Quote:No one in America has both the power and the determination to hinder Obama from doing whatever he wants.

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And so with President Obama and federal courts' rulings: they have no means of enforcing their rulings. As any intemperate two-year old knows, you can do anything you want until someone compels you to stop. And so Obama can order whatever he wishes until he is compelled to stop.

The courts lacks the means of such compulsion. That leaves the Congress to rein in the executive. (Please excuse me while I erupt in peals of derisive laughter.) Congress's only authority to rein in a president consists of two things:

• Withhold funding for departments and agencies under executive authority, or
• Impeach him. 

That's it. (In 1834, the Congress voted to censure President Andrew Jackson. Jackson correctly declared that there was no Constitutional authority for it and basically told the Congress they could either impeach him or get stuffed, although he put it a little more pithily.)

Since those are the only two options available, and since the Congress is controlled by the Democrats (the Republican majority in the House meaning nothing here), neither loss of funding nor impeachment will ever be used to restrain this president.
The goal of the entire Democrat party is to be the permanent, sole political authority in the country. This is the actual transformation that Barack Obama promised to great applause in his 2008 campaign. And we are getting transformed good and hard:

Quote:nstead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party. Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about.

Obama can do this not because the Constitution or law authorize it. Most definitely they actually prohibit it. He is getting away with it because [i]there is no one who can stop him and almost no one who wants to stop him. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, in the Democrat party is in the slightest interested in reining in Obama's expansion of executive diktat because they know what few of the rest of us are awakening to: the Democrats are never going to lose that executive authority again. Let me be clear, with a promise to elucidate another day: there is never going to be another Republican president. Ever.
The media will not examine Obama's imperialist manner because they do not want to. They agree with it. The courts are literally unable to enforce their rulings contra this administration; Obama ignores them at will and without consequence. The Republicans are dominated by the Political Class and lack the numbers, influence, collective will and ideological conviction to rein in the administration even if they had the ability to do so, which they don't.
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Quote:IPAB is the most dramatic example of President Obama’s approach to government by expert decree, but much of the rest of his domestic program, from the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law to his economic agenda, is substantially similar. In total, it amounts to that fundamental transformation of American society that President Obama promised as a candidate: but instead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party. Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about.

Democracy never lasts long,” Adams famously said. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” For liberal regimes, a very common starting point on the road to serfdom is the over-delegation of legislative powers to the executive. France very nearly ended up in a permanent dictatorship as a result of that error, and was spared that fate mostly by good luck and Charles de Gaulle’s patriotism. Long before she declared her infamous state of emergency, Indira Gandhi had been centralizing power in the prime minister’s office, and India was spared a permanent dictatorship only by her political miscalculation and her dynasty-minded son’s having gotten himself killed in a plane wreck. Salazar in Portugal, Austria under Dollfuss, similar stories. But the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics.

Quote:robkelk wrote:

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Take all such pronouncements with a pasture-lick of salt. They are fear-mongering, election-posturing, patently-untrue attempts to ensure the "soft" members of the party get out and vote. Unfortunately (because they are fear-mongering, election-posturing, and patently-untrue), they work.

Logan Darklighter Wrote:Most such pronouncements occur just prior to an election. Not nearly a year after one. Besides, the point stands about the Republicans being irrelevant. A point which actually I would assume you would applaud.

Logan Darklighter Wrote:It's the fact that our government is being run by people who now are emboldened to run the country by Presidential Dictate completely outside of the rule of law or the constitution.

Quote:People have been trained from birth in democracy to solve their problems by voting, or by activism aimed at getting other people to vote. When that democracy is just the velvet glove over the iron fist of a nearly unaccountable caste of mandarins and enforcers, people really have no idea what to do about it.

Quote:What hap­pened here was the grad­ual habit­u­a­tion of the peo­ple, lit­tle by lit­tle, to being gov­erned by sur­prise; to receiv­ing deci­sions delib­er­ated in secret; to believ­ing that the sit­u­a­tion was so com­pli­cated that the gov­ern­ment had to act on infor­ma­tion which the peo­ple could not under­stand, or so dan­ger­ous that, even if the peo­ple could not under­stand it, it could not be released because of national secu­rity… Each step was so small, so incon­se­quen­tial, so well explained or, on occa­sion, ‘regret­ted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the begin­ning, unless one under­stood what the whole thing was in prin­ci­ple, what all these ‘lit­tle mea­sures’ that no ‘patri­otic [citizen]’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it devel­op­ing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn grow­ing. One day it is over his head.