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WASHINGTON — One Saturday last fall, President Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism. “We had been attempting to highlight the inability of Congress to do anything,” recalled William M. Daley, who was the White House chief of staff at the time. “The president expressed frustration, saying we have got to scour everything and push the envelope in finding things we can do on our own.” For Mr. Obama, that...

— One Saturday last fall, President Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism. -snip- But increasingly in recent months, the administration has been seeking ways to act without Congress. Branding its unilateral efforts “We Can’t Wait,” a slogan that aides said Mr. Obama coined at that strategy meeting, the White House has rolled out dozens of new policies — on creating jobs for veterans, preventing drug shortages, raising fuel economy...

One Saturday last fall, President Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism. snip Aides say many more such moves are coming. Not just a short-term shift in governing style and a re-election strategy, Mr. Obama’s increasingly assertive use of executive action could foreshadow pitched battles over the separation of powers in his second term, should he win and Republicans consolidate their power in Congress. snip The unilateralist strategy carries political...

One of the lies Ron Paul's more vocal supporters (his army of cyberstormtroopers) will tell you until they're blue in the face is that the Shame of Texas has a strict constructionist view of the Constitution. They'll hiss, scratch, and burn a cross on your blog for daring to point out the obvious. In other words, they're like Chairman Obama's Drones, big on fascisti passion, small on critical thinking. Let's take a stroll down Memory Hole Lane, shall we ? Here is the text of Ayatollah RuPaul's interview with Neil Cavuto of FOX News back in 2009: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NEIL CAVUTO,...

This administration is abusive enough when it acts outside its constitutional authority, but it is even more tyrannical when it affirmatively thwarts the express will of the Congress on matters within the legislative domain. When Congress denied Obama authority to transfer money to the International Monetary Fund, he did so anyway, issuing an executive order promising to give that body $140 billion for redistribution to Third World countries. Now he's made another mockery of bipartisanship and the Constitution in making six recess appointments, including two people so objectionable that a near supermajority of Democratic senators wouldn't confirm them: James Cole...

It takes the Congress and the president to enact or to change laws; the president can't do it alone and neither can an administrative agency. The August 23, 2010, decision of Royce C. Lamberth, chief judge of U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C, in Sherley v. Sebelius has legal significance for one main reason: it reasserts the principle, occasionally lost sight of, that laws passed by the Congress and signed by the president — good, bad, or indifferent — trump both executive orders and the actions of administrative agencies. It is hardly a novel principle, and its application here was...

Flashback: Obama’s Promise on Using Executive Power to Change Laws http://www.breitbart.tv/flashback-obamas-promise-on-using-executive-power-to-change-laws/

WASHINGTON — With much of his legislative agenda stalled in Congress, President Obama and his team are preparing an array of actions using his executive power to advance energy, environmental, fiscal and other domestic policy priorities.

President Obama finds himself the target of similar criticism he leveled at his predecessor for trying to increase executive power. --- Candidate Barack Obama criticized President Bush for trying to increase executive power. Now President Obama finds himself the target of similar criticism as his growing army of czars raises concerns and questions about his authority. Candidate Obama's complaints were usually about Bush excluding Congress from national security and civil liberty matters. But Republicans say his czars are shutting Congress out of health care and environmental issues. By some accounts, there are close to three dozen so-called czars in the...

THE National Security Act of 1947, a reor ganization of the foreign-policy and military apparatuses of the U.S. government, created what historians call "the national security state." Critics complain that the national security state vastly empowered government and cut the executive branch loose from legislative accountability. It marked the beginning of a hyperactive interventionism abroad. Domestically, all the same criticisms apply to the consequences of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which marks a new era in American economic policy just as the 1947 act did in foreign policy. Since last fall, we have seen the rise of the TARP state...

A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team. In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance. Mr. McCain...

Via yesterday’s WaPo is a column by David Greenberg that continues the theme I noted yesterday afternoon about Rudy Giuliani’s style of governance: Rudy a Lefty? Yeah, Right. The essay’s main thesis is that the usage of “moderate” or even “liberal” to describe Giuliani (as is frequently done in the press vis-a-vis his social stances, anyway) is inaccurate. Primarily he notes that the focus on abortion, guns and gays is too narrow in terms of defining Giuliani and, moreover, even argues that Giuliani’s positions on those issues are not “liberal” as they are made out to be. I specifically found...

The Bush administration's vow this week to block contempt charges from Congress could prove to be a successful strategy for protecting White House documents about the multiple firings of U.S. attorneys, Democratic legal scholars and legislative aides said yesterday. This week, Bush administration officials disclosed that they will never allow a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges on behalf of Congress, noting that the Justice Department cannot be required to act against a decision by the president. But administration officials and other legal scholars, including some Democrats, noted that Justice Department lawyers in the Clinton administration made a similar argument...

THE LATEST they-do-it-too excuse for the undeniably botched and increasingly suspicious firings of U.S. attorneys involves the 1993 episode in which President Clinton's new attorney general, Janet Reno, unceremoniously dismissed the first Bush administration's holdover U.S. attorneys. By comparison with the Reno massacre, we are told, the Bush administration's canning of eight U.S. attorneys was positively restrained; if you suspect political motives in the current controversy, so the argument goes, consider that when he was ousted by Reno, the U.S. attorney in the District, Jay Stephens, was just weeks away from deciding whether to indict House Ways and Means Chairman...

STARVATION: DAY 7Jeb Bush urged to intervene immediatelyKeyes, Klayman in Tallahassee for face-to-face meeting Posted: March 24, 200511:35 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com With legal and legislative options apparently exhausted, former Judicial Watch chairman Larry Klayman and former presidential candidate Alan Keyes are in Florida's capital trying to persuade Gov. Jeb Bush to use his executive powers to save Terri Schaivo's life. Klayman, a candidate last year for the U.S. Senate from Florida, believes that since Bush "is the supreme executive power of the state of Florida, he has the right and duty to step in and, in effect, pardon Terri Schaivo...

GOP-backed measures moving through the Legislature combine to give the governor's office, with its constitutionally limited duties, the most unprecedented infusion of power seen in a century. While some call the measures an unwarranted, sweeping power shift, others said the bills give the governor added authority that naturally flows from streamlining and limiting government – movements prompted by a $9.9 billion budget shortfall. Rep. David Swinford, R-Dumas, chairman of the Government Reform Committee, said the governor deserves and should get more direct authority. As committee chairman, he wrote a 412-page bill that would provide governors with new powers. He said...

"In the President Alone" A Legislative Proposal to End the Confirmation Stalemate By John C. Eastman Posted October 17, 2002 This article appeared on the Thursday, October 17, 2002. Reprinted with permission of Wall Street Journal (c) 2002 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Last week, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution held an important hearing (albeit one overlooked by the floor debate on the Iraq resolution), entitled "A Judiciary Diminished is Justice Denied: The Constitution, the Senate, and the Vacancy Crisis in the Federal Judiciary." Although there is nothing unusual in House subcommittee's holding hearings,...