President's decision on DOMA

So where is the Constitutional authority for the President to decide if a law is constitutional/not and decide whether to enforce it.
The only thing I see is in Article II Section 3 that
he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,
and DOMA is the law of the land until repealed by legislation or struck down by court ruling, not Presidential decisions/directives. And I don't care what his definition of "is" is.

I hear generic statements that past Presidents have made similar judgments but can't find anything in my searches to support.

Regardless of how you feel about gay rights etc, If the President can pick & choose which laws will be constitutional, not the SCOTUS, we have a real crisis on our hands, imo. He has already demonstrated in the contempt of court drilling judgement that he thinks he's above the law. Now apparently he thinks he IS the law, along with the Justice "request" that PPACA be implemented despite being ruled unconstitutional.

I'm thinking these are real grounds for impeachment if allowed to stand, not just a stain on a dress or whether or not "oral" is "sex"..
What say you?!? :confused:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BrianW

So where is the Constitutional authority for the President to decide if a law is constitutional/not and decide whether to enforce it.
The only thing I see is in Article II Section 3 that
he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,
and DOMA is the law of the land until repealed by legislation or struck down by court ruling, not Presidential decisions/directives. And I don't care what his definition of "is" is.

I hear generic statements that past Presidents have made similar judgments but can't find anything in my searches to support.

Regardless of how you feel about gay rights etc, If the President can pick & choose which laws will be constitutional, not the SCOTUS, we have a real crisis on our hands, imo. He has already demonstrated in the contempt of court drilling judgement that he thinks he's above the law. Now apparently he thinks he IS the law, along with the Justice "request" that PPACA be implemented despite being ruled unconstitutional.

I'm thinking these are real grounds for impeachment if allowed to stand, not just a stain on a dress or whether or not "oral" is "sex"..
What say you?!? :confused:

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Where have you been??
This is nothing new with this group.......


RK

Hey, he may have done us a favor. If he loses in 2012 the republican president can tell the justice dept not to defend OBAMACARE in court. He just set the bar!
Imagine no arguments from the gov't defending Obamacare.

this POTUS thinks he know more than the members of SCOTUS and is systematically trying to marginalize them..ironically they may get last laugh when the rule on his health care provisions

What all, by now, should expect from this oligarchy. Only the bloody-from-falling-on-the-sword-for-this-messiah, continue to make excuses for his lack of ability to be in the WH to begin with.

Here's some more of what we all see from this inept 'leader'.

UB


Secret White House Meetings
by Erick Erickson

02/24/2011


Remember all that highfalutin rhetoric from Barack Obama about not doing business with lobbyists, etc? Well, we already knew it was a lie given the number of lobbyists he let into the White House to work after saying he wouldn’t.

But it appears the lie is a serial lie. Obama is having his minion take meetings with lobbyists routinely, but they are doing it outside the White House across the street.

Why?


Because he can say no lobbyists have been to the White House. At the facility where they are meeting the secret service does not keep logs. So there is no way to really track who is going into and out of the meetings with the White House.

In other words, we know the White House is happy to have routine visits from the AFL-CIO and SEIU. And if they want those to be known, who exactly are they ashamed of you knowing about? Or scared?

This, my friends, is the most transparent administration ever!

So i'm "assuming" that those responding here wouldn't have an issue with their rep initiating/co-sponsoring articles of impeachment? :confused::confused:

Now think/say what you will, but I haven't heard too much of the news lately except for the focus on Libya/Daffy, Somalia, and the headlines on Yahoo!. (I can't listen to any top 3=4 RWE talk radio during the day) beside what y'all post here on PP.

So I post this thread up this morning, and happen to listen to Hannity for just a bit this afternoon after getting off of work early, and on Drudge, Newt is warning about PBO's "constitutional crisis" and possible impeachment opportunties. Weird.

I'm going to a town hall tomorrow AM and intend to bring this issue up if possible.
Curious to know what my new 'freshman' rep thinks.

Brian, this is not new. You mentioned you couldn't find similar claims, so here is one very recent:

President George W. Bush, however, has used signing statements to an unprecedented extent. He issued more than 1,000 constitutional challenges to provisions in 150 laws in his first six years in office (Kelley 2007; American Bar Association 2006). He also used signing statements to assert the unilateral and unreviewable right of the executive to choose which provisions of laws to enforce and which to ignore. For instance, he has used them to indicate that he does not feel bound by all of the provisions of laws regarding: reporting to Congress pursuant to the Patriot Act, the torture of prisoners, whistleblower protections for the Department of Energy, the number of U.S. troops in Colombia, the use of illegally gathered intelligence, and the publication of educational data gathered by the Department of Education (Savage 2006, 2007, 228-49).

http://gunston.gmu.edu/pfiffner/inde...s/Page1837.htm

Really, one could argue that Clinton and Bush were complicit in selective enforcement of the law, and the practice was in fact institutionalized by Congress via DADT. If gays are legally banned from the military, isn't telling them "we won't ask, if you don't tell" sort of a selective enforcement of a law?

Let me say I am not picking on Bush, and could find other examples from almost any president. This is just recent and in our memories. It is wrong for a sworn executive to ignore either of the other two branches of gov't. It was wrong when Bush did it, and its wrong when Obama does it. Impeachable? We'd tie up congress with every president, past, present, and future if we impeach them for presidential power grabbing.

Thanks for posting that up Dave, rather than just the generic statements I've heard.

But from your link

Thinking Constitutionally

Even if one posits that President Bush has not and would not abuse his executive power, his claim to be able to ignore the law, if allowed to stand, would constitute a dangerous precedent that future presidents might use to abuse their power. Joel Aberbach points out that “in the end, this is not a partisan issue, for someday the Democrats will have unified control, and even that somewhat-less-disciplined party might countenance a government of the type Bush and Cheney have apparently structured” (Aberbach 2007). Madison argues in Federalist no. 10, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Thinking constitutionally means looking ahead and realizing that future executives will likely claim the same authority as their predecessors. Claims to executive power ratchet up; they do not swing like a pendulum unless the other two branches protect their own constitutional authorities.

The rule of law is fundamental to a free society and to democracy, because neither can exist without it. As Thomas Paine argued in Common Sense, “In America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law” (emphasis in original). Madison put it this way in Federalist no. 47: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” In each of the following cases of claims to constitutional authority, President Bush was asserting that he alone could exercise the authority of each of the three branches:

And I would offer that, that is exactly what has happened. So that regardless of Bush not being "checked", not 'checking"Obama sets us up for even a more egregious abuse of power.
Two wrongs don't make it right.

If we don't draw the line now, when?!? :confused: