On July 12, President Obama unilaterally gutted the Clinton administration’s signature achievement—welfare reform. The 1996 welfare-reform law, while passed with strong bipartisan support, has been the bane of progressives, who have never accepted its fundamental principle that those who can work must work. Over the last year, the Obama administration also took the hatchet to the immigration laws and to the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” statute.
These actions have two things in common. First, they were announced with much fanfare and designed to appeal to the president’s liberal base. Second, and much worse, they were implemented by suspending enforcement or waiving applications of laws Mr. Obama does not like.
The president cannot write—or rewrite—the laws. The Constitution makes Congress the legislature, and the president cannot simply ignore its decisions.
The entire system of separation of powers—which is the heart of the Constitution’s “checks and balances” designed to limit governmental power and thereby protect individual liberty—depends upon each branch of the federal government fulfilling its assigned role and respecting that of the others. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama has now made clear that he won’t respect these basic constitutional limits on his power.
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