Thank you Trey Gowdy! We must not tolerate a president acting like a dictator. This may be THE most important discussion of our time.
WTX Reports - " Democrats dismiss the tactic as a partisan charade that the Senate will simply ignore, but a lead Republican sponsor of the idea said it's important to debate the balance of power in Washington.
"The Constitution says the president has a duty to faithfully execute the law, so for the health of the republic, it would be nice to debate what that phrase means," said GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina.
Republicans in Congress have been agitating for months about what they view as President Barack Obama's selective enforcement of federal laws. Among other actions, they cite his decisions to delay certain requirements of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, to exempt some young illegal immigrants from deportation proceedings, and to end mandatory minimum prison sentences for some non-violent drug offenders.
Gowdy's bill would allow the House or the Senate — not individual lawmakers — to sue Obama or any executive branch employee for allegedly failing to enforce a law. The cases would be sent directly to a panel of three federal judges and then expedited to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"If you can't assert the significance of your institution, then that makes me wonder why you're in that institution," Gowdy said.
Gowdy acknowledges that Democrats are unlikely to vote for the bill. But he said Democrats should support the proposal in anticipation of the next time a Republican occupies the White House.
"There is no line of cases that says the chief executive gets a second veto," Gowdy said. "When the legislative branch imposes a duty on the executive, it's constitutional, and the money has been appropriated, you can't decide whether you want to do it.""
In his speech on the floor of the house Trey used Obama's own words spoken when he was a Senator to make points about the limitations and responsibilities of the branches of Government and of course, also about the importance of following the Constitution. He drove home why process matters while challenging Obama's history of picking and choosing which laws to uphold. "We don't pass suggestions here. We don't pass ideas. We pass LAWS!" he passionately proclaimed.
The Washington Examiner reports: "President Obama is threatening to veto a law that would allow Congress to sue him in federal courts for arbitrarily changing or refusing to enforce federal laws because it "violates the separation of powers" by encroaching on his presidential authority.
"[T]he power the bill purports to assign to Congress to sue the President over whether he has properly discharged his constitutional obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed exceeds constitutional limitations," the White House Office of Management and Budget said Wednesday in a statement of administration policy. "Congress may not assign such power to itself, nor may it assign to the courts the task of resolving such generalized political disputes."
The lead sponsor of the measure, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said it was designed to curb Obama's abuse of presidential authority, most notably in his frequent changes to Obamacare.
Most recently, as reported on Town Hall: "Collapse - White House issues blanket waver to individual mandate tax through 2016. Heads Up, this is the biggest news story of the week, yet it's getting relatively little play.
So I ask this question, if Congress or the Senate has no recourse to stop a dictator wanna be who arbitrarily ignores laws and changes them at his whim in the position of President of the United States, who does?
