Posted by Chrissy the Hyphenated
Everybody who plans to set foot in a voting booth on Nov 6, 2012 should read this:
Excited by power, Obama ignores legal restraints By Timothy P. Carney – May 22, 2011
http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/excited-power-obama-ignores-legal-restraints
U.S. President Barack Obama delivers a statement about Libya in the East Room of the White House March 18, 2011 in Washington, DC. Under the Constitution and under the War Powers Act, the president is allowed to wage defensive wars for up to 60 days without prior Congressional approval. Now that 60 days have passed since the United States joined the hostilities, Obama’s war is more clearly illegal.
President Obama launched a U.S. war in Libya two months ago with no congressional approval. Under the Constitution and under the War Powers Act, which allows the president to wage defensive wars for up to 60 days without prior approval, Obama probably broke the law.
Now that 60 days have passed since the United States joined the hostilities, Obama’s war is more clearly illegal. But nobody should expect this to matter to a president with a long record of disregarding legal and constitutional limits on presidential and federal power.
Presidential arrogation of power is nothing new. President George W. Bush’s lawyer John Yoo declared in a post-9/11 memo that no congressional “statute …. can place any limits on the president’s determinations” about how to fight terrorism, proclaiming such decisions “are for the president alone to make.”
But Barack Obama ran against this imperial mind-set. On war powers, he said, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
More broadly, he declared, “No more ignoring the law when it’s inconvenient. That is not who we are. . . . . We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers.”
Now that he’s president, Obama apparently believes the inverse: Stubborn rulers should not be subject to the whims of the law.
Read more at http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/excited-power-obama-ignores-legal-restraints
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