Obama's executive grasp includes our entire lives

In December 2007, Sen. Barack Obama’s reassurances to the Boston Globe
suggested that he understood constitutional limits on executive and
government power. He knew that there were things the “president does
not have power under the Constitution” to do, including unilaterally
authorizing military action and surveilling citizens without warrants.
He said he would “reject the Bush administration’s claim that the
president has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S.
citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.”

That thoughtful skeptic of executive power now sits in the Oval
Office. Isolating random bits of his presidential rhetoric, you can
almost believe that he understands how a society really thrives. Obama
said in his pseudo-State of the Union Address, “The answers to our
problems don’t lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories
and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations
of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on
Earth.”

But in just three months, we have seen what Obama means when he talks
about “reach.” He doesn’t mean “our reach” but his own. His sense of
that reach, and the abrupt and scary speed with which he’s used it,
marks him as an executive with a tentacled grip—multiple, crushing,
inescapable. No longer the cautious critic of presidential power of
the campaign trail, he now sees nothing as beyond his grasp.

Less than a hundred days in, the fully articulated ideological
contours of his vision remain unclear—just as he wishes. It suits
Obama’s self-image as a mere pragmatic problem solver to never
explain, to float from power grab to usurpation as if nothing but
thoughtful reaction to the exigencies of the moment guides him. But
it’s already obvious that those actions veer strongly toward expansive
government, limiting our options in every aspect of national life.

Budget: The government fiscal game works as well as it does
politically because most people don’t think of government spending in
terms of control over their lives. Most see it as a benefit, a
graceful solution to a perceived lack. Healthcare? Obama’s
approximated buy—in is $600 billion over a decade—a figure sure to
come up grossly short if history is any guide. But most think, well,
I’m not the one with $600 billion to toss, so why not?

That money, plus all the many other nonexistent trillions Obama is
planning to spend, gets paid back either in debt service down the line—
funneling a larger percentage of the lifeblood, time, and effort of
our children to Washington and thence to whoever’s brave enough to
hold U.S. debt by then—or in inflation that eats away at any attempt
on our part to save or invest profitably.

When, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of
Obama’s spending plans, the U.S. government deficit-spends $9.3
trillion over the next decade, that’s more than an absurd abstraction.
It’s enslavement: the hours and days of our lives.

Business and the economy: Here Obama’s grip is far less subtle. He’s
clear and decisive: The financial and industrial economy is his, and
he’ll do with it as he pleases. What’s decided for the U.S. is what’s
decided for General Motors, as presidential pressure pushes out GM
chief Rick Wagoner. Obama and his man at Treasury, Timothy Geithner,
want the power to confiscate any company whose failure they claim
threatens the larger economy.

Now that he occupies the White House, the new president—who justly
pilloried Bush for asserting that national security excused any
executive ukase—seems to believe that his own vision of economic
security empowers him to take whatever he wants and make any decision
he deems necessary, from curtailing CEO compensation to renegotiating
mortgage terms. What private sector? This is economic war!

And lest one think this is all about being faithful stewards of the
public wealth, as Obama and Geithner like to play it, The Wall Street
Journal reported that an unnamed bank was not allowed to return money
the Feds had stuck it with in the first bailout wave. The strings
attached to those bailout funds gave the federal government effective
ownership over the bank; evidently the Obama administration values an
excuse for control more than it values taxpayer money.

It also seems primed to use more traditional means of throwing weight
around the national economy. The president’s pick for antitrust chief,
Christine Varney, has already cast a stink eye at Google, expressing
concern at a conference last year about the company’s “monopoly in
Internet online advertising.” And Obama’s pick to head the Department
of Agriculture, former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, is an enthusiastic
supporter of one of the most foolish and damaging federal economic
manipulations around, endless ethanol subsidies. Any noises about
damping down agricultural subsidies in general, supposedly part of the
“fiscally responsible” Obama agenda, are dying in Congress.

State secrets: Even Obama’s most ardent supporters are disillusioned
by his close adherence to the Bush model when it comes to executive
privilege. Obama’s DOJ has openly agreed that lawsuits challenging
rendition and warrantless-wiretapping programs should be dismissed
because trying them would expose state secrets. His legal team
declares that the president—and only the president—has the right to
make such classified decisions, with neither courts nor Congress, and
of course no one as inconsequential as an aggrieved citizen, able to
second guess.

That’s troubling enough, but it’s not all. While Attorney General Eric
Holder has released some Bush-era documents relating to torture
policy, the Obama administration as a whole is, as this article went
to press, agonizing over whether to release a further set said to be
even more heinous. (Even if they eventually release them, that this
wasn’t a no-brainer shows executive secrecy is still far too robust in
the administration.) Even an international intellectual-property
treaty being actively considered by 27 countries had its contents
declared a national-security secret in an Obama DOJ filing in March.

Healthca We don’t yet know what combination of mandates, subsidies,
government-supplied insurance, and controls will arise. But we do know
that the cornerstone of the cost containment Obama seeks will be
decisions about what gets covered by the insurance that the government
will be guaranteeing, regulating, and demanding. This means rationing
and a potentially fatal blow to one of the last markets where
expensive and experimental new treatments can be developed and, if
found worthwhile, thrive.

Given how Obama has shown such a scrupulous sense of pipers and their
right to call the tune in the financial and automotive markets, he is
apt to be more explicit than past politicians in insisting that any
behavior by companies or individuals that costs the public money must
be stringently controlled. That means your health will no longer be
your own business but Barack Obama’s.

Environment: The president did not immediately get the cap-and-trade
carbon program he wanted. But he is using the powers of the stimulus
package and bailout legislation to establish that he can push out
corporate execs and take over any company he wants in other fields, so
why not in this one, too? His executive branch seems to believe that
it can legitimately claim whatever power it says it needs to achieve a
goal it can halfway connect to a legitimate congressional mandate.

It is quite possible that Obama’s EPA will claim authority for
sweeping action under the Clean Air Act. The president of Clean Air
Watch, Frank O’Donnell, told Rolling Stone that an EPA ruling that
global warming is a public health danger “gives Obama added leverage
in going to Congress. … He can say, ‘I’ve got this authority in my
back pocket. If you torpedo cap-and-trade, I’ll have no choice but to
deal with this administratively.’”

Foreign policy: Obama claims to be on schedule to wind down our
involvement in Iraq. His rosy projections of declining deficits in the
out-years—the ones he doesn’t have to worry about now as he tries to
keep the plates of an overextended economy spinning for one more month—
depend on it. But if a rising insurgency ramps up the killings of U.S.
troops or other Iraqis in the last months before the supposed pullout
at the end of 2011, who believes that Obama will make good on his
pledge?

He has no intention of ending the Bush-era policy of imperial
overreach. He’s just shifting the theater in which we act out this
timeless drama of collapse, with 21,000 more troops promised to
Afghanistan for the potentially eternal mission of ending the Taliban
insurgency there.

This survey only scratches the surface of bad actions and ominous
portents for President Obama’s exercise of power. His administration
is as cynical about federalism as Bush’s, if not more so.
Indeed, he has such a yen for creating independent centers of
executive power in the form of policy “czars” that even Democratic
Sen. Robert Byrd, no advocate of restrained government, recently
complained that Obama is threatening “the constitutional system of
checks and balances” by giving too much independent authority to the
White House outside of Senate-approved department heads. But many
other Democrats in Congress are looking to extend presidential reach
still further, plumping to give Obama power over the entire food
production and distribution system (the proposed “Food Safety
Modernization Act”) and to shut down the Internet in a “cybersecurity
emergency” (the proposed “Cybersecurity Act of 2009”).

Given the realities of Obama’s practice of presidential power, his
official vision seems less important. His team hasn’t yet spelled out
anything as sinister as the loopholes John Yoo devised for Bush from
his Office of Legal Counsel, if only because Obama’s pick for OLC,
Dawn Johnsen, has had her appointment held up in the Senate, largely
over her abortion views. From her record, it’s unlikely that she’ll
give her boss a formalized framework of power. That’s not how Obama
likes to sell himself. But just because Johnson doesn’t deliver some
tortuous explanation for why the president can do whatever he wants
doesn’t mean that her boss will be any more constrained than his
predecessor.

For example, the Obama Justice Department’s filings in the habeas
hearings before U.S. District Court Judge John Bates in the legal
challenge by four Bagram detainees no longer relies, as Bush did, on
bald declarations of inherent presidential power. But Obama’s DOJ does
not therefore conclude that the president does not have the power to
keep “enemy combatants” locked up indefinitely without habeas rights,
even as Obama moves to shut down the public-relations nightmare of
Guantanamo and abandon the term “enemy combatants.”

The power Obama’s Justice Department claims might not be “inherent”
any longer. But as explained by Duke Law School’s Christopher
Schroeder on the website Executive Watch, Obama’s team still “argues
there is ample authority to detain in the combination of the AUMF
[Authorization for Use of Military Force] itself, the president’s
conceded central role in executing the country’s war powers, and
international law.” Those poor *******s languishing at Bagram and
other mystery detention centers aren’t likely to be cheered by this
supposed change in theories of executive power.

U.S. presidents have been acting outside the explicit bounds of their
constitutional mandates from the Adams and Jefferson eras—Alien and
Sedition Acts, Louisiana Purchase—through Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt,
and Johnson to Bush and now Obama. The story of the decay and
destruction of constitutional limits on power is as old as the
Republic itself. And expansions of executive power—see Richard Nixon
with his plethora of new regulatory agencies and wage and price
controls—need not be combined with an explicitly developed theory that
supports and encourages government metastasis.

Executive overstretch has dominated American government for so long
that we usually only hear effective complaints from those fighting to
oust the incumbents steamrolling our liberties at any given moment.
That’s why candidate Obama was so sharp about criticizing Bush’s
extraconstitutional power claims and was able to find the one war he
could be unequivocally against: the one he could blame on his
political opponents. Now he perpetuates the same policies, albeit
under different names and with different excuses (secrecy and “enemy
combatants”) or with promises to stop them eventually (Iraq).

As predictable as out-party opposition is in-party realization that,
as Obama’s right-hand man Rahm Emanuel openly put it, there’s no sense
in letting a crisis go to waste. After all, the costs of classic, FDR-
style “bold, persistent experimentation” are low in such crises.
American presidential powerhouses have had various rationales for
their abuses—from war for Lincoln, Wilson, and Bush to economic crisis
for Roosevelt to playing on a wealthy society’s sense of fairness and
guilt for Johnson.

Obama’s specialty is shaping up to be particularly dangerous because
it’s hard to dispute given the average American’s sensibilities. No
call for liberty and constitutional principle seems convincing when
Obama is arguing that those relying on government giveaways should
have to follow government-set rules. That is, once you’ve allowed them
to go ahead with the handouts, the political game is almost over.
Under the guise of “managing the taxpayers’ money,” Obama and his crew
are rewriting mortgages, deciding executive compensation, tossing out
CEO’s. And note carefully that his plans for where taxpayers’ money
should go continue to swell, from healthcare to the environment to
energy policy to expanded “national service” programs. When taxpayers’
money is everywhere—and Obama is doing his best to make sure it is—
then Obama’s control is everywhere.

The Octo-potus is claiming his space and flexing his grip. As far as
he’s concerned, it’s Barack Obama’s country. We’re just living in it.