “The amendments made by
this section shall apply to months beginning after Dec. 31, 2013.”
And no other provision in Obamacare gives Obama the authority to
change that date.
Pressed
to identify a legal authority for the delay, the White House pointed
to Section 7805(a) of the Internal Revenue Code which gives the
Treasury Secretary the power to “prescribe all needful rules and
regulations for the enforcement of this title, including all rules
and regulations as may be necessary by reason of any alteration of
law in relation to internal revenue.”
If
that section sounds exceedingly broad, it is. Before Obama, it had
only been used twice to delay other tax legislation. And both of
those delays were for less than a year (six months and one month),
only applied to minor portions of much broader legislation, and were
issued the same year the original legislation passed.
By
contrast, the Obamacare employer mandate delay has already been
expanded past 201, involves a major cost saving feature of the
underlying legislation, and was issued more than three years after
the original law passed.
And
that wasn’t Obama’s only Obamacare rewrite. Facing intense
political blowback after his “if you like your health care plan you
can keep it” promise was exposed as a lie last October, Obama
issued another delay in December.
This
time the Department of Health and Human Services issued a “guidance”
letter to states informing them that insurance companies could
continue selling the same individual health insurance plans they do
now, but only to those individuals who currently own such policies,
and only for another year. Pressed again to identify the legal basis
for this executive action, the White House could not identify any
legislative authority, and instead claimed they had “enforcement
discretion” to implement any law as the Supreme Court allowed
in Heckler
v Chaney.
But Heckler created
no such power.
In Heckler,
death row inmates sued the Food and Drug Administration in an effort
to force them to apply existing regulations to the use of drugs used
for lethal injection. The Court found that the FDA had discretion
over how to enforce their existing regulations.
But
the latest Obamacare fix is not just a decision not to enforce
existing regulations. It creates brand new rules, including a
requirement for what insurers must include in their policy
cancellation letters.
More
importantly though, if Obama can get away with citing Heckler to
rewrite Obamacare, he can cite it to rewrite any law, at any time he
wants, for whatever reason.
CAN
THE CONSTITUTION BE SAVED?
Obama will still be president for another two and a half years and it is virtually guaranteed he will do more violence against the Constitution. Amnesty advocates have grown extremely impatient with Obama’s inaction on immigration and they know his DACA program has no logical limit. If Congress does not grant illegal immigrants amnesty by legislation before 2016, Obama will do it by administrative fiat.
Obama will still be president for another two and a half years and it is virtually guaranteed he will do more violence against the Constitution. Amnesty advocates have grown extremely impatient with Obama’s inaction on immigration and they know his DACA program has no logical limit. If Congress does not grant illegal immigrants amnesty by legislation before 2016, Obama will do it by administrative fiat.
What
if anything can the American people do? The steel mill owners sued
when Truman stole their plants, why can’t we?
The
biggest barrier to holding Obama accountable through the courts is
the legal doctrine of standing. In order to establish legal standing,
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) recently told The
Weekly Standard,
“You’ve got to show that the plaintiff has suffered an injury in
fact, a concrete, particularized harm that’s fairly traceable to
the conduct of the defendant, and it is capable of being redressed or
remedied by the court.”
Proving
direct and individualized harm from Obama’s lawlessness is
difficult. How can any one person prove DACA harmed their job
prospects? Or that a denied NCLB waiver harmed their education?
Pressed
to identify a remedy for Obama’s executive overreach, Lee told The
Weekly Standard,
“I think the most effective, efficient way of doing it, the way
that sort of maximizes the deterrent effect without significantly
disrupting government in general is for Congress to use its spending
power in such a way that withholds funds in areas in which the
president has overreached.”
“The
Founding Fathers contemplated that,” Lee continued, “James
Madison discussed it in Federalist 57. And it’s per- haps the most
effective, least intrusive tool for Congress to respond to executive
overreach.”
Establishment
Republicans may not like to hear it, but Lee is right. The only way
to stop Obama’s lawlessness is to cut off funding for the agencies
he is using to abuse the law. No more Education Department funding
until NCLB is rewritten. No more DHS funding until DACA is halted. No
more HHS funding until the Obamacare delays are undone.
These
would all be messy fights for congressional Republicans, but the
alternative would be to admit their own irrelevance.
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