Jake Davison

Last November’s elections were a massive landslide that most voters assumed would put the brakes on President Obama’s big government agenda. But the Obama Administration has stretched the executive branch’s power beyond anything the founding fathers intended in order to keep pulling the country’s domestic policies ever leftward. Obama and his army of radical regulators are largely succeeding in ignoring Congress, skipping the democratic process and re-writing laws under the guise of mere regulation.

You may remember from high school civics class that the legislative branch writes the laws, the executive branch enforces them and the judicial branch interprets them. But President Obama, a graduate of Ivy League Columbia University and Harvard Law School, as well as being a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, is apparently too well educated to let that passé, crusty Constitution get in his way. In his first two years, he and his party-controlled Congress passed a bushel full of massive regulations, including ObamaCare. Now that a Republican is Speaker of the House, he has barely slowed down.

Obama summed up his view of the Constitution in a 2001 radio interview criticizing the ultra-liberal Supreme Court of the 1960’s and 1970’s by saying, “…as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.”

Obama is currently breaking free at a massive cost to freedom.

In his new book released last week, Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him, Americans For Prosperity’s Vice President of Policy Phil Kerpen lays out in frightening detail how Obama’s regulators are essentially writing and enforcing laws without any input from Congress. In the interest of full disclosure, Phil was my colleague when I worked at AFP.

Using his bureaucratic appointees in the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of the Interior and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Obama is still operating as if he controlled Congress and has the power to write laws. And, as Kerpen painstakingly describes, the appointees themselves are usually enthroned by recess appointments or other bureaucratic sleight of hand, such as creating ‘czars’ who technically don’t require the advice and consent of the Senate but who act with the same power and authority as cabinet secretaries.

What does this mean for Michigan? In my interview with Kerpen, he said, “Michigan is hit especially hard, because the EPA’s attempt to accomplish the president’s cap-and-trade agenda by other means will have a crippling effect on manufacturing.” What can Michigan citizens do before Election Day to sway Obama supporters like U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow to stop Obama? According to Kerpen, “Michigan citizens need to hold their elected officials accountable not just for the bad bills they helped pass, but also for the bad regulatory actions they failed to stop.”

For instance, take last spring’s greenhouse gas power grab by the EPA, which may cripple the auto industry. Stabenow was desperate – not to stop it and thereby save the jobs of her UAW supporters – but rather to find political cover by pretending to oppose it. She offered a phony amendment that only pretended to solve the problem and that she knew would fail. Kerpen says citizens must expose that sort of tactic, and ask her why she allowed the EPA to move forward with something the American people had already rejected.

When our elected officials are voting not to stop the EPA from enacting cap-and-trade, not to stop the FCC from regulating the Internet, not to stop the NLRB from undermining worker rights, citizens must insist on electing truly representative representatives who will stand up to bureaucrats and do their job of writing the laws – and leave only the work of enforcing them to the executive branch agencies.

Jake Davison is a North Star Writers Group columnist and president of Advantage Associates, a Michigan-based campaign consulting, public relations and public policy research firm. Jake can be reached at jd@youradvantage.org.

© 2011 North Star Writers Group

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