Republicans are really, really, seriously, immensely, massively P.O'd at President Obama, the Head of Executive Branch, for having the nerve, the all-fired audacity to issue Orders to the Branch of the Executive.
It's got them so mad, they could spit.
http://www.foxnews.com/...
Can the president legally bypass Congress and rule the government by decree?
The answer to the question above is: No. But you wouldn’t know that by listening to President Obama.
In the past three weeks, the president has made it clear how he plans to run the executive branch of the federal government in the next three years: with a pen and a phone.
In a menacing statement at a cabinet meeting last month, as well as during his recent State of the Union address and in a pre-Super Bowl interview with my Fox News colleague Bill O’Reilly, the president has referred to his pen and his phone as a way of suggesting that he will use his power to issue executive orders, promulgate regulations and use his influence with his appointees in the government’s administrative agencies to continue the march to transform fundamentally the relationship of the federal government and individuals to his egalitarian vision when he is unable to accomplish that with legislation from Congress.
Yes, yes, tyranny, dictator, yadda yadda - but perhaps there's a reason why besides the
Sequester and the
Fiscal Cliff the collapse of
Immigration Reform and the
40 Pointless Votes to take HealthCare away from 25 Million People that President Obama may not have much confidence left in Congressional Republicans.
Perhaps it has something to do with this.
The massive spike in filibusters at the end of the chart is of course, the first four years of President Obama.
But here's the thing, in all their fulminating over Obama's outrageous use of executive orders - it doesn't seem like any of them have bothered to gain even a wikipedia level of understanding of what an executive order actually is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
United States Presidents issue executive orders to help officers and agencies of the executive branch manage the operations within the federal government itself. Executive orders have the full force of law[1] when they take authority from a power granted directly to the Executive by the Constitution, or are made in pursuance of certain Acts of Congress that explicitly delegate to the President some degree of discretionary power (delegated legislation). Like statutes or regulations promulgated by government agencies, executive orders are subject to judicial review, and may be struck down if deemed by the courts to be unsupported by statute or the Constitution. Major policy initiatives usually require approval by the legislative branch, but executive orders have significant influence over the internal affairs of government, deciding how and to what degree laws will be enforced, dealing with emergencies, waging war, and in general fine policy choices in the implementation of broad statutes.
So even this fairly simple explanation makes it clear that Presidential Executive Orders
have the full force of law, do not necessarily require the the approval of Congress, that they are far from "lawless" as they can be challenged and overturned in the courts and they can define
how and which laws will be enforced.
One fairly dramatic example of this would be the Emancipation Proclamation where a Republican President decided to unilaterally overthrow the slavery laws of dozens of states as part of his Commander In Chief Powers during a time of war.
Or how about this chart of the rate of Presidential Signing Statements up until the reign of George W. Bush.
As you can see, Bush outpaced all previous Presidents by a wide margin at redefining and re-interpreting the laws that were passed by Congress to fit
his agenda and preference of how he planned to implement and enforce those laws.
However, don't take my word for it - here's what the Wapo reported about a GAO analysis of Bush's ability to 'take care the the laws are properly executed".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
President Bush has asserted that he is not necessarily bound by the bills he signs into law, and yesterday a congressional study found multiple examples in which the administration has not complied with the requirements of the new statutes.
Bush has been criticized for his use of "signing statements," in which he invokes presidential authority to challenge provisions of legislation passed by Congress. The president has challenged a federal ban on torture, a request for data on the administration of the USA Patriot Act and numerous other assertions of congressional power. As recently as December, Bush asserted the authority to open U.S. mail without judicial warrants in a signing statement attached to a postal reform bill.
For the first time, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office -- Congress's investigative arm -- tried to ascertain whether the administration has made good on such declarations of presidential power. In appropriations acts for fiscal 2006, GAO investigators found 160 separate provisions that Bush had objected to in signing statements. They then chose 19 to follow.
Of those 19 provisions, six -- nearly a third -- were not carried out according to law. Ten were executed by the executive branch. On three others, conditions did not require an executive branch response.
So based on this admittedly somewhat limited analysis, at least a the third of the time that President Bush specifically stated that
he would knowingly ignore the law - he kept that promise.
The GAO found that even though Congress passed provisions that required U.S. Customs to relocate it's checkpoints around Tuscon every 7 days, the agency decided this was "not consistent with their mission" and instead would periodically shutdown checkpoints - but didn't move them as Congress requested.
The GAO found that when Congress requested in 2006 that the Pentagon provide a cost breakdown for it's global expenditures on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the DOD ignored the order and didn't break out these costs, although they did provide them for the Balkans and Guantanamo Bay.
The GAO found that after Congress demand that FEMA provide their housing plans and alternatives for the failures of Hurricane Katrina - EEMA simply refused saying they "didn't usually produce such reports".
One last thing, it turns out if you actually bother to count them, that President Obama has to date issued fewer executive orders than any previous President in the last 100 Years, since the administration of Grover Cleveland.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
So yeah, that's like "Tyranny" and stuff. Which is funny coming from the GOP who said that people who talked about Impeaching Bush for his various and sundry War Crimes were suffering "
Bush Derangement Syndrome".
But then again knowing what they're actually talking about, rather than simply asserting the fantasies they want their followers to believe, has never really been the strong suit of today's branch of Conservative Republicans.
And that isn't likely to change anytime soon.
Vyan