OPINION:
Barack Obama is a trailblazer. Most past presidents who get an electoral rebuke like the one he got November would have looked to the examples of Democratic and Republican presidents before him, and tried to accommodate both himself and Congress to reality, and move forward.
Bill Clinton did that after the 1994 congressional elections, and so did George W. Bush in 2006. But Mr. Obama isn’t interested in messages from people who vote. He pays his respects and attention to the people who don’t, and rewards them for their sloth and indifference. His disdain for Congress, when Democrats were in control, has turned to contempt. What Congress, the Constitution, the courts and even his own party want is of little concern. He’s going to do it his way. He’s the president he’s been waiting for.
The Republicans in Congress don’t have a clue what to do about it. He vetoed the Keystone pipeline this week, despite overwhelming public support for it — even his own administration tried and failed to find anything wrong with it — and now he is willing, perhaps eager, to close down the Department of Homeland Security rather than accommodate urgent demands from Congress and the public to delay the implementation of his executive orders on immigration. He concedes that he didn’t have the authority to do that, but who needs a president when we have a community organizer. Saul Alinsky told him he could do it this way.
His intransigence and indifference to democratic norms is breathtaking: “Give me what I want or I’ll blow up everything and blame it on you.” His “my way or the highway” governance was applied Thursday to education. Both the House and Senate have been working on bills to reauthorize “No Child Left Behind” legislation, which has not been updated in nearly a decade. The president’s stalling has given him the time to force the states to accept Common Core and other federal strings to control the way local schools operate. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee says this enables an emerging “national school board.”
Wide public outrage at this federal intrusion into the way the public schools have operated for generations persuaded the Republicans in Congress that they could put together reforms that everyone, Democrats and Republicans alike, would embrace. Sen. Alexander, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, says he thinks such legislation could be approved by his committee, and sent on to the Senate, next month.
That hope evaporated Thursday with the White House declaration that President Obama would veto any legislation to limit the ability of the federal government to require the states to do as the president tells them to do. Sincere legislative and executive attempts to resolve problems require “give and take.” No one in a democratic republic gets everything he wants when men and women of good will and differing values sit down to develop legislation. But Republican leaders in Congress now must deal with a president whose idea of “give and take” means “you give, and I take.” Or else. This is the Chicago way, designed and perfected by Al Capone and his friends, but it’s not the American way.
The president can do this because so far the Democrats march blindly with him despite, in many cases, disagreeing with his methods and some of his goals. This is a shortsighted view. The president won’t have to face a licking again, but Democrats in Congress will.
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