And when one Branch refuses to defend it self via the Constitution? A Crisis - Granite Grok

And when one Branch refuses to defend it self via the Constitution? A Crisis

Is it really just for show?  Everyone on the Right sees Obama as overreaching his authority (hint: 20 Supreme Court rulings against him, all 9-0 unanimously) says that the Constitutional lecturer (Obama) is not trying to govern within its confines but to break out of it.  The Constitutional gives Congress the power to reign in the Reigner:

  • The Power of the Purse (US House)
  • Impeachment (US House indicts, US Senate runs the trial)

We saw what happened when the US House tried to defund Obamacare – they couldn’t take the heat.  And now, the second shoe (reformatted, emphasis mine): 

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) indicated today that if President Barack Obama takes actions that exceed his constitutional authority, the House of Representatives has no plans to use its own constitutional authority to withhold funding from those actions.  At his weekly press briefing, CNSNews.com asked Boehner:

You’ve said you disagree with calls to impeach the president over abuse of power via executive actions. But under the Constitution the House actually has the power of the purse. So, if the President takes actions that exceed his Constitutional authority, will you withhold funding for those actions in the next must-pass appropriations bill?”

“There’s a lot of ways to deal with this issue,” Boehner responded. “But we’ve got a Republican House and we’ve got a Democratic Senate. And there are a lot of things we’ve passed here that the Senate clearly has not passed.  “Now, when it comes to that issue, some of these actions that you could defund, there clearly isn’t, I wouldn’t guess, an appetite in the United States Senate to withhold those funds,” Boehner continued. “That’s why we’ve decided that the more direct approach of suing the president is the right path to go down here.”  “Listen, I’m for upholding the Constitution,” said Boehner, “and I’m for protecting the interest of the House vis-à-vis the power grab that’s going on by the White House. And while he has the authority to issue executive orders, he does not have the authority to unilaterally change laws in our country, which he has done.”  Boehner announced this June that the House now plans to sue President Obama for taking unilateral actions that exceed his legal authority, saying at the time that abuse of power affords Obama “king-like authority at the expense of the American people and their elected legislators.”

I understand the politics of the matter – the Democrats control US Senate and are quite partial to the Redistributionist now sitting in the Oval Office (the first tweet)  and have a material effect on both bill passage and impeachment.    But doing just a hair above doing nothing (the second tweet) is nothing but political theater – yes, it goes to Obama’s illegal modifications of Obamacare.

There are several pillars to American Exceptionalism and its continued existence.  Chief among them is the Separation of Powers; Obama has abrogated that while the Congress has given it away.  I will tell you: if it were a Democrat controlled House and Senate while the Presidency was held by a Republican, I would still hold to the value that the Congress should fight as hard as possible against that President.

Our country is MORE than just partisan politics – it is predicated by people following the law and in the case of our Federal Government politicians, the Constitution.  It is THE document, our Social Contract, our embedded values, that holds this country together.  Not defending it, not heeding the call of the tipping point – it will be the fall into the abyss.

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