The lone wolf president

This essay is by former U.S. judge Andrew Napolitano, was published at Lew Rockwell's. I´d like to quote a couple of paragraphs, the full essay is in the link below.

Lone wolf Obama

"In 2012, President Obama signed executive orders that essentially said to about 1.7 million unlawfully present immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before their 16th birthdays and who are not yet 31 years of age that if they complied with certain conditions that he made up out of thin air they will not be deported.

In 2014, the president signed additional executive orders that essentially made the same offer to about 4.7 million unlawfully present immigrants, without the age limits that he had made up out of thin air. A federal court enjoined enforcement of the 2014 orders last month.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission — the bureaucrats appointed by the president who regulate broadcast radio and television — decreed that it has the authority to regulate the Internet, even though federal courts have twice ruled that it does not."

Reference:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/03/andrew-p-napolitano/when-el-supremo-is-a-lone-wolf/

I should also add, I understand Obama´s frustration with the Congress. But the emergence of the imperial presidency worries me, and Obama is following on the path of previous presidents, who have abused their power way too much.

I think the problem is bipartisan. Here´s a quote from the Cato Institute bitching about Clinton´s imperial attitude:

"In his his classic 1973 book The Imperial Presidency, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that the American political system was threatened by “a conception of presidential power so spacious and peremptory as to imply a radical transformation of the traditional polity.” America’s rise to global dominance and Cold War leadership, Schlesinger explained, had dangerously concentrated power in the presidency, transforming the Framers’ energetic but constitutionally constrained chief executive into a sort of elected emperor with virtually unchecked authority in the international arena.

As William Jefferson Clinton came to power in January 1993, there was some reason to hope that the imperial presidency would be scaled back. Clinton, after all, was the first post-Cold War president and a member of a political party that had in the wake of the Vietnam War striven to restrain presidential aggrandizement in foreign policy. 

Such hopes proved illusory. Throughout his administration, President Clinton has adopted a view of his executive power that is positively Nixonian in its breadth and audacity. The administration insists that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty still binds the United States under international law, even though the Senate explicitly declined to ratify that agreement. Administration officials likewise insist that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is still in effect even though one of the contractual parties (the Soviet Union) no longer exists. 

The administration has attempted to implement provisions of the Kyoto Protocol on the environment while continuing to refuse even to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification. Those actions demonstrate that President Clinton has routinely abused the treaty power."

Link: http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/arrogance-power-reborn-imperial-presidency-foreign-policy-clinton-years 

To make sure the Democrats don´t get pissed at me for being one sided, president Bush was guilty of presidential abuses of power, as discussed in this NY Times article: 

"The war is hardly the only area where the Bush administration is trying to expand its powers beyond all legal justification. But the danger of an imperial presidency is particularly great when a president takes the nation to war, something the founders understood well. In the looming showdown, the founders and the Constitution are firmly on Congress’s side.

Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”  

The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe’s history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.” 

Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. “In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed,” he warned. “It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.” 

When they drafted the Constitution, Madison and his colleagues wrote their skepticism into the text. In Britain, the king had the authority to declare war, and raise and support armies, among other war powers. The framers expressly rejected this model and gave these powers not to the president, but to Congress."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/opinion/23mon4.html

Here´s a link to Judge Napolitano´s webpage:

http://www.judgenap.com/

Just to make sure, I want to make it clear I really hate Fox News.