COMMENTARY BY DR JOHN WORLDPEACE FOR PRESIDENT 2016
The Republicans are like a bunch of lost politicians who have not much to offer to the 21st century. They seem to be against everything. They refuse to work with Obama. They refuse to compromise. They have no idea what to do so they attack a president who is determined to move forward in a very fast moving world. It is a sad state of affairs and my feeling is that with full control of the House and Senate they will have to take the blame for everything that goes wrong in the next two years. And by so doing will at the least elect what they fear more than anything else; another Democratic president.
The world is just changing too fast for these Republicans.
Dr John WorldPeace
150104 0610
SOURCE: The Boston Globe
GOP calling on courts to block Obama
By Michael D. ShearNew York Times January 04, 2015
WASHINGTON — As Republicans prepare to take full control of Congress on Tuesday, the party’s leaders are counting on judges, not their newly elected majority on Capitol Hill, to roll back President Obama’s aggressive second-term agenda and block his executive actions on health care, climate change, and immigration.
On health care, Republicans in Washington have sued the president and joined state lawsuits urging the Supreme Court to declare major parts of the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.
On climate change, state attorneys general and coal industry groups are urging federal courts to block the president’s plan to regulate power plants.
And on immigration, conservative lawmakers and state officials have demanded that federal judges overturn Obama’s plan to prevent millions of deportations.
Democrats say the legal moves reflect a convenient turnabout for the Republican Party and a newfound willingness to seek an active role for the judiciary when it benefits conservative policy goals.
“What they cannot win in the legislative body, they now seek and hope to achieve through judicial activism,” said Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia. “That is such delicious irony, it makes one’s head spin.”
But conservative legal scholars say Republicans are justified in seeking judicial relief from what they believe has been a series of egregious abuses of power by Obama. They argue that urging the courts to restrain the president’s authority is legally different from a judge using rulings to invent new rights under the Constitution.
“Given the state of dysfunction in Congress, in many cases, the courts do represent the last opportunity to get a fair hearing on these issues,” said Patrick Morrisey, West Virginia’s attorney general, who is leading the court fight against the president’s efforts to regulate coal.
The Republican disputed the view that conservatives are now looking for help from activist judges, a practice they once derided. “Quite the opposite, it’s a call for adhering to the rule of law,” Morrisey said.
He is also seeking to convince a US court that Obama’s attempts to have the Environmental Protection Agency set standards for carbon emissions amount to illegal double regulation of power plants.
As the new year begins, conservatives and Republican officials have filed legal briefs in courts across the country aimed at blocking Obama from exercising his executive authority and stopping expansive decisions by federal agencies.
In an amicus brief filed last month on behalf of 68 members of Congress, the conservative American Center for Law and Justice said Obama’s immigration actions were unconstitutional because federal officials had “exceeded the bounds of their prosecutorial discretion and abdicated their duty to faithfully execute the law.”
In another brief, the Washington-based advocacy group urged the Supreme Court to invalidate the president’s health care tax subsidies, saying they were the “most egregious example of the administration’s make-it-up-as-we-go approach to implementing” the Affordable Care Act.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said he believes the president’s policies will withstand the legal challenges, saying of the administration, “Certainly, they were very, very careful not to go beyond what the law will allow.”
Schumer added that the Republican definition of an activist judge is flexible: “They decry the courts overruling or implementing things they don’t like, but are eager to have the courts implement things they like.”