{"id":2412,"date":"2026-07-01T23:13:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T16:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/?p=2412"},"modified":"2026-07-01T23:13:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T16:13:19","slug":"top-10-ways-obama-violated-the-constitution-during-his-presidency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/?p=2412","title":{"rendered":"Top 10 Ways Obama Violated the Constitution during His Presidency"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"long-form__wrapper container--medium-down\">\n<div class=\"paragraph paragraph--type--text paragraph--view-mode--long-form paragraph--55241 lead lead--dropcap clearfix\">\n<p>he Obama administration has been the most\u00a0lawless\u00a0in U.S. history. I don\u2019t mean that in the Nixonian sense of personal corruption, whereby the president is\u00a0<em>personally<\/em>\u00a0above the law, although the idea that Barack Obama\u2019s tenure has been ethically pure is\u00a0laughable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"long-form__wrapper container--medium-down\">\n<div class=\"paragraph paragraph--type--text paragraph--view-mode--long-form paragraph--55242 body-text\">\n<p>No, my accusation rests on the 44th president\u2019s seeing himself as\u00a0<em>professionally<\/em>\u00a0above the law, ignoring the executive branch\u2019s legal limits and disrespecting constitutional bounds like federalism and the separation of powers.<\/p>\n<p>But don\u2019t just take it from me. Liberal law professor Garrett Epps (a professional acquaintance)\u00a0admits\u00a0that \u201ceven for those like me who admire Barack Obama, the constitutional record is disturbingly mixed. Obama leaves the Constitution weaker than at the beginning of his terms.\u201d Epps labels Obama\u2019s posture to be one of \u201caggressive compliance,\u201d torturing statutory language as far as it can go in order to avoid constitutional claims.<\/p>\n<div class=\"long-form__wrapper container--medium-down\">\n<div class=\"paragraph paragraph--type--text paragraph--view-mode--long-form paragraph--170508 body-text\">\n<p><strong>Obama Only Furthered the Imperial Presidency<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>He points first to the 2011 Libya intervention. It involved neither a congressional authorization of the use of force, nor compliance with the 1973 War Powers Act, which requires at least congressional notification of troop commitments and affirmative permission after 60\u00a0days. Every president since the WPA\u2019s enactment has claimed that it\u2019s an unconstitutional limit on inherent executive authority over military power. Obama instead claimed that hundreds of missile strikes and dozens of air missions didn\u2019t trigger the WPA because they only constituted \u201ckinetic military action\u201d rather than war.<\/p>\n<p>It just doesn\u2019t pass the smell test. Neither does at least some of the National Security Agency\u2019s robust program of domestic surveillance, about which Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has lied to Congress. And then there\u2019s the\u00a0aggressive posture\u00a0towards and persecution of journalists. It\u2019s as if the goal was to show Donald Trump how it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"container\">\n<aside class=\"aside--right paragraph paragraph--type--aside paragraph--view-mode--long-form paragraph--55244 aside\">\n<div class=\"transition--fade-in--from-left transition transition--delay--0 transition--duration--slow js-animation-trigger--scroll\" data-once=\"animation-on-scroll\">\n<div class=\"paragraph paragraph--type--pullquote paragraph--view-mode--aside-nested paragraph--55243 pullquote pullquote--default p-mb-last-child-0\">\n<p>The Obama administration has been the most lawless in U.S. history. Here are just a few examples to prove it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"long-form__wrapper container--medium-down\">\n<div class=\"paragraph paragraph--type--text paragraph--view-mode--long-form paragraph--55245 body-text\">\n<p>This is all a world away from candidate Obama, who said this on the campaign trail in 2008: \u201cThe biggest problems that we\u2019re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that\u2019s what I intend to reverse when I\u2019m president.\u201d As George Mason law professor David Bernstein\u00a0quipped, foolish voters thought that Obama was taking issue with the imperial presidency, when really he was only complaining that the wrong man occupied the throne.<\/p>\n<p><strong>How Obama\u00a0Ignored Constitutional Checks and Balances<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Indeed, once he lost the congressional majority that allowed him to sign breathtakingly unconstitutional legislation like Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, Obama began using his pen in other ways. Hearkening to Woodrow Wilson\u2019s progressive view of the administrative state, President Obama steadily took out his frustrations with the checks and balances that inhibited his ability to \u201cfundamentally transform\u201d the country.<\/p>\n<p>A lack of congressional acquiescence didn\u2019t stop this president. Even in Obama\u2019s first term, the administration launched a \u201cWe Can\u2019t Wait\u201d initiative, with senior aide Dan Pfeiffer explaining that \u201cwhen Congress won\u2019t act, this president will.\u201d And when the reelected President Obama announced his second-term economic plans, he said that \u201cI will not allow gridlock, or inaction, or willful indifference to get in our way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But no matter how much you hold it up to the light\u2014and no matter what textual penumbras you induce\u2014there\u2019s no \u201cgridlock clause\u201d in the Constitution by which the president\u2019s power increases to the extent Congress doesn\u2019t support him. Indeed,\u00a0gridlock\u00a0is a feature of our system, not a bug, meant to check executive abuse and majoritarian populism both.<\/p>\n<p>As we mark another peaceful transfer of power, let\u2019s pause to note the 10 most significant ways in which Barack Obama violated the Constitution, in rough chronological order.<\/p>\n<p><strong>1. The Chrysler Bailout<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Building on the Bush administration\u2019s illegal use of TARP funds to bail out the auto industry, the Obama administration in 2009 bullied Chrysler\u2019s secured creditors\u2014who were entitled to \u201cabsolute priority\u201d\u2014into accepting 30 cents on the dollar, while junior creditors such as labor unions received much more. This subversion of creditor rights violates not just bankruptcy law, but also the Constitution\u2019s Takings and Due Process Clauses.<\/p>\n<p>This blatant crony capitalism\u2014government-directed industrial policy to help political insiders\u2014discourages investors and generally undermines confidence in American rule of law. The Supreme Court ultimately vacated the Second Circuit ruling that allowed this farce to proceed; Chrysler\u2019s creditors are still out of luck, but there\u2019s no legal precedent.<\/p>\n<p><strong>2. Obamacare Implementation<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One can, and many have, written whole articles about how the Affordable Care Act is such an affront to the rule of law that its individual mandate and Medicaid coercion\u2014both of which Chief Justice John Roberts rewrote\u2014are just the tip of the lawless iceberg. On implementation, we can\u2019t blame Congress or courts. Here\u2019s a sample:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Labor Department announced in February 2013 that it was delaying for a year the part of the law that limits how much people have to spend on their own insurance. This may have been sensible, but changing a law requires actual legislation.<\/li>\n<li>Later that year, the administration announced\u00a0<em>via blogpost on the eve of the\u00a0<span tabindex=\"0\" data-term=\"goog_1020046503\">July 4<\/span>\u00a0holiday<\/em>\u00a0that it was delaying the requirement that employers of at least 50 people provide complying insurance or pay a fine. This time it cited statutory authority, but the cited provisions allow the delay of reporting requirements, not the mandate itself.<\/li>\n<li>The famous pledge that \u201cif you like your plan, you can keep it\u201d backfired when insurers started cancelling millions of plans that didn\u2019t comply with Obamacare. So Obama called a press conference to proclaim that people could continue buying non-complying plans for another year\u2014despite the ACA\u2019s language to the contrary. He then refused to consider a House-passed bill that would\u2019ve made this action legal.<\/li>\n<li>A little-known part of Obamacare requires congressional staff to get insurance from health exchanges, rather than a taxpayer-funded program. Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management to interpret the law to maintain the generous benefits.<\/li>\n<li>Obamacare grants tax credits to people whose employers don\u2019t provide coverage if they buy a plan \u201cthrough an Exchange established by the State\u201d\u2014and then fines employers for each employee receiving such a subsidy. No tax credits are authorized for residents of states where the exchanges are established by the\u00a0<em>federal\u00a0<\/em>government, as an incentive for states to create exchanges themselves. Because so few (16) states did, however, the IRS issued a rule allowing subsidies (and fines) for plans coming from \u201ca State Exchange, regional Exchange, subsidiary Exchange, and federally-facilitated Exchange.\u201d Yes, we can also blame the Supreme Court for upholding this.<\/li>\n<li>The Department of Health and Human Services granted more than 2,000 waivers to employers seeking relief from Obamacare\u2019s regulations. Nearly 20 percent of them went to gourmet restaurants and other businesses in former Speaker Nancy Pelosi\u2019s San Francisco district. Nevada, home to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, got a blanket waiver, while GOP-controlled states like Indiana and Louisiana were denied. Beyond political favoritism, such dispensations violate a host of constitutional and administrative law provisions like equal protection and the \u201cintelligible principle\u201d needed for congressional delegation of authority to cabinet agencies.<\/li>\n<li>HHS also continues paying insurance companies to compensate them for losses caused by Obamacare\u2019s ignorance of basic economics. Alas, Congress never appropriated these funds, so the House of Representatives is suing the administration and won in the district court. Now on appeal,\u00a0<em>House v. Burwell<\/em>\u00a0is stayed until the D.C. Circuit hears from the incoming Trump administration. (Full disclosure: My wife joined the House general counsel\u2019s office last month and is litigating the appeal.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>3. Political Profiling by the IRS<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>After seeing a rise in the number of applications for tax-exempt status, the IRS in 2010 compiled a \u201cbe on the lookout\u201d (\u201cBOLO\u201d) list to identify organizations engaged in political activities. The list included words such as \u201cTea Party,\u201d \u201cPatriots,\u201d and \u201cIsrael\u201d; subjects such as government spending, debt, or taxes; and activities such as criticizing the government, educating about the Constitution, or challenging Obamacare. The targeting continued through May 2013, with no consequences other than Lois Lerner, the chief of the exempt-organizations unit, being held in contempt of Congress\u2014and then being allowed to peacefully retire despite erased records and other cover-ups. Okay, this one qualifies as Nixonian.<\/p>\n<p><strong>4. Recess Appointments<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In January 2012, President Obama appointed three members of the National Labor Relations Board, as well as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, during what he considered to be a Senate recess. But the Senate was still holding \u201cpro forma\u201d sessions every three days\u2014a technique developed by Sen. Harry Reid to thwart Bush recess appointments. (Meanwhile, the Dodd-Frank Act, which created the CFPB, provides that authority remains with the Treasury Secretary until a director is \u201cconfirmed by the Senate.\u201d) In 2014, Supreme Court\u00a0<em>unanimously<\/em>\u00a0ruled that the NLRB appointments were illegal, while last year the D.C. Circuit found the CFPB\u2019s structure to be unconstitutional.<strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>5. DACA and DAPA<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Congress has shamelessly failed to pass any sort of immigration reform, including for the most sympathetic victims of the current non-system, young people who were brought into the country illegally as children. Nonetheless, during his 2012 reelection campaign, President Obama directed the Department of Homeland Security to issue work and residence permits (Deferred Action to Childhood Arrivals) to the so-called Dreamers.<\/p>\n<p>Then, after the 2014 midterms, the president decided that he had been wrong\u00a022 times\u00a0in saying he couldn\u2019t give temporary legal status to illegal immigrants. The administration engineered this Deferred Action for Parents of Americans in the wake of Congress\u2019s rejection of the same policies, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, immigration law, and the Constitution\u2019s Take Care Clause. A district court enjoined DAPA in February 2015, which action the Fifth Circuit twice affirmed, as did the Supreme Court by a 4\u20134 vote.<\/p>\n<p><strong>6. Assault On Free Speech and Due Process On College Campuses<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In 2013 the Department of Education\u2019s Office of Civil Rights, in conjunction with the Justice Department, sent the University of Montana\u00a0a letter\u00a0that became a national \u201cblueprint\u201d for tackling sexual harassment. The letter urged a crackdown on \u201cunwelcome\u201d speech and requires complaints to be heard in quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trial, and convict based on a mere \u201cmore likely than not\u201d standard.<\/p>\n<p>As noted civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate\u00a0explained this week, the administration construed Title IX\u2014the federal law barring sex discrimination by federally funded schools\u2014as a mandate to punish students and faculty accused of sexual misconduct using procedures that make it extraordinarily difficult for innocent people to defend themselves.<\/p>\n<p><strong>7. The Clean Power Plan<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In June 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new rule for regulating power-plant emissions. Despite significant criticism, it finalized the rule in August 2015, giving states until 2018 to develop plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, with mandatory compliance beginning in 2022.<\/p>\n<p>The EPA cites Section 111 of the Clean Air Act as justification for this Clean Power Plan, but that section\u00a0can\u2019t give\u00a0the agency such\u00a0authority. Section 111 doesn\u2019t permit the government to require states to regulate pollutants from existing sources when those pollutants are already being regulated under Section 112, like those deriving from coal-fired plants. The late Justice Scalia\u2019s last public act was to join an order staying the rule pending further litigation (or, as is likely, a rescinding of the rule).<\/p>\n<p><strong>8. The WOTUS Rule<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In May 2015, the EPA announced its new Clean Water Rule, which aims to protect streams and wetlands from pollution. The agency insists that the rule doesn\u2019t affect bodies of water not previously regulated, but several groups\u00a0have sued\u00a0on the basis that the rule\u2019s definitions of regulated waters greatly exceed the EPA\u2019s authority under the Clean Water Act to regulate \u201cwaters of the United States\u201d (WOTUS).<\/p>\n<p>The Supreme Court has thrice addressed the meaning of that phrase, making clear that, for the EPA to have regulatory authority, a sufficient nexus must exist between the location regulated and \u201cnavigable waters.\u201d The Clean Water Rule, however, purports to give EPA power far beyond waters that are \u201cnavigable\u201d by any stretch of the word\u2019s definition. Litigation is ongoing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>9. Net Neutrality<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In the works throughout the Obama presidency, the Open Internet Rule was adopted in February 2015 and went into effect that June, forbidding internet-service providers (ISPs) from prioritizing different kinds of internet traffic.<\/p>\n<p>The real issue, beyond this \u201cnet neutrality,\u201d is the Federal Communications Commission\u2019s manufacture of authority to regulate the internet despite clear congressional instruction that the internet remain unregulated. In 2014, courts struck down the FCC\u2019s 2010 self-aggrandizement under the 1934 Communications Act and 1996 Telecommunications Act, so the agency doubled down by writing a new rule that equated the internet with telephony.<\/p>\n<p>That creative interpretation allowed the FCC to claim the sweeping discretion it had used to manage the AT&amp;T phone monopoly throughout the 20th century. Moreover, while the FCC touts the regulation as ensuring that the internet remains free of censorship, the rule impinges on the First Amendment rights of internet-service providers.<\/p>\n<p><strong>10. EPA\u2019s Cap-And-Trade<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In October 2015, the EPA issued a carbon-emissions cap-and-trade regulation, establishing for each state limits on carbon dioxide emission, with four interim steps on the way to the final goal. EPA says that this rule, too, is authorized by Section 111 of the Clean Air Act, but Congress considered and rejected such a\u00a0cap-and-trade program\u00a0in 2009. Far from being authorized by the Clean Air Act or lying in some zone of statutory ambiguity, this massive new regulatory scheme contradicts the express will of Congress.<\/p>\n<p><strong>That\u2019s Only The Beginning<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It was obviously difficult to narrow that enumeration to just 10\u2014and I cheated by putting all the Obamacare shenanigans under one item. Some may complain that I should\u2019ve prioritized other kinds of executive actions, whether regarding guns or transgender bathroom access or electricity regulation. Others may prefer to invoke President Obama\u2019s decision not to subject the Iran nuclear treaty to a Senate vote\u2014aided by Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker\u2019s na\u00efve complicity\u2014or engaging in the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap without notifying Congress. Sadly, the possibilities for this parlor game are nearly endless.<\/p>\n<p>Then, of course, there\u2019s the administration\u2019s\u00a0abysmal performance\u00a0before the Supreme Court, where its win percentage hovers around 45 percent (as against a historical norm of 60\u201370 percent). The Justice Department has even suffered nearly 50\u00a0<em>unanimous<\/em>\u00a0losses, half again as many as under George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. These cases have come in such disparate areas as criminal procedure, religious liberty, property rights, immigration, securities regulation, tax law, and the separation of powers.\u00a0They have nothing in common other than incredible assertions of federal power. The government\u2019s arguments across this wide variety of cases would essentially allow the executive branch to do whatever it wants without constitutional restraint.<\/p>\n<p>Are these really the kind of powers President Obama and his progressive enablers would want their worst enemies to have? As my colleague Gene Healy\u00a0writes\u00a0in the latest issue of\u00a0<em>Reason<\/em>, \u201cthe very idea of \u2018President Trump\u2019 seemed like a thought experiment a libertarian might have invented to get a liberal friend to focus on the dangers of concentrated power. Now it\u2019s an experiment we\u2019re going to run in real life, starting\u00a0January 20, 2017.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If you live by executive action, you die by executive action\u2014whether that means reversing President Obama\u2019s policies or pocketing his constitutional excesses for future use.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>he Obama administration has been the most\u00a0lawless\u00a0in U.S. history. I don\u2019t mean that in the Nixonian sense of personal corruption, whereby the president is\u00a0personally\u00a0above the &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-stories","category-motivation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2415,"href":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2412\/revisions\/2415"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talesofmotivations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}