Obama's Mockery of the Constitution, Part 2

I want to follow up on what I wrote last week on Obama's "recess appointments" by linking to this excellent opinion article in The Wall Street Journal by Michael McConnell, the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. McConnell ably explains why Obama's unconstitutional appointments matter and refutes claims made by Obama's defenders.

I highly recommend that you read the entire article, as I cannot summarize everything from it here. However, I wanted to highlight one portion of the article in which McConnell notes that Obama's latest appointments merely continue the pattern of callous disregard for the Constitution that has marked his entire presidency. Obama decided to go to war in Libya not only without a congressional declaration of war, but also without following the reporting requirements of the War Powers Resolution that included a 60-day deadline for congressional authorization. His administration is attempting to bypass Congress entirely by imposing cap-and-trade regulations and union card check legislation, despite the fact that the people's representatives in Congress have rejected both.

Obama believes that he is above the law. He believes he has the right to appoint whomever he wants to whatever position he wants without congressional approval, the right to make sweeping new laws apart from Congress, and the right to unilaterally take our country to war with no accountability to Congress whatsoever. If he gets away with this behavior, he will be emboldened to be even more brazen. Democrats don't care; they support Obama's actions. Republicans control only one branch of Congress and so can do little to stop Obama -- and they are not doing a very good job using the power and public platform they do have. The media is far too busy asking the Republican presidential candidates about their views on contraception to bother to keep Obama accountable. It is difficult and time-consuming to challenge many of these things in court.

2012 is a critical year for those of us who value our constitutional system. We have a chance to defeat Obama, and we'd better not screw it up. I read comments on several conservative websites, and it worries me how divided conservatives are and how determined they seem to be to cannibalize each other. We may disagree on which of the GOP candidates is the best, but we should all agree that any of them, with all their imperfections, would be infinitely better than Obama. Romney, Santorum, Perry, Gingrich, Huntsman -- any of them. (Ron Paul is a bit of a special case, and his views are so dramatically out of the mainstream of the Republican party that I could understand some Republicans being unwilling to support him. But he is a niche candidate who has no chance of winning the nomination.) I keep reading comments from supposed conservatives saying they would "never" vote for ___ [insert name of Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, etc]. If conservatives continue with that attitude, they will swing this election to Obama. As conservatives, we should have one political goal this year, and everything we do should further that goal. Obama's defeat is the only thing that will make achieving our other goals possible, including repealing ObamaCare.