America will witness the circus that
is Congress throughout September, and likely draw exactly the wrong conclusion.
Congress is supposed to be
messy. It is designed to be a test of wills between competing
ideologies. It is when Congress asserts its constitutional powers that
our nation is strongest and the people’s voices are heard.
Unfortunately, over the past six
years, Congress has failed to fight to hold onto their constitutionally
designed powers against an avaricious executive branch and an obsequious
judicial one. President Obama’s Iran deal is an opportunity for the
Senate to turn this recent history on its head simply by asserting its Article
II, Section 2 authority, and voting on the deal as the treaty it is.
President Obama won’t like it, but should he try to implement the treaty
without ratification, the Senate should be ready to sue, and force the issue
into the courts.
The idea is simple, force the
federal courts to make a decision on whether the treaty power of the U.S.
Constitution can be ignored by the executive branch simply because it is
inconvenient to them.
On the budget front, Congress will
be deciding how much will be spent on every discretionary program in the United
States budget in September.
The focus will likely be heavily
tilted toward the decision on whether the U.S. taxpayer should be funding
Planned Parenthood’s abhorrent
practice of cutting the organs out
of viable babies and selling them to researchers.
This budget will fund 80 percent of
the remainder of Obama’s term in office. Based upon the President’s pen
and phone approach to his power, it is reasonable to assume that this President
won’t decide as President George W. Bush did, to shut down the regulatory
process in the last six months of his term out of concern for being accused of
publishing “midnight regulations.”
Congress’ decisions on what they
choose to fund, and what specifically to not fund, will have a material impact
on whether Obama will be able to continue on his regulatory jihad against the
free enterprise system.
A simple example is the choice
Congress made to defund Obama’s proposed transfer of control of certain
Internet functions from the United States to a multi-national stakeholder
body. Wisely, Congress listened to U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.), Sen.
Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and others and ended funding for the giveaway, and they
should do so again for the upcoming year.
Stopping the implementation of a
laundry list of Obama regulations should be a no-brainer through the process of
finalizing a continuing resolution.
A few obvious defund targets are
stopping the implementation of Obama’s errantly named Clean
Power regulation, ending funding for the EPA’s sue
and settle scam that is used to create law
while funding the environmental left, and putting the kibosh on implementation
of the National
Labor Relation’s Board recent decision
destroying the franchise business model to benefit big labor benefactors.
But there are many, many other
issues big and small that Congress should weigh in on.
HUD’s recent implementation of rules
that put into place the structure to override
local zoning ordinances to further the
placement of low income multi-unit housing in areas currently zoned for single
family as part of green zoning begs for defunding, and the House of
Representatives, due to the efforts of U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.), have
already passed legislation doing just that.
As do seemingly smaller regulations
like the crazy Department of Energy rules that would make dishwashers incapable of getting dishes clean, and EPA proposed
regulations that would make only the most expensive wood
burning stoves available for sale.
These few examples of rogue,
destructive regulations and myriad more deserve Congress’ attention through an
aggressive use of their power of the purse authority.
Obama has only fifteen months
remaining in the White House, and stopping implementation of some of his most
harmful measures by refusing to fund their implementation is the best, and
only, response to a President who proceeds as if he is the sole branch of
government.
For America to work again, Congress
has to work the way it was intended, and that means reasserting their
prerogatives. Whether that be through insisting that the treaty
ratification process be followed, or by setting the nation’s spending priorities
in very specific ways to stop Obama’s executive overreach, the next three weeks
will be instrumental in determining if the leaders of the legislative branch
will fight to swing the balance of power back toward the vision upon which our
nation was founded.
Stay tuned, while the “fights” in
Congress may seem like spinning wheels, in the end, they have real meaning for
post-Obama America.
The
author is president of Americans for Limited Government.
http://netrightdaily.com/2015/09/post-obama-america/
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