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Wednesday, January 29, 2014

A History Lesson on Executive Orders


It gets so tiresome.

All the calls for this president to be---I saw it yesterday---"empeached."

It's so ridiculous.

He's a Constitutional scholar, for pity's sake.  I think he knows what is and is not "Constitutional."

And now, today, after the State of the Union speech last night and after President Obama's desperate but necessary threat to issue more Executive Orders since, after all, he's dealing with one of the most truly "do-nothing" Congresses in our nation's history, it seems a little history lesson is in order.  Here's the truth, kiddos:

ObamaFewest Executive Orders in Over 100 Years

Yes, read it and weep:

A bit from the article:

We've crunched the numbers, and as you can see in our handy graph, above, Obama has issued fewer executive orders per day in office than conservative heroes like George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Calvin Coolidge. In fact, you have to go all the way back to Grover Cleveland in the nineteenth century to find a president who has issued executive orders at a lower rate than Obama.

And yet, we have the following lately:

Kentucky senator Rand Paul has accused Obama of acting "like a king or a monarch." South Carolina congressman Jeff Duncan declared last week, "We live in a republic, not a dictatorship." Mike Huckabee proclaimed that the White House has "nothing but contempt for the Constitution" and seeks to "trump ... the checks and balances of power in which no branch could act unilaterally." Texas congressman Steve Stockman has already threatened impeachment.

Way to put things in perspective, guys.  Congress won't and doesn't do their job so they blame someone else for going forward, doing something, getting things done--for the people--and doing some work.

Bloody hypocrites.

As though demanding a more livable, fair, minimum wage is somehow a horrible thing.

So as of yesterday, here's John Boehner's and the Republican Party's response to this "outrage":


On Tuesday morning, at a breakfast discussing the State of the Union address later in the evening, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters that President Obama is on dangerous ground on his use of executive orders. Essentially, Boehner issued a veiled threat stating that if the President thinks he can enact more change by circumventing Congress and utilizing executive orders, then Obama could be facing a backlash from Congressional Republicans. While he did not overtly state it, it seemed pretty clear he was talking about impeachment.
“We’re just not going to sit here and let the President trample all over us. This idea that he’s just going to go it alone, I have to remind him we do have a constitution. And the Congress writes the laws, and the President’s job is to execute the laws faithfully. And if he tries to ignore this he’s going to run into a brick wall.”

Actually, Mr. Boehner, given how little Congress did in the last session of your up-to-now august body, we expect that's precisely what you'll do. That is, sit there and do nothing.

You scheduled 97 total days of "work" this year in Congress.

Oh, yeah.  I think you'll do nothing.

Bloody hypocrites.

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