Divider-in-Chief (28 page)

On the campaign trail in Amherst, Ohio, over the fourth of July weekend in 2012, Obama stopped into Ziggy's Pub and Restaurant. When the pub's owner said, “You're in a building that has Fox News on,” Obama suggested that he change the channel.

The Obama administration seems to have an authoritarian impulse when it comes to news media, which explains why it has used such heavy-handed tactics against the few media outlets that refuse to dutifully push the Obama message.

Anita Dunn once bragged that the Obama campaign had been able to “control” the media.
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This is the same woman who once identified the Marxist mass murderer Mao Tse-Tung as one of her “favorite political philosophers.”
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Mark Lloyd, the Obama administration's Federal Communications Committee “Chief Diversity Officer,” has voiced admiration for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, whom Lloyd has called “incredible” and “dramatic.” Chavez has imprisoned numerous dissenting journalists and overseen a state takeover of all media.
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The Obama administration likes media that it can, in Anita Dunn's word, “control.” Any media that it can't control it tries to marginalize, dividing the media into friends and foes, excluding the latter and expecting adulation from the former. If this hallmark behavior of the Obama administration represents the new politics of hope and change, it's not the sort of hope and change a free people is likely to want.

W
hile running for president, Barack Obama regularly criticized President George W. Bush for what he claimed was Bush's abuse of executive authority. “These last few years we've seen an unacceptable abuse of power at home,” Obama said in Chicago in 2007. “We've paid a heavy price for having a president whose priority is expanding his own power.”
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By condemning Bush, Obama was assuring voters that he'd show much more restraint. But in his quest to “fundamentally transform America,” Obama has displayed a shocking eagerness to flout the Constitution's separation of powers and checks and balances. Obama has eschewed compromise and outreach to Republicans and shown an unmatched willingness to intimidate other branches of government and subvert their constitutional authority.

Obama has trained much of his rhetorical fire on the U.S. Supreme Court. Obama attacked the court for its 2010 decision in
Citizens United
v.
Federal Election Commission
, which overturned restrictions on corporations' political speech.

A few days after the decision, Obama launched an unprecedented attack on the court during his State of the Union address, accusing the court of judicial activism for striking down campaign finance laws that violate the First Amendment. Obama claimed the justices had “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.”
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Obama then encouraged Congress to pass a law to overturn the court's decision.

Obama's accusation against the court provoked a stunned Justice Samuel Alito to shake his head and mouth the words, “That's not true.” The justices attend the State of the Union speech out of respect for the president. Obama showed no similar respect for the court, unfairly attacking the justices at a venue that gave them no chance to respond.

In April 2012, as administration attorneys argued the case for Obamacare before the Supreme Court—saying the mandate both was and was not a tax—Obama made veiled political threats against the justices, telling the media that he was “confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
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Obama referred to the Supreme Court derisively as “an unelected group of people,”
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and he said that striking down the law or the mandate would be an unacceptable act of “judicial activism.”
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He called on justices to show “deference to democratically elected legislatures” by upholding the law, or risk diminishing its “credibility.”
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Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut declared that the court would damage its reputation if it didn't uphold the law. “The court commands no armies, it has no money; it depends for its power on its credibility,” he said. “The only reason people obey it is because it has that credibility. And the court risks grave damage if it strikes down a statute of this magnitude and importance.”
⁷

Many legal experts criticized the threats against the court, especially those by the president. “Though past presidents have occasionally inveighed
against judicial activism,” the
Washington Post
reported, “legal analysts and historians said it was difficult to find a historical parallel to match Obama's willingness to directly confront the court.”
⁸
The threats, though, achieved their desired effect, as Chief Justice John Roberts stunningly sided with liberals in a convoluted decision that upheld Obamacare in spite of its glaring constitutional deficiencies.

When it comes to the law-making branch of government, Obama's slogan is, “If Congress won't act, I will.” Obama has uttered a version of this in response to Republican opposition to many key parts of his domestic agenda.

“Now, whenever Congress refuses to act, Joe and I, we're going to act,”
⁹
Obama promised at a February 2012 event on the payroll tax cut extension. “In the months to come, wherever we have an opportunity, we're going to take steps on our own to keep this economy moving.”
¹⁰

“What I'm not gonna do is wait for Congress,” Obama declared in an April interview on
60 Minutes
, in which he was asked what he'd do if the Supreme Court overturned Obamacare.
¹¹

Obama's by-any-means-necessary approach to implementing his agenda involves unconstitutional power grabs, administrative usurpations, and various other forms of executive overreach. He has not only acted without congressional approval but sometimes in direct contradiction to a majority of the people's elected representatives.

Obama started his presidency by appointing dozens of “czars,” White House liaison officers who were neither elected nor confirmed by the Senate and were thus accountable only to the president and his senior staff.

Obama has issued an unprecedented number of presidential signing orders and executive orders, which he began issuing right away. In the first few days of his term, Obama issued an order reversing a ban that prohibits taxpayer funding to groups that perform abortions abroad, another to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and still another to restore funding
for research on stem cells derived from human embryos. In the first two years of his administration, Obama worked with a Democratic Congress to pass key parts of his agenda. But after congressional Democrats suffered what Obama referred to as “a shellacking” in the 2010 mid-term elections, Obama quickly discovered that he would have a difficult time advancing his liberal agenda.

Instead of looking for ways to compromise with congressional Republicans, however, Obama searched for other means to enact his policy goals. Then-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel promised that Obama would govern through “executive orders and directives to get the job done across a front of issues.”
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According to the
New York Times
, in fall 2011, Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. “He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism.”
¹³

“‘We had been attempting to highlight the inability of Congress to do anything,' recalled William M. Daley, who was the White House chief of staff at the time. ‘The president expressed frustration, saying we have got to scour everything and push the envelope in finding things we can do on our own.'”
¹⁴
But Obama has done more than push the envelope on executive authority. He's conducted an all-out assault on the constitutional separation of powers.

Obama hasn't tried to hide his executive office imperialism. According to the
New York Times
, “Each time, Mr. Obama has emphasized the fact that he is bypassing lawmakers. When he announced a cut in refinancing fees for federally insured mortgages last month, for example, he said: ‘If Congress refuses to act, I've said that I'll continue to do everything in my power to act without them.'”
¹⁵

One of Obama's first decisions after the mid-term elections was to direct the Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage
Act (DOMA), which bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages against constitutional challenges.
¹⁶

Other efforts include ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to issue regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, after his cap and tax legislation (which was intended to do the same thing through proper legislation) ended up in the dustbin, and granting at least ten states waivers from the strict requirements of the 2002 law No Child Left Behind.
¹⁷
And in 2011, Obama issued a signing statement claiming that he could bypass a provision in the budget that prevented him from appointing White House czars on issues such as health care, climate change, and the auto industry.
¹⁸

In July 2011, Obama told a crowd of Hispanic activists that it would be “tempting” to bypass Congress and change immigration laws himself, but “That's not how our democracy functions.... That's not how our Constitution is written.”
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Less than a year later, in June 2012, Obama announced that the Department of Homeland Security would no longer deport certain illegal immigrants who were brought to the country as children. The move was seen as a de facto amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants.

It was also seen as an overtly political move, a desperate lunge for Hispanic votes. Republican senator Marco Rubio of Florida said Obama's decision “exposes the fact that this issue is all about politics for some people.”
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Obama's amnesty by fiat allowed him to exploit the ultimate wedge issue—immigration—to divide Republicans and rally wary Hispanic voters.

One estimate from January 2012 put the number of executive orders issued by Obama at 108.
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“Obama has amazingly enough gone even further than President Bush in the use, or abuse rather, of executive power,” Gene Healy, vice president of the Cato Institute, told the
Washington Examiner
.
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Obama has also been willing to go it alone on foreign policy. He has used executive power to target people for death using drone attacks, including American citizens living abroad. Obama provoked criticism from
Congress and elsewhere when he decided to join a NATO military mission in Libya without seeking lawmakers' approval. Challenged on the constitutionality of the operation, Obama argued that the Libyan mission wasn't a declared war but rather a “kinetic military action.”

Both of Obama's two major legislative accomplishments are executive branch power grabs. Obamacare granted the Department of Health and Human Services sweeping new powers to determine what the new law meant. As reporter Philip Klein wrote in the
American Spectator
:

Due to the ambiguity of the law, Klein wrote, Sebelius will, if she remains in office, have “wide ranging... powers” to determine “what type of insurance coverage every American is required to have... what hospitals can participate in certain plans,” and otherwise oversee how billions of dollars in taxpayer money is spent.
²⁴

Then there's the Consumer Protection Act, otherwise known as the Dodd-Frank Act. The 2010 law puts a great deal of power in the hands of the executive branch. C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel for the George H. W. Bush administration, wrote in 2010 that Dodd-Frank “create[s] a structure of almost unlimited, unreviewable and sometimes secret bureaucratic discretion, with no constraints on concentration—a breakdown of
the separation of powers, which were created to guard against the exercise of arbitrary authority.”
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Dodd-Frank also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), headed by a five-year presidential appointee. The power of that appointee, law professor Todd Zywicki told author and lawyer David Limbaugh for his book
The Great Destroyer
, is “so significant it may be unconstitutional,” adding, “I am not familiar with an institution that gives so much power to one person.”