President Obama’s so-called “We Can’t Wait” campaign to govern unilaterally without input from Congress took a big step last week. With an official policy directive, Obama gutted President Clinton’s 1996 bipartisan welfare reform by removing the federal requirement that those on welfare either work or train for work.

As Mitt Romney, his Republican opponent, noted in a statement, this is bad policy, for “the linkage of work and welfare is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life.” Yet Romney let Obama slide on the legally dubious method Obama used to override the plain language of the welfare reform statute.