AMERICA NO LONGER HAS A PRESIDENT

 
The clearest indication yet he thinks of himself more as the Emperor Barack I than as the president of a constitutional republic came last week (6/15) when Mr. Obama declared he would no longer enforce immigration law for illegals under age 30.

The president does not have the right to decide which laws he’ll enforce and which he’ll ignore, Mr. Obama acknowledged when he spoke at a Univision forum in March of last year.

"The notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case," Mr. Obama said then.  "There are laws on the books that Congress has passed… The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws."

But desperate people do desperate things.  Mr. Obama’s imperial decree came a day after his much ballyhooed speech on the economy bombed, two weeks after Republican Gov. Scott Walker won a smashing victory in the recall election in Wisconsin.

By arrogating to himself a power the Constitution gave to Congress, Mr. Obama hopes to accomplish three things:

*He wants to curry favor with Hispanics who are lawfully entitled to vote.

*He wants to make it easier for illegals to vote.  That Republicans won big in a state Democrats have carried in every presidential election since 1984, despite reports of widespread cheating by Democrats, sent shivers of fear down the spines of Team Obama.  They suspect that if, in November, only those who are eligible vote, the president is doomed.  That’s why his attorney general is suing to block ballot security measures, and to prevent states from enforcing federal immigration laws his administration has chosen to ignore.

*He wants to get Mitt Romney talking about something other than the economy.  (Mr. Romney didn’t take the bait.)

This is the most brazen, but not the worst assertion by Mr. Obama of powers not granted to the president by the Constitution.  He has the right to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial or even an indictment, and without oversight by either Congress or the courts, his attorney general claimed in March.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus for suspected traitors.  But neither he nor any other of Mr. Obama’s 42 predecessors ever made so breathtaking an assertion of power.  (Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th president, but Grover Cleveland, whose two terms were not consecutive, is counted twice.)

"By asserting the right to kill citizens without charge or judicial review, (Attorney General Eric) Holder has effectively made all of the Constitution’s individual protections of accused persons matters of presidential discretion," wrote George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley, a Democrat.

There are other examples of scofflaw behavior.  Mr. Obama had been in office for only a few weeks before he violated federal bankruptcy law to give the United Auto Workers a windfall at the expense of Chrysler’s bondholders.  Michael Barone described that then as "gangster government."

He is trying to deny to religious institutions their First Amendment rights by forcing them to include in their health insurance plans things they consider morally wrong.

"To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable," said Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York and the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

America was unique in the world, and a light unto it, because we "are a government of laws, and not of men," said the second president, John Adams.

No longer, says the Emperor Barack I.  Will his power grab pay off?

A Bloomberg poll Tuesday (6/19) indicated 64 percent of Americans approve of the policy change.  The poll was totally bogus, but even if not this is less beneficial to Mr. Obama than it seems.  Many conservatives (me, for instance) support permitting otherwise law abiding illegals to remain in the country, but we want it done by constitutional means.  "This is banana republic stuff," said Commentary Editor John Podhoretz, another conservative who supports the policy change.

The manner in which he changed it may cost Mr. Obama as much support as he gained from the change, because for few on either side is the issue a vote switcher.  Tracking polls show only a tiny bounce for the president, which is likely to fade.

Of far greater consequence are the administration’s efforts to protect and promote vote fraud.  It’s too early to tell how that will pan out for our Emperor.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.