George Will, writing in WaPo
The danger, Price says, is that the inevitable non-enforcement of many federal criminal laws will establish “a new constitutional norm of unbounded executive discretion” beyond the criminal justice system. Price says the enforcement discretion exercised in the context of the resource-constrained criminal justice system provides “no support for presidential authority to decline enforcement with respect to any other given civil regulatory regime, such as the Affordable Care Act.”
The difference is between priority-setting and policy-setting, the latter being a congressional prerogative because of Congress’s primacy in lawmaking. Absent “a clear statutory basis, an executive waiver of statutory requirements” is “presumptively impermissible.”
It has, however, become “a nearly irresistible temptation” for presidents to infer permission from the courts’ abandonment of judicial review that limits Congress’s power to delegate essentially legislative powers to the executive branch. So, Price asks: “If President Obama may postpone enforcement of the ACA’s insurance requirements and employer mandate, could a subsequent president ignore the Affordable Care Act altogether?”
Read the whole thing
The implication goes far beyond Price’s question and asserts that the the office of the presidency is now an imperial office no longer bound by the Constitution. It means that any future president can arbitrarily order the agencies he controls, to not enforce whatever law he wishes.
Labor laws, campaign finance laws, bribery and corruption laws, misuse of office laws, corruption laws, environmental laws, tax laws, discrimination laws, federal crime statutes, food safety laws, OSHA law, Supreme Court decisions, international treaties, etc…
By picking and choosing what laws he will enforce, Obama has rendered asunder the Constitution. By his own actions, this president has declared that he is above the law of the land and that he will not be limited by the Constitution. This is treason.