July 14, 2013

Impeach Attorney General Holder - for Justice's Sake

By Clarice Feldman
This week, I am grateful I am not a civics teacher.  The entire legal and constitutional framework under which we believe we live seemed to have been turned upside-down.  To start with, as former U.S. Appeals Judge Michael McConnell argued so well, Obama's suspension of the employer mandate of ObamaCare conflicts with his obligations under Article II, Sec 3 to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president on legal and constitutional issues, has repeatedly opined that the president may decline to enforce laws he believes are unconstitutional. But these opinions have always insisted that the president has no authority, as one such memo put it in 1990, to "refuse to enforce a statute he opposes for policy reasons." Attorneys general under Presidents Carter, Reagan, both Bushes and Clinton all agreed on this point. With the exception of Richard Nixon, whose refusals to spend money appropriated...(Read Full Article)