He Did What?!

"Can Obama write his own laws?" This is the title question posed by Charles Krauthammer in his editorial article for the Washington post. This article really caught my eye because after study chapter two of the text the idea of someone, especially the president of all people, ignoring the system and creating his own rules seems absolutely absurd!

Opinion Writer Charles Krauthammer begins the article by telling of the strict mandatory sentences that federal drugs laws carry due to the 1980s crack epidemic. He says that these have "stirred unease in congress and sparked a bipartisan effort to revise and relax some of the more draconian laws." Then Krauthammer states "Traditionally - meaning before Barack Obama - that's how laws were changed: We have a problem, we hold hearings, we find some new arrangement ratified by congress and signed by the president." It sounds to be conducted exactly how we learned it, right? Then what's the problem? Well, according to Krauthammer, our president is participating in such things as unilaterally waiving an Obamacare cap on a patient's out-of-pocket expenses because it stood in the way of his administrative agenda, directing a 70-plus percent subsidy for the insurance premiums paid by congress and their personal staff, and even passing "the DREAM act" (despite the fact that it was refused by Congress) just because the approaching election could hinge on the Hispanic vote! Krauthammer explains "The point is not what you think about the merits of the DREAM act. Or mandatory drug sentences. Or of subsidizing healthcare premiums...The point is whether a president, charged with faithfully executing the laws that Congress enacts, may create, ignore, suspend and/or amend the law at will." HE expresses his opinion on the point with the remarks "Such gross executive usurpation disdains the Constitution," and "It mocks the separation of powers."

Krauthammer is not the only one that feels this way. After becoming aware of this information, I find myself wholeheartedly standing behind this stranger's political opinion. It is definitely NOT OKAY if the man who is supposedly jointly running this country with Congress just decides to enact things that are solely for his own interest and the interests of his implications without abiding by the processes that were sanctioned with the purpose of making our government system honorable and unprejudiced.

Just as Krauthammer proclaims "At stake is not some constitutional curlicue. At stake is whether the laws are the law. And whether the president gets to write his own."