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Civilization Watch
Obama Spits on the Constitution
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September 23, 2010
What do you do if you're president and you want to nominate an extreme leftist to be in charge of American banking and consumer lending?
By law, the position requires the advice and consent of the Senate, and you know that your candidate for the job will never be confirmed. Many in your own party won't vote for her. It will be a big public relations mess.
Here's what you do, if you're Barack Obama. You appoint her to a much lower-level position, an advisory one that doesn't require Senate confirmation. But then you instruct the Secretary of the Treasury not to interfere with any of her decisions and make sure they're carried out.
Technically, she doesn't have the position that requires Senate confirmation (i.e., she doesn't have the title or the salary). But she has all the power of that position, and the cabinet officer who was confirmed by the Senate has been told that this appointee has the ear of the president, which is code for "stay out of her way."
The extremist who has been unconstitutionally given authority she has no right to hold is Elizabeth Warren, who is effectively running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without any checks and balances whatsoever (unless we count Obama's "firm hand").
Now, if Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had any spunk at all, he would resign his position over this. Obama's action is unconstitutional and politically stupid. It shows his contempt for the Constitution. It shows his ignorance of and contempt for American business.
Something as vital as consumer credit is no longer under the supervision of our elected representatives – now Obama and his cronies can do what's "good" for us, without our opinions mattering at all.
As the Wall Street Journal puts it: "Remind us again why the tea party critique of Obama governance is crazy." For more details, see http://sn.im/bankdictator (Full URL: http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748703440604575495681843430198-lMyQjAxMTAwMDEwODExNDgyWj.html )
If the Republican Party had any spunk, they would respond to this outrage by introducing a resolution of impeachment in the House of Representatives. President Obama has clearly shown by this action that he despises his oath of office.
He promised in that oath to "faithfully execute the office of president of the United States," and avowed that he would "to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Circumventing the advice-and-consent role of the Senate is a clear violation of the Constitution. Instead of preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution, he is doing his best to erase it, to make it meaningless.
And the fact that the Democrats in the Senate are sitting still for this shows what depths the Democratic Party has sunk to. There was a day when, regardless of party loyalty, Congress would have acted at once to block a president for a power grab like this.
After all, what is to stop him from appointing all kinds of unconfirmable radicals, morons and otherwise offensive candidates as "advisers to the president" and then instruct cabinet officers to look the other way as these illegal appointees do whatever they want?
This is what dictatorship looks like, boys and girls. And Obama has been doing it all along. What do you think his "czars" are? But this case is so obvious, and so dangerous to the economy as well as to our freedoms, that it cannot be allowed to stand.
But even if Obama decides to withdraw this unconstitutional appointment, we must not forget that this is what he wants to do and how he wants to govern.
Even a brainless, rubberstamp Congress like this one seems to annoy Obama too much for him to put up with that silly "Constitution" stuff. What will Obama do when he faces at least one house with a Republican majority? When the Democrats lost Congress in 1994, Bill Clinton suddenly discovered how conservative he had been all along, and co-opted all of Newt Gingrich's achievements so that he could get reelected.
But Obama? He's shown that he'll simply ignore the Constitution.
The question is, how far can he go? At what point do loyal, oath-keeping government officials say, "I will not follow that instruction because it's unconstitutional"?
Better to be fired by this president than to remain in an administration that is determined to govern as if we had a dictatorship of the proletariat instead of a Constitution.
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