It’s Nice to be Emperor

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan 

If you don’t like something or want to get something done, you don’t let little things like the Constitution get in your way.

For more than three years Emperor Obama has been behaving as if the separation of powers is a pesky fly to be swatted away whenever it becomes too annoying.

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If Congress doesn’t pass the legislation he desires, he uses his executive powers and regulatory agencies to get his way. If he doesn’t like a law or thinks it’s unconstitutional, he tells his minions and bureaucrats not to enforce it.

In the past Emperor Obama used the EPA to create new cap-and-trade laws and the Department of Health and Human Services to force Catholics and other religious groups to go against their own consciences and provide their employees with abortion and birth-control coverage in their health care packages.

His latest edict came last week when he decided it would be nice to give about 1.4 million undocumented young immigrants temporary relief from deportation.

It didn’t matter to Emperor Obama what the legislative branch thought about the “DREAM Act,” which would provide conditional permanent residency to the well-behaved children of parents who came to the U.S. illegally.

It also didn’t matter to him that various versions of the act had failed to get through Congress for 10 years. He signed an imperial order and pronounced that his administration would stop deporting young illegal immigrants who meet the requirements of the DREAM Act.

In other words, once again our imperial president told Congress to buzz off. Saving his royal butt from being tossed out of the White House was more important than the rule of law and constitutional niceties.

This latest presidential power grab really wasn’t about helping young Latinos or working toward a long-run solution to a tricky immigration problem. It was about getting more Latinos to reward him with their votes in November.

Senator Marco Rubio had put forth an immigration plan that sought a long-term solution, but now it’s been shelved. Instead of doing the right thing and reaching across the aisle to Rubio and working with him, our imperious president played his usual cynical game of political solitaire.

Have you noticed how he never wants to solve anything in the long run? Whether it’s the payroll tax extension, the Keystone Pipeline or immigration, he wants it to remain an issue until December so he can use it as a ploy to get re-elected.

Emperor Obama obviously could not care less about helping the Latino population. When Democrats had control of both houses of Congress he did absolutely nothing for them.

Now he’s doing to Latinos what Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky allegedly did to the children of Pennsylvania — using and abusing them. With his short-sighted politicking, Emperor Obama has hurt the Latino cause in the long run.

More important is his disrespect for the U.S. Constitution. When he was elected president, not emperor, he raised his hand and swore to uphold the Constitution — the whole Constitution.

But like so-called “Cafeteria Catholics,” who pick and choose which rules of the Church they’ll abide by, or like those who pick and choose which of the Ten Commandments to follow, Barack Obama has become a Cafeteria Constitutionalist.

People on the right and many on the left are seriously concerned that we have an imperial president in the White House. Let’s hope the America people will be made aware of it, too, because they’re the only ones who can dethrone Emperor Obama.

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Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press, 2011). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com, or e-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.

Copyright 2012 Mike Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc., newspaper syndicate. For info contact Cari Dawson Bartley. E-mail Cari@cagle.com, (800) 696-7561.