Can House Republicans make Obama enforce laws?

House Republicans say President Obama has been derelict in enforcing key laws and are looking pass bills to hold him accountable. But the issue hardly began with Obama.

|
Susan Walsh/AP/File
President Obama announces on June 15, 2012, in Washington that his administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the US as children and have since led law-abiding lives.

House Republicans claim President Obama is not doing enough to enforce the laws Congress has passed, and today and tomorrow, they intend to do something about it. 

On Wednesday, they passed a bill that gives each chamber of Congress standing to sue the White House over failure to enforce federal laws, with five Democrats joining all Republicans in a 233-to-181 vote. On Thursday, they will take up a bill that would require the Justice Department to inform Congress when the White House is not going to enforce a particular law, and to explain why.

As a practical matter, the bills will never become law. Neither will get past the Democrat-controlled Senate. But they involve a serious claim against a president: that the person constitutionally charged to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” is, by implication, a lawbreaker. It is also a congressional complaint not unique to this president and begs the questions: Well, is he an enforcement slacker compared with other presidents?

The complaint against Mr. Obama involves “Congress and their belief in the sacrosanct nature of the law, and the president saying there’s a lot of latitude that he has a right to exercise,” says Ross Baker, a congressional expert at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

The most often raised criticisms about Obama and the law are:

  •  He is applying the Affordable Care Act willy-nilly – instituting a series of delays and other changes in the way the law works.
  • He is not adequately enforcing deportations in the interior regions of the country, and, more importantly, that he’s segmenting off a special portion of the population – children of illegal immigrants – for delayed deportation
  • He is not consistently enforcing federal marijuana laws.
  • He refused to legally defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) earlier in his presidency.

Obama rejected DOMA, which disadvantaged homosexual unions, on constitutional grounds. His administration followed the proper procedure by notifying Congress of its constitutional objection. Indeed, the Supreme Court ruled the key provision of the act unconstitutional in 2013.

The implementation of Obamacare and drug laws may be vexing and cause confusion, but, says Louis Fisher, an expert on the separation of powers, “the idea that a statute can actually control every part of implementation is very unrealistic. Statutes are pretty general.”

His concern is with Obama’s special exception for the deportation of children of illegal immigrants. “That’s making law by yourself. That’s disturbing.”

He judges Obama to be “sort of in the middle” of presidents who buck congressional authority.

Some presidential scholars name Richard Nixon as the most egregious nose-thumber in recent history of laws passed by Congress. In 1972, he vetoed the Clean Water Act, and when Congress overrode his veto, he refused to spend all of the money allocated for it, impounding half of it. The issue eventually got to the Supreme Court, and in Train v. City of New York (1975), the court ruled that the president had “no authority” to withhold funds, and that he “cannot frustrate the will of Congress by killing a program through impoundment."

Many presidents, however, had used impoundment previously.

Another way presidents have registered their displeasure with laws is through “signing statements.” These statements, issued at the signing of legislation, reflect a president’s views of the bill, and, in many cases, his complaint about it – a signal that it won’t be a priority or will be ignored. Since President Reagan, Bill Clinton has issued the most signing statements, but George W. Bush – by far – issued the greatest percentage that contained some type of challenge or objection.

President Bush used signing statements “in an aggressive way to imply that he might not faithfully execute more than 1,000 provisions of statutes,” writes James Pfiffner, a professor and presidential expert at George Mason University in Arlington, Va. A famous case: that Bush might not execute Sen. John McCain’s amendment outlawing torture that was attached to a defense authorization bill in 2005.

Of course, politics play a role in the GOP complaints coming to a head this week. Republicans criticize the president for not implementing Obamacare, yet they want to repeal it. And they point to the president’s lack of enforcement of immigration laws as reason not to trust him on immigration reform, even though many support the concept behind his delayed deportations – the so-called DREAM Act.

It's “an excuse” to not pass reform this year, says Stephen Wayne, a presidential expert at Georgetown University.

Even if a bill giving both chambers standing to sue the White House became law, says Mr. Fisher, most courts wouldn’t take the case. Congress already has the tools to work out its power disputes with the president: hearings, legislation, subpoenas, the purse – and in worst cases, impeachment. A court would simply say, “You’ve got remedies of your own. Don’t bother us.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Can House Republicans make Obama enforce laws?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/DC-Decoder/2014/0312/Can-House-Republicans-make-Obama-enforce-laws
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe