Senate Candidate Ben Sasse: Obama Is Throwing Nation Into A ‘Constitutional Crisis’
Senate Candidate Ben Sasse: Obama Is Throwing Nation Into A ‘Constitutional Crisis’
November 18, 2013 by Ben Bullard
Ben Sasse, president of Midland University and conservative candidate for one of Nebraska’s seats in the U.S. Senate, released a short video from the campaign trail Friday that elegantly criticizes President Barack Obama’s visionary reimagining of his role under the Constitution. Obama’s a la carte enforcement of the unpopular Obamacare law, says Sasse, illustrates the President’s erroneous belief that the Nation’s chief executive holds legislative power.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_12U...layer_embedded
Here’s a portion of Sasse’s commentary:Just like my fellow citizens last night, I’m frightened by what occurred in Washington, D.C., yesterday. President Obama offered a supposed “fix” to Obamacare that would direct the secretary of HHS to let Americans keep their insurance policy. The President did not actually “fix” anything, but he did provoke a Constitutional crisis.
Understand: President Obama cannot legally do what he proposed to do yesterday, and the media let him get away with the claim. He can’t “fix” part of a law he doesn’t like by fiat. Our President is not a king. He doesn’t get to make decrees. He doesn’t even have a line-item veto, under our current system of government.
The only branch of government, under our Constitution, that has any power to change this law is the Congress.
This debate is no longer only about healthcare, but has become much larger — it has morphed into a battle over transforming our Constitutional system of separate, coequal branches of government. This is about whether or not the Congress will cede its Constitutional power to a runaway executive branch in a way that our Founders never intended, and would not understand.
… President Obama does not have the unilateral authority to change parts of the law that finds inconvenient, now, for political purposes. The fact that Obama rammed this bill through in the worst possible in 2009 does not now give him the imperial power to go back and change parts of it that he doesn’t like.
Sasse also points out that even Obama’s traditional allies, like former Vermont Governor and Democratic Presidential aspirant Howard Dean, openly have questioned his unabashed power grab.
Dean wondered aloud on MSNBC last Thursday evening where Obama gets the idea he can stray into legislative endeavors.
“A: I wonder if he has the legal authority to do this, since this was a Congressional bill that set this up,” Dean said. “And, B: I stick to what I said before the President came on [to give his “administrative fix” announcement] — which is, if you want to make this [health care law] work, you’ve gotta get people in system, and the [Healthcare.gov] website’s not gonna work, evidently, for a while.”
“What the President has done here is outrageous; it is illegal, and it is unConstitutional,” Sasse concludes. “If Republicans in Washington are serious about upholding their oaths of office, they must demand that Obamacare be repealed, and that we start over. Republicans should absolutely refuse to be any part of an unConstitutional attempt by President Obama to prop up this bad law.”
http://personalliberty.com/2013/11/1...tional-crisis/
