“The President and federal agencies may not ignore statutory mandates or prohibitions merely because of policy disagreements with Congress.”
That rudimentary truth, familiar to any freshman political science major, should not be necessary instruction for a former professor of constitutional law like Barack Obama. The fact that it is necessary underscores the depth of lawlessness to which his administration has descended.
On a more optimistic note, however, two new judicial rebukes this week, notable for their harsh terms, show that he remains subject to some degree of adult supervision.
In the first decision, quoted in part above, the nation’s second-highest court commanded Obama’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission to cease “simply flouting the law” by refusing to rule on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository in Nevada. The governing 1983 statute mandates that the Commission “shall consider” applications and “issue a final decision approving or disapproving” within three years. Here, however, the application in question was filed in 2008, making it more than two years overdue.
That is no accident or innocent oversight, but rather deliberate delay in violation of federal law. Obama had promised during his campaign to stifle the project, so his appointees to the Commission just refused to take up the application.
Exacerbating matters, in 2011 the same D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had directed the Commission to complete the procedure post haste. “By its own admission,” however, “the Commission has no current intention of complying with the law.”
Accordingly, the Court issued a rare writ of mandamus, which amounts to an extraordinary order compelling performance of a ministerial act when all other judicial remedies have failed. In so doing, it felt compelled to address the broader issue of the Obama Administration’s habitual lawlessness:
“This case has serious implications for our constitutional structure. It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Our decision today rests on the constitutional authority of Congress, and the respect that the Executive and the Judiciary properly owe to Congress in the circumstances here.”






















