Legal Experts Criticize Obama’s Executive Actions

BLT: The Blog of Legal Times reports:

That has caused a continued rise of a fourth branch—large agencies that can determine their own jurisdictions—and created a dangerous and unstable system for future presidents who will claim the same authority, Turley said.

“He’s become the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid, the concentration of power in any one of the branches,” Turley said of Obama. “If a president can unilaterally change the meaning of laws in substantial ways, or refuse to enforce them, it takes offline that very thing that stabilizes our system.”

Nicholas Rosenkranz, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, testified that Obama has stretched the concept of prosecutorial discretion, particularly in a decision to stop enforcement against certain types of illegal immigrants. “This is a scale of decision making that is not within the traditional conception of prosecutorial discretion,” Rosenkranz said.

Rosenkranz, when answering questions from lawmakers, said the remedy for the overreach is elections. But he also suggested Congress would have grounds for impeachment if a president took unilateral action on something like declaring war.

Michael Cannon, the director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, said that delays in the Affordable Care Act and the administration actions changing that law have “more in common with monarchy than democracy or a constitutional republic.”

“Today, with respect to health care, the law of the land is whatever one man says it is—or whatever this divided Congress will let that one man get away with saying,” Cannon said. “What this one man says may flatly contradict federal statute.” . . .