Monte Kuligowski:
The chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Diane Feinstein, was visibly upset with Barack Obama upon learning of the president’s secretive Bergdahl deal. It is reasonable that she and all members of Congress should be outraged. But should they be surprised that the president traded five of the most dangerous terrorists in Gitmo for the deserter, Bowe Bergdahl, without consulting Congress per the law passed to prevent exactly what Obama did?
Congress should, of course, be livid. But shocked, I don’t think so.
At this point, it should be hard for anyone could be surprised. The man with a pen and a phone had more than threatened to illegally bypass Congress; he had done so before.
And he had done so in big ways.
On the subject of Obama’s usurpation of powers, constitutional expert and George Washington University Law professor Jonathan Turley had this to say during an NPR interview:
We’ve seen a gradual sort of gravitational shift of power from the legislative to the executive branch. It was prominent during the Bush years, where I was also very critical, but it certainly accelerated under President Obama. And the most serious violations, in my view, are various cases when he went to Congress, as in the immigration field, as in the healthcare field, as for very specific things, and was rejected, and then decided just to order those on his own. He’s also been accused of shifting large amounts of money from their appointed or appropriated purpose to other purposes. These really drive at the heart of the separation of powers.
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Professor Turley noted:
As someone who voted for President Obama and agrees with many of his policies, it is often hard to separate the ends from the means of presidential action. Indeed, despite decades of thinking and writing about the separation of powers, I have had momentary lapses where I privately rejoiced in seeing actions on goals that I share, even though they were done in the circumvention of Congress. For example, when President Obama unilaterally acted on greenhouse gas pollutants, I was initially relieved. I agree entirely with the priority that he has given this issue. However, it takes an act of willful blindness to ignore that the greenhouse regulations were implemented only after Congress rejected such measures and that a new sweeping regulatory scheme is now being promulgated solely upon the authority of the President. We are often so committed to a course of action that we conveniently dismiss the means as a minor issue in light of the goals of the Administration. Many have embraced the notion that all is fair in love and politics. However, as I have said too many times before Congress, in our system it is often more important how we do something than what we do. Priorities and policies (and presidents) change. What cannot change is the system upon which we all depend for our rights and representation.
Turley believes that Obama’s “most serious violations” occurred after Congress had soundly rejected Obama’s intentions through our constitutional process.
Those with constitutional integrity and intellectual honesty must agree with Turley that Obama’s habit of circumventing Congress to effectively dictate has created a “constitutional crisis” and has placed the United States at a “constitutional tipping point.”
