executive order

Washington is out of control. Legislators, judges and unelected bureaucrats want to control our lives, livelihoods and living standards, with no accountability even for major errors, calculated deception, or deliberate, often illegal assaults on our liberties and on citizens who resist the advancing Leviathan.

But now President Obama wants to compound his social experimentation with the military, by ordering the Pentagon brass to focus not on imminent weather events surrounding battle plans – not on threats from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, ISIL, Hamas and other real hot spots – but on climate change years or decades in the future. He wants to replace Remember the Alamo with Remember the Climate!

As we digested events from last week in the light of President Obama’s Executive Order about gun control, it became clear that gun control was secondary to his attempt to marginalize the NRA. There was lots of sizzle, but no steak in the end. Even diverting attention from Gitmo, ISIS, North Korea, China, and the Middle East played a minor, but useful role.

Was there a resounding clamor for an EPA? Certainly not from Republicans. And not from Democrats – else Nixon could have (should have) gone to the bi-cameral-Democrat-majority Congress for legislation. (Actually, to expand the federal government’s purview to this massive degree would have – should have – required a Constitutional amendment.)

In my last post I discussed the apparent inversion of the responsibility of the executive branch of government, namely that it has taken on a far greater role in domestic policy while turning its back in large part on its traditional responsibility for foreign affairs. The result has been an over-mighty presidency at home, a weakened and ineffectual Congress, and a rudderless foreign policy. While I challenged the American public to rise against the tide of executive overreach, I did not thoroughly address what Congress itself can do to challenge the siphoning away of its traditional powers. There is in fact a great deal it can do.

It was long the case that American presidents held less power on domestic issues than the Congress. The executive branch could only enact the laws of the legislature with a limited tendency to veto. The president’s real power lay in setting foreign policy, as he had much more freedom of action in that arena than on the home front wherein the checks and balances of the Constitution were in full force. That traditional balance has been overridden in the current political system. The fault for this breakdown of traditional magisteria of influence lies with both the executive and the legislative branches.

Why the concern over President Obama’s Executive Orders? It is human nature that desensitization will creep in as related to frequency, making felt outrage over each successive mandate seem less intense or serious. The result: executive orders are likely to become more frequent and increasingly more extreme in their content in the absence of any serious push back to reign them in.

Is it possible that President Obama was never advised that governing by Executive Order is not the wisest thing to do? It’s definitely not the panacea he may think it is!

President Obama today announced a plan to provide relief of student-loan debt via executive order. His order would allow borrowers to pay no more than 10 percent of their “discretionary…