The first term's over-and-over subject was "the
wealthiest 1%." Past some point, people wondered why he kept beating these
half-dead horses. After the election, we knew. It was to propagandize the
targeted voting base that would provide his 4% popular-vote margin of
victory—very young voters and minorities. They believed. He won.
The second-term over-and-over, elevated in his summer
speech tour, is the shafting of the middle class. But the real purpose here
isn't the speeches' parboiled proposals. It is what he says the shafting of the
middle class is forcing him to do. It is forcing him to "act"—to undertake an
unprecedented exercise of presidential power in domestic policy-making.
ObamaCare was legislated. In the second term, new law will come from him.
Please don't complain later that you didn't see it
coming. As always, Mr. Obama states publicly what his intentions are. He is
doing that now. Toward the end of his speech last week in Jacksonville, Fla., he
said: "So where I can act on my own, I'm going to act on my own. I won't wait
for Congress." (Applause.)
The July 24 speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill.,
has at least four references to his intent to act on his own authority, as he
interprets it: "That means whatever executive authority I have to help the
middle class, I'll use it." (Applause.) And: "We're going to do everything we
can, wherever we can, with or without Congress."
Every president since George Washington has felt
frustration with the American system's impediments to change. This president is
done with Congress.
The political left, historically inclined by ideological
belief to public policy that is imposed rather than legislated, will support Mr.
Obama's expansion of authority. The rest of us should not.
The U.S. has a system of checks and balances. Mr. Obama
is rebalancing the system toward a national-leader model that is alien to the
American tradition.
To create public support for so much unilateral
authority, Mr. Obama needs to lessen support for the other two branches of
government—Congress and the judiciary. He is doing that.
Mr. Obama and his supporters in the punditocracy are
defending this escalation by arguing that Congress is "gridlocked." But don't
overstate that low congressional approval rating. This is the one branch that
represents the views of all Americans. It's gridlocked because voters are.
Take a closer look at the Galesburg and Jacksonville
speeches. Mr. Obama doesn't merely criticize Congress. He mocks it repeatedly.
Washington "ignored" problems. It "made things worse." It "manufactures" crises
and "phony scandals." He is persuading his audiences to set Congress aside and
let him act.
So too the judiciary. During his 2010 State of the Union
speech, Mr. Obama denounced the Supreme Court Justices in front of him. The
National Labor Relations Board has continued to issue orders despite two federal
court rulings forbidding it to do so. Attorney General Eric Holder says he will
use a different section of the Voting Rights Act to impose requirements on
Southern states that the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Mr. Obama's repeated
flouting of the judiciary and its decisions are undermining its institutional
authority, as intended.
The three administration nominees enabled by the
Senate's filibuster deal—Richard Cordray at the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau, Thomas Perez at the Labor Department and EPA Administrator Gina
McCarthy—open a vast swath of American life to executive authority on steroids.
There won't be enough hours in the day for Mr. Obama to "act on my own."
In a recent Journal op-ed, "Obama Suspends the Law,"
former federal judge Michael McConnell noted there are few means to stop a
president who decides he is not obligated to execute laws as passed by Congress.
So there's little reason to doubt we'll see more Obamaesque dismissals of
established law, as with ObamaCare's employer mandate. Mr. Obama is pushing in a
direction that has the potential for a political crisis.
A principled opposition would speak out. Barack Obama is
right that he isn't running again. But the Democratic Party is. Their Republican
opponents should force the party's incumbents to defend the president's creeping
authoritarianism.
If Democratic Senate incumbents or candidates from
Louisiana, Alaska, Missouri, Arkansas, North Carolina, Montana and Iowa think
voters should accede to a new American system in which a president forces laws
into place as his prerogative rather than first passing them through Congress,
they should be made to say so.
And to be sure, the other purpose of the
shafted middle-class tour is to demolish the GOP's standing with independent
voters and take back the House in 2014. If that happens—and absent a more
public, aggressive Republican voice it may—an unchecked, unbalanced presidential
system will finally arrive.
A final quotation on America's system of government: "To
ensure that no person or group would amass too much power, the founders
established a government in which the powers to create, implement, and
adjudicate laws were separated. Each branch of government is balanced by powers
in the other two coequal branches." Source: The White House website of President
Barack Obama.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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