Tag: House of Representatives

There is no fourth branch of the federal government

There is no fourth branch of the federal government

The US Constitution defines three separate (and supposedly equal) branches of government:

  • Executive
  • Legislative
  • Judicial

Unfortunately, today we have a fourth branch of government:

  • Administrative (or maybe called the Regulatory branch)

How did this happen?

The founders probably could not have anticipated this happening. In the day and age of the writing of the US Constitution, it was not anticipated that regulations would need to be created that were so specific that the Congressmen themselves could not write the words (or at least with the help of some assistants).

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She Knew All Along

She Knew All Along

 

Mrs. Clinton complained in her testimony on Capitol Hill that past Congresses had never made the overseas deaths of U.S. officials a “partisan” issue. That’s because those past deaths had never inspired an administration to concoct a wild excuse for their occurrence, in an apparent attempt to avoid blame for a terror attack in a presidential re-election year.

The early hints that this is exactly what happened after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans cast doubt on every White House-issued “fact” about the fiasco and led to the establishment of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s select committee.

Count on the Obama administration to again resort to blaming “confusing” and “conflicting” information at the time for its two-week spin. That was Mrs. Clinton’s flimsy excuse at the hearing. But her own conversations prove she was in no doubt about what happened—while it was still happening.

What that House committee did Thursday was finally expose the initial deception.

Source: She Knew All Along

House has decided to sue Executive Office

House has decided to sue Executive Office

supreme court photoI, for one, am glad that the House has decided to sue the President of the United States.

Congress has the exclusive authority to make law because lawmaking requires pluralism, debate and compromise, the essence of representative government. If Congress cannot achieve consensus, that doesn’t mean Congress is “broken.” A divided Congress reflects a divided people. Until there is a compromise acceptable to the majority, the status quo is the only correct path. An impasse emphatically does not warrant a president’s bypassing Congress with a pen and phone, as Mr. Obama claimed the power to do early this year.

The separation of powers also guarantees political accountability. When Congress makes a law and the president executes it as written, citizens will know whom to reward or punish at the next election.government branches photo

A president who unilaterally rewrites a bad or unworkable law, however, prevents the American people from knowing whether Congress should be praised or condemned for passing it. Such unconstitutional actions can be used to avert electoral pain for the president and his allies.

If Mr. Obama can get away with this, his successors will be tempted to follow suit. A Republican president, for example, might unilaterally get the Internal Revenue Service to waive collection of the capital-gains tax (something that I am personally in favor of but I know my more liberal friends would protest). Congress will be bypassed, rendering it increasingly irrelevant, and disfranchising the American people.

I am not going tgovernment branches photoo predict the winner of this suit here even though I have done it elsewhere more privately. The key learning from our government regardless of who wins this little battle is that no branch of the government has the right to completely ignore the other branches nor ignore a large minority or a small majority of the people.

Photo by Stephen D. Melkisethian

Photo by futureatlas.com

Photo by dbking