Andrew Napolitano on Obama's Lone Wolf Presidency

When the president effectively writes the laws, Congress is effectively neutered.

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Beth Rankin/Flickr

In 2012, President Obama signed executive orders that essentially said to about 1.7 million unlawfully present immigrants that if they complied with certain conditions, they will not be deported. In 2014, the president signed additional executive orders that essentially made the same offer to about 4.7 million unlawfully present immigrants. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission—the bureaucrats appointed by the president who regulate broadcast radio and television—decreed that it has the authority to regulate the Internet, even though federal courts have twice ruled that it does not. This week, the president's press secretary told reporters that the president is seriously thinking of signing executive orders intended to raise taxes on corporations by directing the IRS to redefine tax terminology so as to increase corporate tax burdens. 

What's going on here? What's going on is the exercise of authoritarian impulses by a desperate president terrified of powerlessness and irrelevance, argues Andrew Napolitano. Here is a president who claims he can kill Americans without due process, spy on Americans without individualized probable cause, start wars on his own, borrow money on his own, regulate the Internet, ban lawful guns, tell illegal immigrants how to avoid the consequences of federal law, and now raise taxes on his own.