By Rick Manning, President of Americans for Limited
Government.
America will witness the circus that is Congress throughout
September, and likely draw exactly the wrong conclusion.
Congress is supposed to be messy. It is designed to be a
test of wills between competing ideologies. It is when Congress asserts
its constitutional powers that our nation is strongest and the people’s voices
are heard.
Unfortunately, over the past six years, Congress has failed to
fight to hold onto their constitutionally designed powers against an avaricious
executive branch and an obsequious judicial one. President Obama’s Iran
deal is an opportunity for the Senate to turn this recent history on its head
simply by asserting its Article II, Section 2 authority, and voting on the deal
as the treaty it is. President Obama won’t like it, but should he try to
implement the treaty without ratification, the Senate should be ready to sue,
and force the issue into the courts.
The idea is simple, force the federal courts to make a decision
on whether the treaty power of the U.S. Constitution can be ignored by the
executive branch simply because it is inconvenient to them.
On the budget front, Congress will be deciding how much will be
spent on every discretionary program in the United States budget in September.
The focus will likely be heavily tilted toward the decision on
whether the U.S. taxpayer should be funding Planned Parenthood’s abhorrent practice of cutting the
organs out of viable babies and selling
them to researchers.
This budget will fund 80 percent of the remainder of Obama’s
term in office. Based upon the President’s pen and phone approach to his
power, it is reasonable to assume that this President won’t decide as President
George W. Bush did, to shut down the regulatory process in the last six months
of his term out of concern for being accused of publishing “midnight
regulations.”
Congress’ decisions on what they choose to fund, and what
specifically to not fund, will have a material impact on whether Obama will be
able to continue on his regulatory jihad against the free enterprise system.
A simple example is the choice Congress made to defund Obama’s
proposed transfer of control of certain Internet functions from the United
States to a multi-national stakeholder body. Wisely, Congress listened to
U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and others and ended
funding for the giveaway, and they should do so again for the upcoming year.
Stopping the implementation of a laundry list of Obama
regulations should be a no-brainer through the process of finalizing a
continuing resolution.
A few
obvious defund targets are stopping the implementation of Obama’s errantly
named Clean Power
regulation, ending funding for the EPA’s sue and
settle scam that is used to create law while funding the
environmental left, and putting the kibosh on implementation of the National
Labor Relation’s Board recent decision destroying the franchise
business model to benefit big labor benefactors.
But
there are many, many other issues big and small that Congress should weigh in
on.
HUD’s
recent implementation of rules that put into place the structure to override
local zoning ordinances to further the placement of low income multi-unit housing in areas currently zoned for
single family as part of green zoning begs for defunding, and the House of
Representatives, due to the efforts of U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.), have
already passed legislation doing just that.
As do
seemingly smaller regulations like the crazy Department of Energy rules that
would make dishwashers
incapable of getting dishes clean, and EPA proposed regulations that would make
only the most expensive wood burning
stoves available for sale.
These few examples of rogue, destructive regulations and myriad
more deserve Congress’ attention through an aggressive use of their power of
the purse authority.
Obama has only fifteen months remaining in the White House, and
stopping implementation of some of his most harmful measures by refusing to
fund their implementation is the best, and only, response to a President who
proceeds as if he is the sole branch of government.
For America to work again,
Congress has to work the way it was intended, and that means reasserting their
prerogatives.
Whether that be through insisting that the treaty ratification process be
followed, or by setting the nation’s spending priorities in very specific ways
to stop Obama’s executive overreach, the next three weeks will be instrumental
in determining if the leaders of the legislative branch will fight to swing the
balance of power back toward the vision upon which our nation was founded.
Stay tuned, while the “fights” in Congress may seem like
spinning wheels, in the end, they have real meaning for post-Obama America.