Welfare is not Obama’s first abuse of executive power

Mitt Romney has seized on President Obama’s decision to gut President Clinton’s bipartisan welfare reform, releasing a statement including:

The success of bipartisan welfare reform, passed under President Clinton, has rested on the obligation of work. The president’s action is completely misdirected. Work is a dignified endeavor, and the linkage of work and welfare is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life.

This is a decent first start but it does not go far enough. While Romney does a fine job of hitting Obama on the policy of what he did, he lets him slide on how he did it. Simply put: Obama had no authority to rewrite our nation’s welfare law unilaterally. More importantly, welfare is just the latest policy area where Obama has decided that if Congress will not do what he wants then, “damn the Constitution, I will.”