GOP Majority In Congress Could Stop Unlawful President

 GOP Majority In Congress Could Stop Unlawful President


Unconstitutional Acts: This president continues to pile up extralegal ambitions, his latest being an attempt to skirt the Senate and commit the U.S. to a de facto global warming treaty. Would Robert Byrd have stood for that?

We had our troubles with the late Democratic senator from West Virginia. The longest-serving member of Congress in history was not the taxpayer's friend.

But Byrd did zealously guard Congress' constitutional role. He believed in the separation of powers and the checks and balances the founders created among the three branches of government.

We can't say the same for the current Senate leader, Harry Reid of Nevada. Nearly six years into the Obama presidency he's done nothing to stop the president from, in the words of radio talk show host and constitutional lawyer Mark Levin, "conducting himself in defiance of our system, in defiance of our Constitution."

What Obama can't get through law, he tries to get through executive order. Since assuming office in January 2009, the president, who has threatened that he has a phone and a pen he can use to make law, has racked up an impressive list of executive moves that ignored constitutional restraints. A few of those include:
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 Hiding the whereabouts of illegal immigrant minors who were processed over the summer after crossing the border. Richard Kelsey, assistant dean at the George Mason University School of Law, says Obama's refusal to reveal the immigrants' locations is "a new chapter in the administration's lawlessness."
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 Binding the country, according to the New York Times, to "a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress." The arrangement would have the status of a treaty, which the country can enter into only with the advice and consent of the Senate, which Obama has no intention of seeking.
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 Issuing an executive order on immigration. The dictate will likely come soon, and there is concern it will halt deportations and grant amnesty to illegals.
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 Repeatedly changing the terms of the Affordable Care Act without the congressional approval required to change law. In response, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who supported ObamaCare, told a House committee that, with his abuse of executive power, Obama's "becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid."
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 Allowing his Environmental Protection Agency to rewrite the Clean Air Act to suit its preferences.
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 Threatening to "sign executive orders and executive and administrative actions that move the ball forward," to "act on my own, without Congress." He also warned "we are not just going to be waiting for legislation" and said "wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that's what I'm going to do."
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 National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recess appointments that were made when Congress still in session. All three of the NLRB appointments were unanimously struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
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 Swapped a group of Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was being held by militants in Afghanistan, without congressional approval.

No, we don't want another Robert Byrd in the Senate. But we do need someone in Congress who will stop Obama's runaway executive train.

Will House Speaker John Boehner's lawsuit stop the president? It's not clear. Legal action often takes time.

The ballot box, though, can bring faster change. Consider what a Republican majority in both chambers could do to stop the president from ripping through the limits of his office. The threat of impeachment and removal from office for his crimes against our Constitution, as well as much-needed investigations of his administration, would become real.