Congress should check our out of control president

John Rossomando
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Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the ability to pass laws. But that memo apparently seems to have missed the desk of the first constitutional law professor to occupy the White House.

For Barack Obama, the Constitution is a scrap of paper that he seems to think doesn’t apply to him. And unless Congress acts to defend its constitutional authority from our runaway president, it risks undermining its own authority.

So far, Obama has used executive orders and regulatory power to push through cap-and-trade, his jobs plan, housing reform, health care and so forth in spite of congressional opposition.

Senior GOP members of Congress who I have spoken with see this as big problem because it transfers constitutional authority from the elected representatives of the people to unaccountable bureaucrats.

And we have seen the Obama administration introduce hundreds of billions of dollars worth of invasive regulations that the Democratic Congress previously rejected. Industry representatives say these regulations could cost thousands of jobs at a time when unemployment is stuck at 9 percent.

But if the president can do all of these things, who needs Congress? The abuse of executive orders flies in the face of the separation of powers and checks and balances.

Congress needs to reassert its power by curtailing the president’s ability to issue executive orders by making them subject to congressional review. The Constitution gives the president the ability to execute laws not to make them.

If the president oversteps his boundaries, he needs to be reigned in. Ideas such as the REINS Act that would make regulations costing in excess of $100 billion would be a good place to start.

But this needs to go further and bind the president’s hands to keep him from implementing laws that Congress previously rejected on his own volition because power cannot be concentrated in the hands of a single individual.  

As Madison writes in Federalist 47: “The reasons on which Montesquieu grounds his maxim are a further demonstration of his meaning. "When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or body," says he, "there can be no liberty, because apprehensions may arise lest THE SAME monarch or senate should ENACT tyrannical laws to EXECUTE them in a tyrannical manner.”

 

 

Comments

[Henry Steddom]

Did you forget that clinton was also a constitutional law professor?