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Restore the balance

By Jim Gerlach President Obama made a promise he could not keep when he said that if you liked your health insurance plan, you'd be able to keep it under Obamacare.

By Jim Gerlach

President Obama made a promise he could not keep when he said that if you liked your health insurance plan, you'd be able to keep it under Obamacare.

That simple phrase could very well be what history remembers most about our 44th president.

However, another phrase captures the essence of this president and his penchant for bypassing Congress to advance his political agenda: If you don't like the law, you can ignore it.

Before the State of the Union address, the White House had been warning that the president could go around Congress if he doesn't get what he wants. That's not new. For example:

Federal law says it's the responsibility of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to deport anyone arrested for entering this country illegally. Yet, five months before facing reelection in 2012, the president ignored the law and directed ICE to stop deporting illegal immigrants who met certain criteria he unilaterally established.

Possession of marijuana is still illegal under federal law. Instead of coming to Capitol Hill with a proposal to change that law, the president simply declared that the Justice Department would no longer enforce it.

The president will even ignore laws he fought to enact. The Obama administration has granted waivers to politically connected allies and enacted a one-year delay of the Obamacare mandate that corporations and other large employers provide insurance coverage to their workers.

The multitude of fixes to the severely flawed Obamacare law has drawn a strong rebuke from the attorneys general of 11 states, who believe the president is acting illegally.

"We support allowing citizens to keep their health-insurance coverage, but the only way to fix this problem-ridden law is to enact changes lawfully: through congressional action," the attorneys general wrote in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "The illegal actions by this administration must stop."

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University constitutional scholar, told the House Judiciary Committee in December that Obama has been expanding the power of the executive branch so much that he's transformed our system of checks and balances and created an "uber-presidency."

"There could be no greater danger for individual liberty, and I really think that the framers would be horrified by that shift because everything they've dedicated themselves to was creating this orbital balance, and we've lost it," Turley said. "[Obama's] become the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid, the concentration of power in any one of the branches. If a president can unilaterally change the meaning of laws in substantial ways, or refuse to enforce them, it takes off-line that very thing that stabilizes our system."

Our system of duly enacted laws is not an a la carte menu compiled to serve the whims of a president and federal agencies. No president or executive agency, regardless of political party or affiliation, should be able to pick and choose the laws to be enforced based on a policy or political agenda.

In fact, the Constitution requires that the president use his executive authority to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

President George Washington explained his responsibility for enforcing all laws, even ones imposing unpopular taxes, this way: "It is my duty to see the laws executed: To permit them to be trampled upon with impunity would be repugnant to that duty."

Based on Obama's pattern of ignoring and unilaterally changing laws, I have introduced legislation that would allow the House or Senate to seek immediate judicial relief in the event that a president fails to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

This legislation would authorize the House or Senate - upon passage of a resolution in either chamber by a 60 percent supermajority of votes - to bring an expedited action before a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking review and declaratory or injunctive relief in the event that a president fails to meet the constitutional requirement that all laws be faithfully executed. That court's decision would have to be issued within 90 days and would be immediately appealable directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Currently, there is no method for expedited review of these executive actions and, as a result, we have seen a proliferation of executive orders, regulations, and policies that unquestionably demonstrate an improper and inadequate enforcement of federal laws.

Making a promise you can't keep is common in politics. Completely neglecting your duty to execute all laws shouldn't be.

That's why I'm working to help Congress restore the coequal balance of power between the legislative and executive branches envisioned by our Founding Fathers and prescribed by our Constitution.