Not that any of the scandals or court rulings actually MATTER to the Unchecked President

[Logan Darklighter]

This article by Donald Sensing doesn't say anything that hasn't been said before. But it says it very well and quite succinctly. 
It’s a gloomy message. But it seems to be the truth, at least as I see it.

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

...
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:

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.
[/i]

[robkelk]

Panicky Ed Schultz Predicts: If Romney Wins, There'll 'Never Be a Democratic President Again'

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.

In Yes, Prime Minister, this is called "playing the man, not the ball." And we all know how old Yes, Prime Minister is.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Logan Darklighter]

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.
There is no effective check on the "Ruling Class" because the leadership of the Republicans is part of that ruling class. 

But what's really sad and frightening to me - and the main point of the article, more than any particular political party going the way of the Whigs - is this: We are living in a post-constitutional America now. The system is broken because the administration and bureaucracy no longer rule the country based on the laws of the land, but by dictate from "above". 

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.

[khagler]

robkelk wrote:

---

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.

Agreed. I remember the Democrats saying that about Bush, and the Republicans saying it about Clinton. I'd like to think it doesn't work because it's so insulting to the listener's intelligence, but I haven't really seen any evidence either way.
And on the subject of insulting people's intelligence, let's all pause to contemplate the absurdity of the National Review complaining about a President ignoring the Constitution and ruling by decree...

[robkelk]

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.

Is it a year after an election, or a year before one?

And I tend to be small-c conservative in my thinking (by the Canadian definition which in other parts of the world is "wild-eyed small-l liberal", but still) - it's an occupational hazard of being a civil servant.

(The "small-c" and "small-l" bits are to distinguish the viewpoints from the Canadian political parties of the same names but different viewpoints, BTW. They get the capital letters.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Bob Schroeck]

Quite frankly, in my opinion any such claims are either paranoia, fear-mongering, or both.

Political parties in the United States have formed and disbanded repeatedly since the nation was founded. I would have no more concern over there never being another Republican or Democrat as President than I have over the prospect of there never being another Whig or Bull Moose President. Despite pretensions (mostly Republican, but not solely so) to being the Bearers of Divine Truth, no party deserves to exist forever, and if they vanish into the sunset, it's because they failed to serve their purpose, which is to represent the interests of some large, but probably not all-encompassing, segment of the population. Once a party forgets their purpose, and starts thinking of themselves as a dynasty that must be preserved Lest Darkness Fall And The Barbarians Overrun Us All, they deserve to disappear into the history books. Something else will form to take up their original purpose and do it better, at least at the start.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Logan Darklighter]

You're missing the point. Whether the Republican Party goes the way of the Whigs or not is irrelevant. 
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. And the system has been purposely compromised and all opposition neutralized that could possibly stop them from doing so. There is no "loyal opposition" because the leaders at the top of what would be that "loyal opposition" (The Republicans) have been co-opted into the power structure and are more concerned with keeping their own jobs and lining their nests than with upholding the constitution and/or the balance of powers between the three branches of government. 

[robkelk]

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.

That's an extremely serious charge. If you have any evidence that it is true, please take the evidence to the FBI.

(You appear to have been taken in by what Bob called "paranoia, fear-mongering, or both"... but I'm willing to entertain the idea that you know something that the rest of us don't.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Foxboy]

I still wish we could get a bipartisan (amongst the voters, because fuck the partly leaders) "NO INCUMBENTS!" motion to take off.

Even if it's just until we get a fresh cycle in the Senate... so, what, three biennial election cycles?
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[Bob Schroeck]

If we're going to sling accusations of actively trying "to run the country by Presidential Dictate", I think we'll have to go back about forty years to stick the first charge to a Republican, who made the blatant claim on national TV that "if the President does it, that makes it legal" and appeared to believe it with all his heart.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[khagler]

I came across a comment on this article that sums up the problem nicely:

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.

[Rajvik]

Bob, you might want to go back even further to FDR and the New Deal which was technically struck down by the supreme court as being unconstitutional in i believe the third year of his presidency, didnt keep him from maintaining the TVA and the rest of the alphabet soup through out his 3 elections.
 

[RMH999]

Or Andrew Jackson's "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" when the Supreme Court was ignored regarding the Cherokee tribe relocations.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
- Albert Einstein

[Bob Schroeck]

In that case, why don't we just say that it's an American political tradition? And obviously its mis- and over-use through the centuries is going to result in a tyrannical despotism any day now.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[khagler]

As people have pointed out here, it's more of a gradual process, but I suspect that in the future history lessons simplified for schoolchildren will mark the Bush/Obama years as the starting point, as it was then that the President openly seized power to arbitrarily imprison, torture, and murder people.

Here's a good quote on the gradual process:

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.

[classicdrogn]

Huh, I wandered by Politics because I had an idea for a political cartoon that I decided not to actually draw because it was sensationalistic, but wanted to mention anyway... and found the perfect thread to put it in.

So: Centered, we have Lady Liberty, tied down on a bench. The cloth over her face is marked "Bill of Rights" (or just "Constitution") but the ink is running under the stream of water, and the caption is one of the Obvious Bad Guys standing over her saying "Keep pouring, I can still read the inconvenient parts."
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Black Aeronaut]

Guys. Let me say this as succinctly as possible so there can be no doubt: the conservatives, whoever they were at the time, shot themselves in the foot with Citizens United.

It was conservatives that thought that the second iraq war was a great idea. It was conservatives that allowed important American industries to be moved to China. It was conservatives that want to destroy Net Neutrality. And it was conservatives that gave Obama his most important tool for the election: limitless donations.

No, I don't appreciate all the things he's done. (Quit screwing around with gun control, dammit!) But I appreciate the tea party fucking with the ACA far less. (I'd love it if I can get treated for depression, but apparently some Republicans would rather have me stripped of my 2nd ammendment rights than have me be able to afford mental health care.)

[Dartz]

Am I the only one who's noticed the amount of phrases and buzzwords being tossed around like newspeak these days?
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[robkelk]

Thinking for yourself is doubleplus-ungood - let the pundits and politicians tell you what's best.

Or so the pundits and politicians would prefer, at least.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012