President Obama’s Abuse of Power Calls for Tough Oversight

The American public has become numb to the abuses of power by President Obama’s administration.  While many federal laws need to be updated, a more immediate concern is that the laws in place are not being upheld.  The president has openly stated that he has no intention of following the law. Consequently, the most important task of the 114th Congress is oversight to ensure that the laws are being followed.

Faced with a president who boasts that he is bypassing Congress, it is essential that the oversight committees be headed by aggressive, knowledgeable, and experienced people in order to perform a thorough investigation.  With Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) stepping down from his post at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the most qualified person to take his place is Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), now chairman of the Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation and Regulatory Affairs.

Next week President Obama will reportedly go it alone on immigration reform and issue an executive order that would grant 5 million undocumented workers a possible fast track path to citizenship.  Dissatisfied with a series of congressional bills to increase legal immigration that command bipartisan support, he has announced that he will take the law into his own hands.

Never mind that a broad executive order would cause immense problems for workers supposedly benefitting by the grant of legal status.  Legal challenges to the executive order would work their way through the courts, casting a cloud of doubt on individuals’ legal status.  Further, an executive order does not have the comprehensive and permanent power of a law.  I wrote about this in August 2014 here and in August 2011 here.

This type of action requires a fast oversight response from Congress, a response that Representative Jim Jordan, a former NCAA wrestling champion, is fully equipped to handle.

Consider that Mr. Obama has clearly stated that he is issuing executive orders for the primary purpose of bypassing Congress. The willful disregard of law is practically unheard of in U.S. history.

On June 28, in his weekly address, Mr. Obama said, “The problem is, Republicans in Congress keep blocking or voting down almost every serious idea to strengthen the middle class.  This year alone, they’ve said no to raising the minimum wage, no to fair pay, no to student loan reform, no to extending unemployment insurance… This obstruction keeps the system rigged for those at the top, and rigged against the middle class.  And as long as they insist on doing it, I’ll keep taking actions on my own.” 

Unfortunately, immigration is not the only time that Mr. Obama’s administration has disregarded the law. The Internal Revenue Service, in a May 2012 ruling, extended Obamacare health insurance subsidies from those in state exchanges to those enrolled in the 36 federally-run health exchanges in violation of the letter of his own Affordable Care Act.  The Supreme Court has just agreed to consider the case. I wrote about this on Tuesday here.

The president has moved the deadlines of the Affordable Care Act to suit his own political needs, most recently shifting the date of 2015 enrollment in the health exchanges from October 1 to November 15, after the mid-term elections. He delayed the employer requirement to offer health insurance for one year for all businesses and for two years for small businesses, while criticizing Republicans who sought to change the law through the legislative process.

The Justice Department has neglected to investigate stories of voting rights abuses by blacks against whites in Philadelphia and the Fast and Furious program, where guns were sold illegally to see if they would end up in Mexican drug cartels.  

The Justice Department has refused to provide an independent counsel to investigate the actions of Lois Lerner, director of exempt organizations at the IRS, who delayed granting tax-exempt status to conservative groups.  IRS Commissioner John Koskinen asserted to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that Ms. Lerner’s emails were unavailable. Then, in August 2014, existence of email and BlackBerry backups were revealed to Judicial Watch by Justice Department attorneys for the IRS, who probably thought that since August is a favorite vacation month, no one would notice. I wrote about the IRS scandal last summer in June and in August.

Mr. Jordan has been a crusader for getting to the bottom of the IRS targeting of conservatives. Cleta Mitchell, an attorney at Foley & Lardner, wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal that Mr. Jordan’s call on the U.S. Treasury’s Inspector General for Tax Administration in early 2012 resulted in the audit that exposed the targeting. Since the audit, Mr. Jordan has held numerous hearings with IRS, DOJ, and Treasury officials. 

Mr. Jordan has also delayed proposed IRS rules that would affect the free speech rights of tax exempt 501(c)(4) organizations used by conservatives, while leaving untouched the rights of tax exempt liberal and environmental groups  that file under 501(c)(3), and tax –exempt unions, that have 501(c)(5) status.  I wrote about this in December 2013 here.

Mr. Jordan was a leading voice in exposing the cronyism and waste of the Obama Administration’s green energy programs. He held several hearings in which CEOs of firms that received Energy Department loans testified that they got funding through their close connections to people in the Obama administration.  They also testified that many projects were unsuccessful, with missed milestones and misspent funds. 

Mr. Jordan’s Energy Department efforts led to a full Committee investigation, in which over a million pages of documents were reviewed. These documents revealed that DOE loan office employees were using personal email accounts (as opposed to official ones) to conduct DOE business to hide the malfeasance of the loan program. Based on emails requested by the Committee, I wrote about the scandal in 2012 here.

In the best of times, a congressional oversight committee would have little to do. With a president who openly flouts the law, these are not the best of times.  The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will have much work to do. It needs a strong and experienced chairman. It needs Jim Jordan.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor, directs Economics21 at the Manhattan Institute. You can follow her on Twitter here.

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