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Good stuff from Jonathan Turley at today’s House hearing on executive
power, although I regret that I couldn’t find a more user-friendly
format for you to watch. There’s no compilation clip; you’ll have to
make do with the C-SPAN embed by fast-forwarding to the time cues I give
you and being patient while the vid buffers (and buffers, and buffers).
At 1:10:55 he describes the “royal prerogative” that the Constitution
was designed to eliminate but which Obama, through the growth of the
administrative state and his own expansive view of executive discretion,
is now flirting with. At 2:53:45, he applies that concept to O’s war
powers, specifically vis-a-vis Libya and the White House “kill list.” If
you have time for only one snippet, though, skip to 2:33:00 for his
list of Obama’s five most egregious violations of separation of powers.
Some are familiar to you — declaring that he wouldn’t deport illegals
who might qualify for DREAM, refusing to enforce the employer mandate,
etc — but the ones about him shifting money around without regard to how
Congress has appropriated it might not be. Turley makes two valuable
points here. One: Courts tend to give the executive a wide berth in
separation-of-powers challenges on the theory that Congress has the
power of the purse and can defund any executive agency it likes. But
that’s not true anymore, he says. Obama, by defying appropriations, has
claimed some of that power for himself. What check does Congress have
left? That brings us to point two: Even if Congress can’t stop Obama,
the courts can. The problem there, though, says Turley, is that O and
the DOJ have argued successfully in many cases that no one has standing
to sue him because no one can show an injury from his power grabs that’s
concrete enough to justify a federal lawsuit. So the courts can’t check
him either.
The only check is to beat him at the polls, and since he’s now
term-limited, there’s no real check there apart from his party’s fear
that they’ll be punished for his excesses instead. Show of hands: Who
thinks Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi will keep Obama in line?
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