Exclusive: Tom Tancredo urges president to exercise the only honorable ‘out’ he has
When does a national tragedy become a national embarrassment, then a national disgrace and, finally, a national joke? When its name is Barack Hussein Obama.
The problem is, the joke is on us.
What is President Obama’s response to the nightmare of Obamacare? His “solution” is yet another resort to unconstitutional rule by decree.
Did Obama ask Congress for changes in the ACA? No. He announced he has fixed the problem by administrative decree, through a letter sent by his HHS bureaucrats to state insurance commissioners informing them they could ignore federal law until Jan. 1, 2015.
Obama hopes by this action to escape the death spiral his presidency has experienced since the real-world consequences of Obamacare became obvious to millions of citizens. The Obama White House can now pretend it has “fixed” the problem. But that is not only a political fiction and a policy fantasy, it will soon be revealed as a legal quagmire.
No one is really fooled by Obama’s fictional “fix,” but it does accomplish one paramount objective. It gets Democrats in Congress off the hook. They were deserting the ship in droves. Now they can pretend Obamacare is “still working” because it has been “fixed.” What happens when this unconstitutional one-year suspension of federal law expires is a question they will try very hard to avoid answering.
When we say Obama’s action is unconstitutional in bypassing Congress, are we offering a partisan cheap shot? Hardly. In fact, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean was the first to say publicly that Obama has no authority to suspend federal law merely because it has unforeseen or undesirable consequences.
Constitutional law expert Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern University School of Law says of Obama’s Nov. 14 action, “The ‘fix’ amounts to new legislation – but enacted without Congress. The president has no constitutional authority to rewrite statutes, especially in ways that impose new obligations on people.”
Professor Jonathan Adler at Case Western University School of Law believes, “Even if state commissioners approve the plans, they will still be illegal under federal law.”
And according to a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, John Yoo, a former Department of Justice attorney, “The president simply has no power to refuse to enforce a duly enacted law of Congress.”
The president is not merely giving his own federal agency the right to exercise “prosecutorial discretion,” which was the basis for his administrative suspension of immigration law in June of 2012. He is suspending the implementation of an entire section of federal law enacted by Congress as a key element of his Affordable Care Act only three short years ago. No such power is granted the president by the U.S. Constitution.
Obama’s action is especially noxious because of its transparent partisan motive, which is to salvage Democratic control of the U.S. Senate through the 2014 election. But what should outrage all Americans even more is that his action is another lie added to a mountain of fabrications and lawless actions.
Not only is Obama engaging in an unconstitutional action to distract attention from his lies about Obamacare, his action follows a consistent pattern of lies and lawlessness that is now a national embarrassment and a disgrace to the office of the presidency.
If Barack Obama were an honorable man, he would take full responsibility for his actions and resign. Resignation is the only honorable “out” for a president with no place else to go but more lies and lawlessness. His fake and pointless “fix” to his disastrous “health care reform” will not fix anything, not even his reputation.
Congress has ample grounds to begin impeachment proceedings against the president. He has several times resorted to unconstitutional administrative edicts to circumvent Congress, and in each case he has done so for purely partisan political advantage, not in response to a national emergency.
For Obama, resignation from office should be seen as a preferred path over the tortuous and divisive impeachment process. Nixon resigned for an offense – the cover-up of involvement in the Watergate break-in – that was far less damaging to the national well-being and the rule of law than Obama’s actions. Impeachment will gain more and more support as the full weight and cost of the Obamacare catastrophe sinks in.
If he is not impeached nor forced to resign for his unconstitutional actions, it will be a signal that the American political establishment no longer cares about faithfulness to the U.S. Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law. It will be the final chapter in our history as a republic.
