Obama’s Chief of Staff Promises ‘Audacious Executive Action’ in Final Year

[Lucille]

http://beforeitsnews.com/contributor/upload/218836/images/King-Barack-Obama-And-His-Jester.jpg

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/429692/obamas-chief-staff-audacious-executive-action-final-year


White House chief of staff Denis McDonough pushed back against the notion his president is played out in the wake of his last State of the Union address, promising “audacious executive action” in Barack Obama’s final year in office.

During a breakfast with reporters in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, McDonough responded to the observation that the president’s final speech before Congress lacked the usual pledge to “go it alone” if lawmakers failed to act. Coupled with the feeble executive actions on gun control announced earlier this month, had President Obama rethought the utility of acting unilaterally on issues important to the White House?

“We’ll do audacious executive action over the course of the rest of the year, I’m confident of that,” said McDonough, explaining that President Obama’s decision not to outline specific executive actions was more about a commitment to process than a lack of willpower.

"Process is your friend, but process also dictates what you can do,” McDonough said. “And we do want to make sure that the executive actions we undertake are not left hanging out there, subject to Congress undoing them.”

In addition to gun control, the White House has expressed interest in further unilateral actions on immigration reform, and in working around Congress to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay. But McDonough said the White House is considering executive action on any and all issues, and that the main question President Obama plans to ask himself is “Why not?”

[jkob]

daring them to impeach him

just wait until he bites off more than he can chew

he should be impeached if he breaks the law, lame duck or not.

[ZENemy]

Why should we believe anything that control freak scum bag has to say ? How many times can he cry wolf and still have the people head for the caves?



10. “We’ve got shovel-ready projects all across the country.” Most of that shoveling was going on in the Oval Office, but, hey, Obama sold nearly a trillion dollars worth of pork on the back of this bad boy.

9. “I didn’t set a red line.” This double-talk about Obama’s plans in Syria had the Norwegians on the Nobel committee looking up the number of the local repo man.

8. “No more secrecy.” Edward Snowden would seem to have a different take on this.

7. “My father left my family when I was 2 years old.” Obama made this claim in September 2009 when addressing the nation’s school kids. By this date, the blogosphere knew that baby Obama had never spent a night under the same roof as his father, let alone two years, and that his mother surfaced in Seattle with the baby, but without the baby’s daddy, weeks after his birth.

6. “The Fast and Furious program was a field-initiated program begun under the previous administration.” Obama spun this fiction at a September 2012 Univision forum knowing it was false. Three months earlier, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney had made the same bogus claim virtually word for word at a press conference and got shot down on national TV.

5. “Not even a smidgeon of corruption.” Obama said this in response to Bill O’Reilly’s question early this year about the IRS scandal: “You’re saying no corruption?” The occasion was a live interview on Fox News right before Super Bowl 2014.

If there were not even a “smidgeon of corruption,” as Obama insisted, it is hard to understand what outraged him, or at least seemed to, when news of the IRS scandal first broke. “It’s inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it,” Obama said in May 2013.

4. “We revealed to the American people exactly what we understood at the time.” Obama made this claim in response to O’Reilly’s inquiry about Benghazi. “The notion that we would hide the ball for political purposes when a week later we all said, in fact, there was a terrorist attack taking place and the day after I said it was an act of terror, that wouldn’t be a very good cover-up.”

In fact, it was exactly a week later, on Sept. 18, 2012, that Obama took his first questions about Benghazi on, of all places, the David Letterman show. “Here’s what happened,” said Obama, “You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who – who made an extremely offensive video directed at – at Mohammed and Islam.”

The usually irreverent Letterman looked shocked. “Making fun of the Prophet Mohammed!” he said. Yes, confirmed a solemn Obama, “Making fun of the Prophet Mohammed.”

3. “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” This is the compound lie that got Obama re-elected and sent us so far down the road to serfdom we may not be able to turn back.

2. “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” Obama told this whopper to his assembled staff on his first day in office. Within a year, the two-headed promise had been violated more wantonly than a goat at a Taliban bachelor party.

As liberal constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley assessed the presidency, “Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be.” Ouch!

1.“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Oh, man, Obama had his hand on the Bible for this one. May God have mercy on his soul.

[Lucille]

This long national nightmare is almost over, and then another will begin.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/10/11/last-100-days-obama-still-has-lengthy--do-list/91901790/?hootPostID=a371418c734ec429140b52f7fcb6d328


With 100 days to go in his presidency, President Obama still has the power to usher in long-lasting policy changes through regulation, executive orders, and the pardon power.

Presidents actually have a lot of things that they can do," said Kenneth Mayer, who studies executive orders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "What was once considered to be a low point of presidential activity actually has high levels of presidential activity."
[...]
In some areas, Obama's late-term executive actions are simply the "culmination of years of work," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said earlier this year.

But in other areas, the White House has a clear strategy of making his policies as difficult as possible to undo.
[...]
Executive orders

If the first 100 days of a presidency is all about the legislative agenda, the last 100 are usually about executive action.

In the last few months, Obama has signed a number of executive orders that will make permanent — at least, unless rescinded by a future executive order — policies that were already in effect during his presidency. He formalized the Atrocities Review Board that had already been operating since the early days of his administration, ordered more transparency on drone strikes, and created a structure to continue his work on global entrepreneurship after he leaves office.

"If there is an opportunity for us to routinize that approach to dealing with these complicated issues, the president believes the country would benefit from that," Earnest said on the drone strike policy. "After all, because that routinized approach didn’t exist when President Obama took office, it required a lot of work to figure out how to most effectively deal with this policy challenge and be transparent about it."
[...]
'Midnight' regulations

Regulations usually spike in election years, although Obama himself is the exception to the rule. In 2012, the White House slowed down its review of regulations until after the election.

But this year, the Obama White House has approved 112 significant regulations through September, according to the American Action Forum, a conservative advocacy group. In 2008, the Bush White House had approved 89 through the same time frame.

But the average length of time the White House has taken to review those regulations was a longer-than-normal 68 days, suggesting that the White House could be waiting until after the election to approve new regulations.

There are 31 significant regulations awaiting approval from the White House, with most coming from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the pipeline are rules that would decrease the allowable emissions for heavy duty trucks and increasing the amount of fuel coming from renewable sources. Both are aimed at helping the United States meet its commitments under the Paris climate accord — a non-binding agreement that relies largely on executive action to implement. Clinton has promised to keep that commitment; Trump has said he would cancel it.

"Obviously, an administration has authority to publish anything it wants, and if a regulation gets published in the midnight period, there's nothing inherently wrong with that," said Sam Batkins, the AAF's director of regulatory policy.

"What is concerning is when you see a surge in regulations, especially when you have a new administration coming in of a different political party," he said. "There's a concern that the rules aren't being vetted."

Incoming presidents of both parties have dealt with that surge by ordering a moratorium on enforcing new regulations for the first 60 days. Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, went even further, sending a memo ordering agencies to withdraw any regulations that hadn't gone into effect by being published in the Federal Register.

But unlike executive orders, regulations are even more difficult to reverse — requiring the agency to do just as much work to deregulate as it took to regulate in the first place, leading to a sort of regulatory inertia.
[...]
Pardons and commutations

The ability to "grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States" is one of the most absolute constitutional powers a president has. But Obama largely neglected it for the first six years of his presidency, waiting almost two years to issue just nine pardons.

But Obama has sought to "reinvigorate" that power in his last year — granting record-setting numbers of commutations in order to shorten the sentences of drug offenders. The clemency initiative was an effort to jump-start criminal justice reform efforts in Congress by highlighting the long drug sentences enacted during the 1980s and 1990s.