Thursday, February 10, 2011

Rule of law

Lawless Democrats

Citing "clear and convincing evidence," a U.S. district court judge a week ago held the Obama administration's Interior Department in contempt for continuing to enforce a moratorium on oil drilling after he told the department it had no right to do so.

"Each step the government took following the court's imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance," Judge Martin Feldman found.

Ordinarily there are consequences for such defiance. But this administration fears nothing because there's simply no precedent for a government trampling the law with such apparent impunity.

It's not just the judge's ruling on drilling that draws attention. There's a growing pattern of lawlessness.

Three days earlier, another district court judge, Roger Vinson of Florida, ruled in a lawsuit brought by 26 states that Congress lacked authority under the Commerce Clause to force individuals to buy insurance, the cornerstone of ObamaCare.

Allowing this power would make the "enumeration of powers in the Constitution (in) vain for it would be difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power," Vinson wrote, ruling the entire law unconstitutional.

That ruling followed one by Virginia District Court Judge Henry Hudson, who ruled against the individual mandate alone last December.

The administration's response? "Implementation of the health care bill rightly continues to move forward as the law of the land," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told CNS.

He claimed that since other judges on lesser matters had ruled for ObamaCare, Vinson's ruling could be ignored. The administration also, incredibly, hurled charges of "judicial activism" at the judge.

The legal defiance seems to infect the Democrats down to the state — and even city — level.

• In Virginia this week, Chief General District Court Judge Dean Worcester declared he would ignore a Virginia Supreme Court ruling about the rights of illegal immigrants in deportation hearings, reasoning that the higher court was "wrong."

• In California, voters in 2004 approved a balanced budget amendment, and not once has gotten one from its Democrat-controlled state legislature, which employed Enron-style accounting by pushing unfunded liabilities off the books. Nobody's in jail for that one.

• In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel is running for mayor despite a law requiring candidates to have lived in the city for a year to be eligible to run. In his case, he got a judge to bend the law his way, something that will no doubt happen even more once he has real power as mayor.

The Obama administration's open defiance of judges is a disturbing new development because it's so brazenly illegal and the whole system seems to have been caught off guard.

It signals a corruption at the top that didn't start with defying judges, but with a long mudslide of questionable legal actions that amounted to abuses of power.

The contempt for law was seen early in the stiffing of bondholders in the General Motors bankruptcy reorganization so that favored political groups like labor unions could be paid first and be given ownership in GM stock, negating 200 years of bankruptcy precedent.

It's also visible in Environmental Protection Agency attempts to enact the failed cap-and-trade law through regulation after Congress refused to pass it.

And it's being repeated by the National Labor Relations Board, which is trying to foist "card check" unionization on unwilling workers through regulatory means because Congress wouldn't pass that law either.

Make no mistake — it's an assault on democracy to accept neither the law nor the checks and balances in our constitution. It points to an executive branch of concentrated power and diminished accountability, one that fails to recognize the foundations of democracy in the rule of law.

This could be a most damaging legacy of the Obama presidency.

2 comments:

JeremyR said...

Get real, this conduct by Obama is like expecting a thief to respect property laws after he has broken into your house, kidnapped and raped your wife, and murdered your children.
From my perspective, Obama began with an utter disregard for basic constitutional and election laws.
Why should he change now?

jerry said...

Agreed. I don't think he has any intention of changing his anti Constitutional views. But, it's important to keep his actions out front and illuminated.