President Obama launched a U.S. war in Libya two months ago with no congressional approval. Under the Constitution and under the War Powers Act, which allows the president to wage defensive wars for up to 60 days without prior approval, Obama probably broke the law.
Now that 60 days have passed since the United States joined the hostilities, Obama's war is more clearly illegal. But nobody should expect this to matter to a president with a long record of disregarding legal and constitutional limits on presidential and federal power.
Presidential arrogation of power is nothing new. President George W. Bush's lawyer John Yoo declared in a post-9/11 memo that no congressional "statute .... can place any limits on the president's determinations" about how to fight terrorism, proclaiming such decisions "are for the president alone to make."
But Barack Obama ran against this imperial mind-set. On war powers, he said, "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."
More broadly, he declared, "No more ignoring the law when it's inconvenient. That is not who we are. . . . . We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers."
Now that he's president, Obama apparently believes the inverse: Stubborn rulers should not be subject to the whims of the law.
We shouldn't be surprised, considering the truth behind the observation from a character in Robert Frost's poem "Build Soil": "[W]hat are wars but politics transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?" Obama is waging war the same way he has waged politics.
Obama in 2009 threw out bankruptcy law and precedent when he handed ownership of Chrysler to his political patrons, the United Auto Workers, publicly and privately threatening the creditors who objected.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/excited-power-obama-ignores-legal-restraints#ixzz1NBLGqouH
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