O’Reilly, Stossel Pile On ‘Astronomical’ Cost of Obama Trips: ‘This Is the Royal Presidency’

John Stossel and Bill O’Reilly went off Thursday night on exactly how much money is being spent on vacations for the First Family, with Stossel remarking, “This is the royal presidency.” Both men were astounded by the “astronomical” cost of travel alone for presidential trips, though Stossel mockingly suggested the plane cost is so high because “they have to be in constant communication if they want to declare nuclear war.”

Stossel did not that it’s “no worse than Bush or Clinton,” but he and O’Reilly still found the high cost outrageous, and Stossel detected some hypocrisy in how the government spends money.

“What upsets me more is when they were stopping White House tours ‘cause they said sequester was so awful, Sasha and Malia did spring break on Paradise Island in the Bahamas with Secret Service.”

O’Reilly also noted how taxpayers are, in essence, paying for trips President Obama takes when he goes to do fundraisers.

Via: Mediaite.com

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Ted Cruz: The Imperial Presidency of Barack Obama

Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president's persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. On Monday, Mr. Obama acted unilaterally to raise the minimum wage paid by federal contracts, the first of many executive actions the White House promised would be a theme of his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

The president's taste for unilateral action to circumvent Congress should concern every citizen, regardless of party or ideology. The great 18th-century political philosopher Montesquieu observed: "There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates." America's Founding Fathers took this warning to heart, and we should too.

Rule of law doesn't simply mean that society has laws; dictatorships are often characterized by an abundance of laws. Rather, rule of law means that we are a nation ruled by laws, not men. That no one—and especially not the president—is above the law. For that reason, the U.S. Constitution imposes on every president the express duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

Yet rather than honor this duty, President Obama has openly defied it by repeatedly suspending, delaying and waiving portions of the laws he is charged to enforce. When Mr. Obama disagreed with federal immigration laws, he instructed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the laws. He did the same thing with federal welfare law, drug laws and the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

On many of those policy issues, reasonable minds can disagree. Mr. Obama may be right that some of those laws should be changed. But the typical way to voice that policy disagreement, for the preceding 43 presidents, has been to work with Congress to change the law. If the president cannot persuade Congress, then the next step is to take the case to the American people. As President Reagan put it: "If you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat" of electoral accountability.

President Obama has a different approach. As he said recently, describing his executive powers: "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone." Under the Constitution, that is not the way federal law is supposed to work.

Via: WSJ

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His Imperial Presidency

Our president forgets the Republican House was elected the very same day he was.

Thomas Friedman is worried about American democracy. He writesthat by not giving President Obama everything we wants in a funding resolution, the House of Representatives is showing “contempt for the democratic process” and is thumbing its nose at our hollowed tradition of “majority rule.”

Like much of what he writes, Thomas Friedman’s logic here is rather murky. Which majority is having its will thwarted by some ideological fringe minority? Is it the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives? A clear majority of the American people has consistently, over several years, confirmed by numerous polls, opposed Obamacare, which is at the heart of the funding disagreement. Are these the majorities of which Friedman writes? No, in his mind, and in the mind of the Democratic leadership, the House of Representatives, as long as it has a Republican majority, is an illegitimate organization. And the majority of the American people who oppose Obamacare just don’t understand it and so their opposition is irrelevant.

According to Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, no one in the legislative branch has any business trying to change anything regarding Obamacare because “it is the law.” Obamacare would not pass today. It would not have passed two years ago. It only became law because Obama’s election in 2008 ushered in short-lived Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate including a “super-majority” in the Senate, which allowed the Democrats to ram the legislation through even though no one was given a chance to read it, let alone understand it (in Nancy Pelosi’s famous words, Congress had to pass it in order to see what was in it). Even then, it only made it through Congress due to political gamesmanship. As a direct result of public opposition to this legislation, Democrats promptly lost the House and nearly lost the Senate. Yet Harry Reid says this piece of legislation is so sacrosanct that Republicans are “insane” to try to change it?

Via: The American Spectator

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