Regulations Without Representation

The single greatest systemic threat to our nation comes from regulatory agencies operating outside of our Constitutional safeguards of checks and balances. The Constitution, Art. I Sec. 8, provides that ALL legislative power resides in Congress. In other words, not a single law or regulation should pass into effect without an affirmative vote of Congress. Yet in practice, regulatory agencies are now the primary source of acts with the force of law. The acts of these agencies pass into law without any vote of Congress. It is a complete bastardization of our Constitutional scheme. And the worst abuser of this system since FDR put it into its current extra-constitutional framework has been Obama.

This from the Weekly Standard on what we can look forward to in Obama's second term:

. . . the tone of the president’s second term is unlikely to improve upon the president’s own words, a year ago: “Where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.” It would be “nice” to work with Congress, he conceded, but he and his regulators were ready to act unilaterally.

That threat echoed the White House press secretary’s own warning, just weeks earlier, that although Congress ought to act to improve the economy, the president “can also act independently—or, rather, administratively, and exercise his executive authority to benefit the American people in other ways. And he will continue to do that.” The White House called this the “We Can’t Wait” initiative.

Today, looking ahead at Barack Obama’s second term, many of his supporters still can’t wait. The New Republic’s Timothy Noah is among them. “With the election over,” he wrote last month, “the president can now take bolder action on a host of issues that don’t require cooperation—or even input—from Congress.” True, “some of these actions might be controversial,” but “that concern matters less now that Obama has faced voters for the last time.”

Noah needn’t fret. In his second term, the president will have every incentive to pursue an agenda predominantly, perhaps even exclusively, through unilateral executive branch action. Some call this the “regulatory cliff”; others, a regulatory “flood” or “tsunami” . . . Call it what you will, but for the next four years, the Obama administration will govern primarily through the regulatory agencies. And Congress and the courts, having tied their own hands, can do little to stop it.

This long offering from the Weekly Standard goes on to discuss at length both how Obama has already abused the regulatory process and the tsunami of new regulations expected to come down in his second term. This is not a republican form of government, it is a socialist bureaucracy with no relation to the Constitution as drafted by our Founders.

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