For Obama and Supreme Court, what goes around comes around
PRESIDENT Obama would like people to think he is being wronged by Senate Republicans who plan to deny him the chance to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. But the GOP lawmakers are determined to block his nominee not merely because he’d create a majority on the bench whose judicial philosophy is to usurp the democratic process and hand down decisions based on their own prejudices. It must, rather, be seen in the context of a presidency that has abusively increased executive power, usurping or trampling the proper authority of Congress. Obama does not respect congressional authority.
For a recent example of why Obama cannot pretend to be the victim, one need only look to his just-announced plans to sign the Paris climate treaty. The president who famously “couldn’t wait” for Congress is now attempting to commit the nation to an international global warming agreement without seeking the required approval of two-thirds of the Senate.
The president announced this not long after the Supreme Court put his Clean Power Plan on ice, pending legal challenges by states upon which it is likely to inflict grave economic damages. He is thus brazenly signing this document despite lacking the legal means to put it into effect.
In a sense, this is the least of Obama’s executive abuses, because it accomplishes nothing that can be considered legally binding. (We hope his successor tears up the document and drops it into the recycling bin). But it is important because Obama is acting in the face of opposition from both the other coequal branches of the U.S. government.
When he negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran, Obama went to the United Nations for ratification before bothering to put it before the Senate. He thus used a foreign institution to impose a major change in America’s Middle Eastern alliances, without enjoying the support of even a simple majority of Americans’ elected representatives. He has similarly crafted policy on immigration and education without the proper legislation. He even unilaterally amended a law that had already been passed — his own health care law, to be precise.
Obama has started wars without congressional approval. At one point in his presidency, he attempted to make recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess, an abuse for which a unanimous Supreme Court had to rebuke him.
Obama is a Democrat, but an anti-democrat. He makes policy in an autocratic fashion, as if he had been elected as the lawgiver and not just its enforcer.
To be fair, he is compounding earlier damage to the Constitution done by his predecessors. But because he stands on the shoulders of autocrats, Obama now stands taller than any of them.
Obama seems to feel entitled to Congress’ cooperation, and he characteristically seized the chance to give lawmakers a patronizing and schoolmasterly lecture on their constitutional duties.
But it is he more than anyone who has ignored the Constitution when it suited him. And cooperation is something you earn. The White House now says he regrets that, as a senator, he filibustered President George W. Bush’s nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.
But so what? He didn’t earn GOP cooperation then, and he hasn’t bothered to earn it since. What goes around comes around.