Obama: lame duck? - his ability to ignore laws he doesn’t like by refusing to enforce them represents a remarkable extension of executive power

Obama is no lame duck

By F.H. Buckley

This president flexes for the final round

There’s been a lot of gleeful chatter about the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, from people who should know better.

Looking at poll numbers, NBC’s chief White House correspondent and political director Chuck Todd said that voters are telling Barack Obama “your presidency is over.” Similarly, The Wall Street Journal has seized upon the half-baked idea that Congress might sue the president for failing to enforce the law. Then Rep. Lou Barletta, Pennsylvania Republican, missed an excellent opportunity to keep silent when he speculated that the president might be impeached. Finally, attention has begun to turn to the 2016 election and the choice of a new president, which underlines how the 22nd Amendment, limiting the chief executive to two terms, tends to turn presidents into lame ducks.

Don’t believe it. We’re a representative democracy, and a shift in poll numbers doesn’t take a thing away from the president’s constitutional powers. As I explain in “The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America,” there aren’t very many limits to those powers today. Sure, the president has to face an election every four years, but that’s almost the only thing left of the Constitution the Framers gave us in their 1787 Convention.

The president’s ability to make law by executive order will continue until Jan. 20, 2017, and you can bet he’ll avail himself of this. Back in February, he raised the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors to $10.10 an hour, and in the cards is a new executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. Ostensibly, independent regulatory bodies will also take their lead from the president, as the Environmental Protection Agency recently did when it ordered coal-fired plants to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by up to 20 percent. As for presidential war powers and Iraq, the president has told Congress that the decision whether to intervene or not is his and his alone.

The president’s ability to ignore laws he doesn’t like by refusing to enforce them represents a remarkable extension of executive power.


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