Obama Staring Down The Constitution

He's taking bitch-slapping it farther than any President before him.

"...The Rosen matter alone would suffice to disqualify the administration from any Friends-of-the-First Amendment society. Yet it is only one of several such assaults. Others include the administration’s campaign, through its insistence on a contraception mandate underObamacare, against religious liberty, and the president’s suggestion after Citizens United that “we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process” to limit the free-speech rights of persons who incorporate their social organizations; and its thuggish targeting of its political opponents.

If the IRS’ treatment of tea-party groups were an isolated story, you could swallow the explanation that a few low-level bureaucrats went rogue. But that account does not explain why the EPA has been far more generous to freedom-of-information requests from liberal groups than from conservatives. Or why, shortly after the Obama campaign slimed Romney supporter Frank Vander Sloot as a disreputable fellow, he was audited three times – twice by the IRS and once by the Labor Department. Or why, after Texas resident CatherineEngelbrecht started a Tea Party group, she received scrutiny not just from the IRS but also from the FBI. And OSHA. And, just for good measure, the ATF. Or why the IRS took 17 months to respond to an initial tax-exempt status from the conservative Wyoming Policy Institute. Or why it shared confidential files from conservative groups with the liberalProPublica.  Or why. . .

Enough on the First Amendment. The president also has tried with considerable vigor to undermine the Second, and has succeeded in subverting the Fourth: Under Obama, who has gone to court to defend warrantless wiretaps he once condemned, warrantless “pen register” and “trap-and-trace” monitoring has soared to unprecedented heights.

In 2011 the president signed a reauthorization of the Patriot Act with just one regret: Congress approved an extension of only one year, while Obama wanted three. He signed into law a defense reauthorization bill allowing the indefinite detention, without charge, of American citizens, thereby gutting the principle of habeas corpus. Granted, he issued an executive order promising not to exercise that power. But the order does not constrain future presidents or, technically, even him.

From a civil-liberties perspective, Obama has carried forward nearly every one of the war-on-terror powers that led liberals to denounce George W. Bush as a goose-stepping fascist, and in fact has made many of them worse. When he retires from public life, perhaps he will return to teaching the Constitution. That should be much easier work – given how little of it there will be left."