American presidents have often wanted to do things they couldn’t do legally. But in the past presidents had a basic pact with the republic and thus restrained themselves or were restrained by law. FDR, for example, wanted to pack the Supreme Court. He found out otherwise.
But we now have a president who appears unwilling to be restrained by the law. Former judge and legal scholar Michael McConnell addressed this yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. Peter Ferrara addresses the issue today in the American Spectator. “It’s not so much that [President Obama] thinks that he’s above the law as he thinks he is the law,” reads the subhead.
Both McConnell’s and Ferrara’s pieces are pegged to the president’s unilateral decision that the employer mandate, a key part of ObamaCare, the timing of which is written in to the law passed by Congress, will be suspended. The mandate is proving unworkable and a political embarrassment for the administration. Solution: suspend it. Never mind the law!
Sure, ObamaCare is an economic fiasco but it is also the law. And the sooner we recogtnize this the better. The president would like to hide this truth from the public, and so he delays. ObamaCare is his legacy and he seems to be willing to take powers that are not his according to our Constitution to delay the day of reckoning.
But as Ferrara writes:
Delaying the employer mandate by one year will not solve this problem, as employers know the Obamacare cost increases are coming. It will just give them more time to rearrange their work forces to further evade Obamacare.
I have a piece ("The Royal Presidency") on the homepage about a president who both substantively and stylistically takes on privileges unbecoming to the leader of a republic.
I must say I think Ferrara’s suggestion that the Tea Party to call for impeachment of the president is off the wall, one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard.
We need to reclaim the rule of law. I believe that, but until the vast majority of citizens recognize that we have lost it, reclamation is an impossible project.
Nothing could be more detrimental than trying to impeach the president. If we can't regain our republic with less drastic measures, we are in deeper trouble than even I believe us to be.