Obama vs. the Constitution - The rule of law is on the ballot.

Obama vs. the Constitution - The rule of law is on the ballot.(NR). By Ramesh Ponnuru.

There were warning signs about President Obama’s fealty to the Constitution even before he took the oath of office.

As a senator he had voted against the nomination of John Roberts to be chief justice of the Supreme Court, arguing that Roberts was deficient in the “empathy” required for the position. In a speech during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he said any justice he selected would have “to understand what it’s like to be poor or African American or gay or disabled or old.” In other words, he wanted a judicial thumb on the scales for liberalism: Notice that he didn’t mention any empathy for small-business owners or kids in failing schools.
During the general-election campaign, Obama answered an interviewer’s question about whether abortion would be a “litmus test” for his judicial appointees by saying that a person who did not believe in the right to privacy, “as well as the implications for gender equality,” would not have the right judicial philosophy. In other words, a refusal to reconsider judicial decisions that even many liberals admit are hard to square with the text, original understanding, history, or structure of the Constitution is a prerequisite for a judicial nomination from Obama. (He never said anything about empathy for unborn children, either.)
Since taking office, Obama has compiled a record consistent with these early hints. Again and again, liberal policy preferences have trumped fidelity to the Constitution.

Some themes emerge from this list. In most of these cases, President Obama has bypassed Congress, rewriting laws or appointing nominees without its consent. (Even at the height of liberal power in the capital, in 2009–10, Congress was not going to enact a law making Notre Dame cover abortion drugs.) In most of these cases, too, his actions have been unprecedented. Not only has nobody taken them before, nobody has even suggested they would be legitimate before. No other president has made recess appointments during a pro forma session of the Senate, for example.

Obama’s predecessor had his constitutional lapses, too, as when he signed, and instructed his administration to defend in court, a set of campaign-finance regulations that he had previously recognized as unconstitutional. The Constitution has been imperfectly honored through most of our history, and there is no foolproof mechanism imaginable for enforcing it.
This president is testing the limits of our system. Note that our list of unconstitutional novelties includes five administration actions from the first eight months of 2012 alone. The public can put an end to this aggression in November. If Obama is reelected, especially with an uncooperative Congress, we can expect more of it.Read the full story here.