OPINION:
Editor’s note: This is one in a series examining the Constitution and Federalist Papers in today’s America.
Click HERE to read the series.
“I’m president, I’m not king.… There’s a limit to the discretion that I can show because I’m obliged to execute the law. I can’t just make the laws up myself.”
That was Barack Obama’s correct response in October 2010 when he was being pressed by immigration activist groups to enact immigration reform without the benefit of congressional involvement. Just two years later, however, President Obama had slightly altered his view of the power of the executive branch role in the lawmaking process. “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” he said in describing his new approach to Congress.
Mr. Obama eventually would use his “pen and phone” strategy to do exactly what the immigration advocates originally wanted him to do: circumvent Congress to implement the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy via executive order.
Unfortunately, in the United States, such circumvention has now become so widely accepted that Congress seems to have accepted its fate as an inferior branch of the federal government.
This is, of course, contrary to the concepts of co-equal branches and separation of powers, and is, more importantly, fundamentally unwise.
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Read More: Lee Zeldin: Unstable policies result from failure of Constitution separation of powers