Obama is winning his power struggle with Congress

Thursday, February 21, 2013 - Common Sense by Paul E. Rondeau
The Washington Times

WASHINGTON, D.C., February 21, 2013 — Many conservatives believe that President Obama is a star protégé of Saul Alinsky, the revolutionary who wrote Rules for Radicals. Alinsky began that book, “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

That certainly fits Obama’s obsession with sticking it to the rich even though it will have as much of an impact on trillion-dollar annual deficits as a mosquito sucking on an elephant. But it is not about the money; it’s about power.

When Obama talked about a fundamental transformation of America, it’s now clear he meant a fundamental transformation of power – from the people to the government. As he wrote in a 1988 essay, “The problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions.”

Obama is not trying to transfer power to the poor and downtrodden. His vision is to consolidate all federal power in the executive branch – to the president.

In his 2012 State of the Union, Obama asked Congress to grant him “the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy so that our government is leaner, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people.”

Really? And who is in charge of the executive branch? And who would decide the needs of the American people? Barack Obama.

“Do not give this man consolidated power!” Glenn Beck declared on his radio program. “How much more power does he need?”

Apparently, as much as elected officials are willing to give him. As the fiscal cliff approached in late 2012, Obama had the audacity to suggest that if Congress couldn’t make the tough decisions, it should turn over its constitutional financial power to the White House as well.

“By demanding the power to raise the debt limit whenever he wants by as much as he wants, he showed what he’s really after is assuming unprecedented power to spend taxpayer dollars without any limit,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said. “And by the way, why on earth would we even consider giving a president who’s brought us four years of trillion dollar deficits unchecked authority to borrow – he’s the last person who should have limitless borrowing power.”

While Obama uses threats of executive orders to bully the legislative branch on things such as amnesty and gun control, he has also launched a political assault on the Supreme Court and the rule of law itself.

Obama directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents not to enforce immigration laws and the Department of Justice not to defend what Obama decided is unconstitutional—the Defense of Marriage Act. J. Christian Adams testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that he quit because [under Obama’s administration] “over and over and over again” the department showed “hostility” toward cases that involve black defendants and white victims.

Obama’s abuse of power isn’t constrained to Washington. Executive branch agencies run by his progressive political appointees churn out tens of thousands of pages of regulations to compel private business to do by regulation whatever Obama can’t get through legislation.

Political appointees use the EPA to kill coal while those at the National Labor Relations Board tried to stop Boeing from building a new plant in a right-to-work state. Damn the jobs if they were not union.

Even state governments are not immune. Obama’s executive branch agencies threaten, sue, and circumvent state governments on everything from immigration to voting reform to protecting tax dollar funding for sex industry giant Planned Parenthood.

Let’s not forget Obama’s outright war on individual religious freedom, conscience, and the Constitution with the Health and Human Services abortion pill mandates regarding Obamacare (which by itself has already generated 13,000 pages of new regulations).

These are just the domestic ripples we can see. “Obama wants to shrink America’s footprint in the world because he thinks we’ve been stepping on the world,” according to Dinesh D’Souza, author of “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.”

We don’t know how far Obama and his progressive cult might go. Saul Alinsky’s son, David, may provide a clue: “Obama learned his lessons [from my father] well.” According to World Net Daily, David Alinsky says that he was “‘proud to see’ his communist father’s model for Marxist takeover successfully impacting ‘the [Democratic] campaign in 2008,’ adding, it was ‘a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky.’”

In his book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote, “I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history …” I wonder too.

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