Liberal Obama supporters always ask the question about what would like Obama to do? Well, when he comes out like this, threatening to just go around congress, and make law himself void of the legislative process, then it is no longer the country I recognize...I guess Podesta is already making his presence felt.
It is no wonder we think Obama is dangerous, because HE IS!
We have a process in this country to do these things Obama wants to do, and it certainly is not unilaterally. We don't have a King, we don't have a dictator, what we have in Obama may actually be worse.
I don't think that's what the President is saying.
People forget that federal executive departments are given a lot of discretion to deal with issues that come up. It's written into the laws that authorize them. They don't make law, they write rules and regulations, and the President has considerable input in that process. For example, it wasn't Congress who told the EPA to regulate CO2. The EPA decided that regulation of CO2 is part of their legal mandate to protect air quality. This, in effect, gave them the legal authority to regulate the whole fossil fuel industry, and so they are in the process of shutting down coal burning plants. None of that was spelled out in the law, but the way the law was implemented gave them the power to do things not foreseen by the legislators who wrote the law.
The executive, judicial and legislative branches of government are bound by the checks and balances of the Constitution. But those checks and balances have no effect on executive departments that have grown so large and control so much. The constitutional government just fades into the background and the executive branch runs everything.
But I digress. The point is that yes, the President has a lot of power that can be exercised as a result of the sheer size and complexity of the executive branch and the discretion and independence built into it. It gives him a lot of levers. He need write no new laws.
This extends to the debate about the ACA, too. Many have been concerned about the way the President has changed details of implementation to address problems that have come up. The law does not authorize him to make those changes, they say. He’s breaking the law, they say. But I'm not sure that the President doesn't have the authority to do those things since such legislation often authorizes an agency to "do what is necessary" to implement broad goals. There are many, many such clauses in the ACA.
The bottom line is this: A government with the power to do so many things tends toward oligarchic authoritarianism. If we end up in that waste basket, or that ash heap of history, with the old USSR then it’s our own fault.
