If you like Obama's executive orders, you are going to love 2014
The American system of government has as it's chief executive, a president who is carefully checked by a watchful Congress and a consientious judiciary.
Except, when it isn't.
Case in point: Our president plans to rule us - not govern us - by using the vast powers of his office and absolute control of the federal bureaucracy to ram his vision of hope and change down our throats. Done without the approval of Congress and with little challenge from the judiciary.
Can he get away with it? Watch him:
The new plan "is to bring all of the government alive in a way we have never been very good at," said another official.
"We'll be doing that as aggressively as possible.... and if we succeed, that is a big presidency," a senior administration official told the Post.
Obama's goals are more ambitious than what he had expected to get from the GOP after his 2012 reelection, an official said.
"Even in the best case - if the [GOP's] fever had broken and the clouds had parted - we still would have only gotten maybe 40 percent of what we wanted," said the official, who echoed Obama's frequent description of the GOP's conservative beliefs as the incoherent ravings of a sick patient.
The new "pen and phone" strategy appears to be a more aggressive version of the post 2010 "We Can't Wait" strategy, in which Obama ha repeatedly promised to implement progressive policies when the GOP-led Congress refused to pass them.
Numerous GOP legislators, including House Speaker John Boehner, have protested Obama's unilateral actions as lawbreaking and unconstitutional.
"If you look at what this administration has done - from Obamacare to the Environmental Protection Agency to the [immigration enforcement], the rules and regulations and executive orders that he rolls out on the fly - it is quite clear that he ignores what is in the law and he does what he wants to do," Louisiana Rep. John Fleming told The Daily Caller.
On Friday, Obama's new homeland-defense secretary offered a hint of the ambitions behind the "pen and phone" plan, when he told an audience that illegal immigrants have "earned the right to be citizens."
Amnesty "is a matter of, in my view, homeland security [because it can] encourage people to 'come out from the shadows,'" said secretary Jeh Johnson, who has the bureaucratic power to further reduce enforcement of the nation's largely unenforced immigration laws.
The White House's plan also calls for Obama to go back on the campaign trail up to November, while his deputy use the agencies to regulate the economy and civil society.
Obama will spend his campaign time "urging businesses to hire the long-term unemployed, working with university presidents to promote skills training adapted to the demands of the changing economy, and identifying problems such as violence against women and girls," according to the Post.
The Post's report did not include any evidence that Obama will try to negotiate deals with the GOP in Congress to boost the economy.
Past presidents usually demonstrated restraint in exercising executive authority. They had done so largely out of respect for the office, and the history of the country. Recent presidents have been more eager to use executive orders because working with Congress is hard work and they figure why bother with that when I an get most of what I want with the stroke of a pen?
But with the White House talking this way, you have to figure that President Obama is going to break the mold and create a whole new kind of presidency, transforming the office of president as much as he transforms America into his radical vision of Utopia. His first term and first few months of his second, have been marked by executive overreach. Apparently, we haven't seen anything yet.
The future promises even more of a rule by decree. He can only achieve this because of the massive growth of the federal bureaucracy which now has its hands on the levers of power unlike anything we've seen before. Obama will get his ruinous carbon regs and attack "income inequality" by going after the rich using his executive authority beyond any limits imagined by the Founders.
After all - "limits" are for the little people.