Obama's Big Mistake

Back in high school, I had a friend who was fairly smart. However, instead of working relatively hard and making great grades, he was always looking to circumvent the rules. He spent almost all of his time and energy trying to find loopholes in school rules and regulations.

More often than not, his actions would get him in trouble with teachers and administrators. He constantly pushed back against almost all authority, constantly pushing the envelope of what was allowed. Basically, he spent most of his time and energy fighting the system, rather than trying to work within the confines of the school rules.

It caused a lot of bad blood between him and the school officials over what were essentially unnecessary conflicts. He ended up graduating, but refusing to participate in the ceremony. If my friend had spent his time simply studying and working to get along with people, he would have been a top student, and he would have probably been the valedictorian, speaking at his graduation, rather than skipping it.

I see that same characteristic in our current President.

Ever since he lost his super-majority in the Senate, he's gotten absolutely nothing done. He goes on and on all the time about how the mean ol' Republicans won't work with him on anything, but the fact is, he doesn't want to work with them, either. Accordingly, our President now spends all his time trying to figure out how much he can get done without Congress. He's doing everything he can to simply avoid Congress on almost every issue. He's unilaterally changing the ACA, fighting the Halbig case so he doesn't have to ask Congress amend the law, raising the minimum wage via executive order and so on. His famous "pen and phone" line is emblematic of his mentality to simply fight/ignore the Legislative branch of our government.

This isn't how to win friends and influence Congress. (Or enact policy.) Another example is evident today, in the realm of the climate change argument.

Just today, the President has now decided that he's going to try and do some strange end run around the fact that the Senate has to ratify treaties. Apparently, the President wants to cut carbon emissions in an international treaty, but he knows the Senate won't approve it. Therefore, rather than going to the Senators and trying to cut a deal and give them something in exchange, the President is now just going to try and do what he can without the Senate.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

Our President isn't even trying to convince the Senate to go along with this. They've told him "no", but he's undeterred. He's going to try and figure out some way to enter into a treaty without actually entering into a treaty. That will be quite a trick.

If the President spent half the time actually trying to compromise and work with Congress that he spends trying to come up with ways around Congress, he might actually get something done. He needs to understand that you can't always get everything you want when there's divided government. Out of all the campaign promises he's made and broken (and there's a lot) the number one promise he's broken is that he would be a pragmatic "uniter", ending our bitter partisanship. He's absolutely done the opposite. As I referenced in my last post, steamrolling the ACA through Congress is what created the Tea Party.

For all of the soul-searching that leftists do about how our foreign aggression "creates" terrorists, they sure don't seem to realize how political aggression created the Tea Party.

But instead, this current President looks like he's going to be end up like my friend from high school. He's going to struggle against the system, and he's going to engender lots of bad blood, and ultimately, it's all going to be a big waste of time and effort, never really reaching his potential. At the rate he's going, he'll probably end up skipping graduation to go play golf.