Gangster Government

"The president ... looks magnificent in the temple where laws are made," writes Michael Barone. "But he doesn't seem to consider himself bound by them." Barone recounts a few of this administration's lawless acts:

• Obama's 2012 'recess' appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were found unconstitutional in a unanimous decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in DC this year. Both agencies are now in legal limbo, pending a Supreme Court decision. Hundreds of thousands of people are affected and millions of dollars are at stake.
• In 2012 the Pentagon told defense contractors to ignore the WARN Act and not inform employees that they may be laid off if the sequester took effect. But it had no legal authority to do so.
• Health and Human Services has stated that the federal government can fund health insurance exchanges run by the feds for states that refuse to create them. But the Obamacare law doesn't allow that.
• In arranging the Chrysler bankruptcy, administration officials brushed aside the rights of secured creditors in order to pay off the United Auto Workers. The action violated decades of standard bankruptcy law.

There are other examples Barone could have mentioned, including the suspension of immigration laws for 800,000 illegals by fiat of Executive Order.

"There is a price for not observing the rule of law," warns Barone. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned of a greater threat almost 100 years ago:

If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.