The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Shouldn’t A Renowned Constitutional Scholar Know That?

Posted on | April 16, 2011 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

Bernstein at Volkh raises the ugly point, emphasis mine:

Remember Iran-Contra? The problem for the Reagan Administration there was that Congress banned the president from allocating money to the Contras. The Administration, quite illegally in my view, tried to get around that ban by using funds from arm sales to Iran to subvert the Congressional ban.
At least the Reagan Administration had the decency to do this secretly, knowing that it was acting unconstitutionally. Moreover, the Reagan folks at least were able to claim that they technically weren’t violating the Congressional ban, because they weren’t using Congressionally allocated funds, but the proceeds from arms sales.
The Obama Administration, by contrast, seems to be brazenly violating the Constitution. As I tell my constitutional law students, Congress’s ultimate power is the power of the purse. If Congress objects, for example, to military action engaged in by the president, it can simply refuse to allocate funds.
But the Obama Administration’s position seems to be that so long as it issues a signing statement refusing to abide by restrictions on funding that it deems to interfere with executive prerogatives, it can simply create the funding out of thin air. If there is no statutory funding for the czars, where exactly is the money coming from?
This is a very dangerous position for the Executive branch to take, and I hope even Obama partisans will recoil at this. Imagine if a future Republican president gets the U.S. involved in a deeply unpopular war. A Democratic Congress passes a military spending bill that specifically denies the president authority to spend any additional money on that war after a 60 day period to get the troops out. The president signs the bill, but with a signing statement that says that the bill’s ban on war funding violates the separation of powers and therefore “the executive branch will construe the relevant section not to abrogate these Presidential prerogatives.” Democrats, and anyone concerned with the Constitution for that matter, would be up in arms, and rightly so.
If Obama had such serious constitutional objections to Section 2262, he had only one constitutionally proper move to make, and that was to veto the bill.

So, now what? Does Sprinklerman call the bluff, or is this just another notch in the chastity belt? These are some mighty ugly precedents. If the line is not drawn here, then where? The Libya business, and now this, seems like it points to a Mel Zelaya-esque disregard for both spirit and letter of the Constitution, as well as the centuries of development since the signing.
More at The American Thinker.
Bonus: in case you missed it, the literary event of 2009! Yes: Czar d’Oz.

Category: Barack Obama

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