Mitt Romney has seized on President Obama’s decision to gut President Clinton’s bipartisan welfare reform, releasing a statement including:
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.”
Education: After failing to get Congress to reform the No Child Left Behind law, Obama unilaterally rewrote it using an unprecedented expansion of waiver authority.
Telecommunications: After failing to pass his preferred net neutrality law, Obama had the FCC enact it through administrative fiat. A federal court has already thrown out the rule as an overreach of regulatory power.
Immigration: Not only has Obama attempted to rewrite our nation’s immigration laws through non-enforcement, a policy the Supreme Court rebuked him for, but Obama also instituted a de facto amnesty by administrative fiat.
Labor: After failing to get “card check” passed through Congress, Obama first illegally appointed two new members to the National Labor Relations Board, which has then pursued a “snap elections” rule that would make organizing unions easier.
Libya: Obama did not even try to go to Congress to get approval for his “kinetic action” against Libya. As one freshman U.S. Senator from Illinois once said: “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
