Bergdahl Deal: Not the First Time Obama Risked American Lives After Bypassing Congress

The chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Diane Feinstein, was visibly upset with Barack Obama upon learning of the president’s secretive Bergdahl deal.  It is reasonable that she and all members of Congress should be outraged.  But should they be surprised that the president traded five of the most dangerous terrorists in Gitmo for the deserter, Bowe Bergdahl, without consulting Congress per the law passed to prevent exactly what Obama did?

Congress should, of course, be livid.  But shocked, I don’t think so.

And he had done so in big ways.

On the subject of Obama’s usurpation of powers, constitutional expert and George Washington University Law professor Jonathan Turley had this to say during an NPR interview:We’ve seen a gradual sort of gravitational shift of power from the legislative to the executive branch. It was prominent during the Bush years, where I was also very critical, but it certainly accelerated under President Obama. And the most serious violations, in my view, are various cases when he went to Congress, as in the immigration field, as in the healthcare field, as for very specific things, and was rejected, and then decided just to order those on his own. He’s also been accused of shifting large amounts of money from their appointed or appropriated purpose to other purposes. These really drive at the heart of the separation of powers.