Bryan Preston at The PJ Tatler – Matt Damon and Charles Krauthammer Agree: Obama is No Good:
Obama is leading. He just isn’t leading in any traditionally American way, through the constitutional process and within the bounds of our historic political discourse. But he is leading, and it’s a grave mistake to believe otherwise.
Kevin Williamson warns where Obama is leading.
Barack Obama’s administration is unmoored from the institutions that have long kept the imperial tendencies of the American presidency in check. That is partly the fault of Congress, which has punted too many of its legislative responsibilities to the president’s army of faceless regulators, but it is in no small part the result of an intentional strategy on the part of the administration. He has spent the past five years methodically testing the limits of what he can get away with, like one of those crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic Park. Barack Obama is a Harvard Law graduate, and he knows that he cannot make recess appointments when Congress is not in recess. He knows that his HHS is promulgating regulations that conflict with federal statutes. He knows that he is not constitutionally empowered to pick and choose which laws will be enforced. This is a might-makes-right presidency, and if Barack Obama has been from time to time muddled and contradictory, he has been clear on the point that he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law.
Or what used to be our common language. Obama doesn’t believe in either one.
And here we are, living in what was a constitutional republic being rapidly transformed into a surveillance state.
And this is why, as much as I respect him, I find Victor Davis Hanson’s analysis of the Obama presidency unconvincing.
Discuss.