Should The President Be Allowed To Ignore The Constitution ?

Yesterday the Washington Examiner posted an article by Michael Barone on President Obama’s tendency to ignore the law when he decides he wants to do something. The article cites a number of examples.

In January 2012 President Obama made some recess appointments–three members of the National Labor Relations Board and the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Unfortunately the Senate did not happen to be recess at the time.

The article reports:

Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the NLRB recess appointments were unconstitutional.

…decisions of the NLRB are the CFPB are in legal limbo, pending a Supreme Court decision. Hundreds of thousands of people and are affected and millions of dollars are at stake. There is a price for not observing the rule of law.

The article goes on to list a few more examples:

For several years the Obama administration has refused to obey a law requiring the president’s budget to be submitted on a certain date. As budget director, Treasury nominee Jack Lew refused to obey the law requiring him to issue a report in response to the trustees’ report on Medicare.

During the 2012 campaign the Pentagon told defense contractors not to inform employees that they may be laid off if the sequester took effect as required by the WARN Act.

They were even told that the government would pay any fines for not complying. What law authorizes that?

…In spring 2009 we got our first glimmers of this modus operandi. In arranging the Chrysler bankruptcy administration, officials brushed aside the rights of secured creditors in order to pay off the United Auto Workers.

This represents a pattern–there are no isolated incidents here. Unfortunately we have almost four more years to get through before we can get back to the Constitution.Enhanced by Zemanta

If This Decision Stands, What Happens Next ?

The Daily Caller (along with many other news sources) is reporting today that the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has ruled that President Obama’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board made during the time that the President declared that the Senate was in recess are unconstitutional. The President does not have the power to declare whether or not the Senate is in recess–that is up to the Senate.

The article reports:

The Jan. 25 ruling came after Republican senators filed a case arguing that Obama did not have the power to appoint top-level officials via a “recess appointment” if the Senate says it is in session.

Obama made that claim when he announced the appointment of two people to the National Labor Relations Board in January 2012.

The appointments allowed the board to subsequently issue a series of pro-labor, anti-business decisions. Following the court’s ruling, the board’s decisions are now vulnerable to a series of lawsuits.

Obama used the same claim to appoint Democratic lawyer Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in January 2012.

The Landmark Legal Foundation further explains:

…three appointments to the five-member NLRB by President Obama made on January 4, 2012, under the Constitution’s Recess Appointments Clause (Article II, Section 2, Clause 3), were not valid  because the Senate was not in recess at the time the appointments were announced. 

There have been a number of rulings by the NLRB and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since these recess appointments. Theoretically all those actions will be nullified because the people making the decisions were not legally entitled to make them.

The specific case that was ruled on was Noel Canning v. National Labor Relations Board. I am sure that we have not heard the end of this.

Running The Economy When You Don’t Understand Business Principles

The Wall Street Journal posted an article online today entitled, “You Don’t Owe That.”

The article reports:

We’ll have to wait until Friday to see how slowly the U.S. economy expanded in the second quarter. But today Team Obama will tell Congress about its latest proposals to spread the wealth around—specifically from private lenders to the people who owe them money on student loans. The goal is to create new ways for borrowers to avoid repayment.

The government is focusing of ways to allow students to default on their loans. There are about $1 trillion in student loans outstanding; close to $900 billion are federal loans. About 90 percent of recent student loans are held by the government.

The article states:

The new report (by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) says that Congress should consider letting borrowers discharge their private student loans through bankruptcy. This would reverse a hard lesson learned during the 1970s. After a surge in former students declaring bankruptcy to avoid repaying their loans, Congress acted to protect lenders beginning in 1977. First it limited the ability of borrowers with government loans to use bankruptcy as a bailout ramp, and later the ban was applied to all student loans (with some exceptions for hardship cases).This reform also protected future borrowers.

Credit miraculously becomes more available when lenders believe they might be repaid.

You would think that the government might want to teach future leaders of American that when you sign a paper saying you will pay something back, you are supposed to mean it.

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