When talking about the possibility of undoing outgoing Majority Leader Senator Harry Reid’s remake of rules regarding confirming nominees, incoming Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell sadly said that a bell that has been rung can’t be unrung. It is likely that Reid, seeking partisan advantage, changed the way the Senate operates forever.
President Obama has created “a new model of presidency,” too, according to George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley, a maverick liberal who has been vocal in warning Americans about the rise under President Obama of a new kind of presidency that contradicts everything the Founders created with the Constitution.
In a recent interview on Fox, Turley said this:
Well, I think we are at a tipping point. This process, this trend didn't start with President Obama. We've seen this trend growing over the years. The center of gravity in our system, our three branch system is moving and we're creating this all powerful presidency, this type of uber presidency.
The key to a Madisonian system is that nobody has enough power to go it alone, that was the genius of James Madison. But we're seeing the rise of a new model of presidency and I believe that supporters of President Obama will rue the day when they stayed silent in the face of this kind of concentration of power. This is the very danger that the constitution was designed to prevent, the concentration of power in one person's hands or one branch…
The important thing is for people to understand that what we're seeing is a change in our system. This is very system. It is nothing to do with President Obama's policies. Some of us may agree with those. It's how he's doing it, not what he's doing. And that should unite everyone. We just had a report come out today of a huge number of what's called memoranda that the president's issuing –…And so, we're losing the focus of our system. We're becoming even less formal. We've gone from presidential orders to memoranda and we're devolving in that sense in the way that the framers wanted…
Like many Americans, I am planning to watch President Obama’s aloha ress conference before he makes his annual trip to Hawaii. I wish a reporter would ask him, without the meandering and stage setting that often accompanies (and blunts) press questioning of the president, if he has fundamentally changed the system of checks and balances put into our system by the Founders. Did he create a new kind of presidency? Oh, never mind. He wouldn't tell us what we know already.
But the more important question: Will it be possible to restore checks and balances and bring the presidency back into accord with the Constitution? That should be a question asked in the 2016 presidential election.
If the damage cannot be repaired, we become a new kind of country, just as assuredly as Harry Reid likely changed the Senate into perpetuity.