The Taste for Arbitrary Power

"When The New York Times revealed not long ago that President Obama was personally selecting which suspected terrorists should live and which should die, everyone – supporters and critics – treated it as a national security story, period," writes Clark Judge. "I saw it as something else."

To me the White House generated portrait of Mr. Obama personally picking the targets of drone strikes reflects his most disturbing characteristic – a taste for the arbitrary exercise of power.

EPA Wants to Regulate Your Ditches

In an unprecedented power grab, the Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of reclassifying private property ditches and gulleys as "waters of the United States" for the purpose of regulating an owner's use of his/her own property, reports Audrey Hudson. Democratic and Republican lawmakers are joining forces to block EPA's latest overreach.

The unusual alliance of the powerful House Republicans and Democrat to jointly sponsor legislation to overturn the new guidelines signals a willingness on Capitol Hill to rein in the formidable agency.

“The Obama administration is doing everything in its power to increase costs and regulatory burdens for American businesses, farmers and individual property owners,” Mica said in a statement to Human Events. “This federal jurisdiction grab has been opposed by Congress for years, and now the administration and its agencies are ignoring law and rulemaking procedures in order to tighten their regulatory grip over every water body in the country.”

“But this administration needs to realize it is not above the law,” Mica said.

The House measure carries 64 Republican and Democratic cosponsors and was passed in committee last week. A companion piece of legislation is already gathering steam in the Senate and is cosponsored by 26 Republicans.

Obama Administration's Faulty View of Federal Power

"As the world awaits the Supreme Court's ruling on ObamaCare," writes Ilya Shapiro, "there's a larger story that the pundits are missing: the court's rejection of the Obama administration's increasingly extreme claims on behalf of unlimited federal power. ... When the administration can't get even a single one of the liberal justices to agree with it in these unrelated areas of the law, that's a sign there's something wrong with its constitutional vision."

He cites 3 cases in which the high court unanimously rejected government's claims this year: