Obama's Top 10 Constitutional Violations in 2013

"It was hard to limit myself to 10 items," writes Ilya Shapiro, editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review, "but these, in my judgment, represent the chief executive’s biggest dereliction this year of his duty to 'preserve, protect, and defend' the Constitution, and to 'take care that the law be faithfully executed':”

1. Delay of Obamacare's Out-of-Pocket Caps. The Labor Department announced in February that it was delaying for a year the part of the health care law that limits how much people have to spend on their own insurance.
2. Delay of Obamacare's Employer Mandate. Delayed requirement that employers of at least 540 people provide complying insurance or pay a fine.
3. Delay of Obamacare's Insurance Requirements. Following millions of insurance cancellations, delayed requirement that people purchase Obamacare-approved insurance plans.
4. Exemption of Congress from Obamacare. The requirement that Congressmen and their staff get insurance on Obamacare exchanges was quietly 'reinterpreted' in August to allow Washington elite to maintain their generous congressional benefits instead.
5. Expansion of the Employer Mandate Penalty Through IRS Regulation. The law has no penalties for employers in states that don't set up health care exchanges, but so many states refused to create health care exchanges that IRS rewrote regulations to impose penalties on employers in non-participating states anyway.
6. Political Profiling by the IRS. IRS continued to target tax-exempt organizations (begun in 2010) that referenced any of the following in their missions:  Tea Party, Patriots, Israel, government spending, debt, taxes, Constitution, and Obamacare.
7. Outlandish Supreme Court Arguments. Between January 2012 and June 2013, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Justice Department's extreme positions 9 times in cases ranging from criminal procedure to property rights, religious liberty to immigration, securities regulation to tax law.
8. Recess Appointments. Obama appointed three members of the National Labor Relations Board, as well as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, while Senate was in session.
9. Assault on Free Speech and Due Process on College Campuses. The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights created a national 'blueprint' for tackling sexual harassment that urges a crackdown on 'unwelcome' speech and requires complaints to be heard in quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trail, and convict based on a mere "more likely than not" standard.
10. Mini-DREAM Act. President Obama, contradicting his own previous statements claiming to lack authority, directed the Department of Homeland Security to issue work and residence permits to the so-called Dreamers.

Can States Force a Federal Balanced Budget Amendment?

From Ilya Shapiro @ CATO: Arizona Moves to Limit Federal Spending. 

Earlier this month, I wrote about the Compact for America, an elegant mechanism for limiting out-of-control federal spending through a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution that would be advanced via an interstate compact.

Well, already there’s progress on that front.  This past Monday, the CFA passed the Arizona House Committee on Federalism and Fiscal Responsibility.  The full state house will now be taking up this important legislation.

I should note that the prime sponsor of the bill is former Cato intern who’s now a state representative (and my friend), Adam Kwasman.  Glad to see that our internship program is paying dividends with the future leaders of constitutional liberty.

Let’s hope the momentum continues and that the CFA gains traction in other states, putting on Congress to call a constitutional convention or pass its own Balanced Budget Amendment.

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: