Busted, President Obama.
As noted by The Washington Free Beacon, President Barack Obama wasn’t always a fan of executive privilege. In fact, the then-Senator complained during a 2008 stump speech in Lancaster, Pa. about his predecessor’s efforts to “bring more and more power into the executive branch” rather than work with Congress.
“I taught constitutional law for ten years,” President Obama said in 2008. “I take the Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems that were facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all, and that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m President of the United States of America.”
And yet, six years later, Obama is practically jumping for joy at the fact that he has the power to act unilaterally from Congress by making it a key element of his 2014 State of the Union address and declaring 2014 his “year of action.”
On Wednesday, the commander-in-chief signed his first executive order under that decree to raise the minimum wage for some federal workers, a move that some experts believe to be illegal because it contradicts the guidelines set forth by the Service Contract Act of 1965.
