According to Article II, the responsibility of the President is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Increasingly, many Democrats want a Chief Executive who executes the laws by killing them with lethal injections of executive orders.
Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), a critic of Obama’s decision to delay his rewrite of the nation’s immigration until after the mid-term election, recently charged this delay in executive law rewriting was discrimination against Hispanics.
We would not wait until after November if it was an issue affecting the gay and lesbian community. If this was about womens’ reproductive rights, if this was about the minimum wage, if this was about a series of other issues, the Democratic Party would come together.
I suspect Rep. Gutierrez may well be right. Certainly it is not difficult to imagine Democrats representing those constituencies demanding that the president refuse to enforce laws in those areas that they dislike. Indeed, no imagination is required; all one need do is look at Obamacare or welfare or any number of other areas, as Daniel Henninger has just helpfully done in the Wall Street Journal:
Universities, public schools, fire and police departments, the financial industry, utilities, state legislatures, orders of nuns, black parents, small-business owners, the electrons inside the Internet, random sections of the U.S. Constitution—all have learned that what they took to be the clear meaning of existing law was wrong.
Messrs. Obama and Holder have attempted to make federal legal authority limitless. The Obama-Holder theory of law—that the needs of justice, as they define it, supersede the law’s boundaries—deserves to be repudiated. It has no precedent outside progressive law journals or various periods in South American history.
I think the only interesting question that remains to be asked of Rep. Gutierrez and his like-minded Democratic colleagues in Congress is whether they believe in executive lawlessness as a matter of principle or only on the issues that concern their own constituencies. Unfortunately, regarding President Obama and Attorney General Holder, that question has already been definitively answered.
