On January 4th of this year, President Obama named Richard Cordray to head up his new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and three other individuals to vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board, without U.S. Senate confirmation, and without the Senate being in recess, in violation of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. According to numerous news outlets and sources within the White House, the President declared that he, and not the United States Senate would decide when the Senate was, in fact, in recess.
HHS mandate requiring Catholic and other religious organizations to pay for contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs for their employees shows no sign of abating. This is notwithstanding the Obama administration's "accommodation," announced last Friday, that will permit insurance companies to pass the cost of contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs along to Catholic and other religious employers - as long as they do so surreptitiously, of course.
During the 2009 bailouts of U.S. automakers GM and Chrysler, the President ran roughshod over contract and even bankruptcy law, subordinating the prior contract rights of senior bondholders to unionized employees, in a political payback for the millions of dollars unions had contributed to Obama's presidential campaign. (To make matters worse, and in what we now know is his typical fashion, Obama castigated those attempting to assert their legal rights as "profiteers.")
And then there is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act itself. Critics raise at least two primary objections. The first is that nowhere does the Constitution give Congress the power to compel American citizens to engage in any commercial transaction, such as buying insurance. Second – and more insidiously – we argue that the Act by its very structure creates incentives and methods for impermissible overreach into what must be the most sacrosanct, private decisions in people’s lives; those which must be free from government coercion.
