President Obama is Seriously Overstepping His Bounds

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The Constitution gives the United States president six, and only six, responsibilities. Today he has thousands of duties, overseen by mammoth bureaucracies.

Why? Because Congress has piled massive responsibilities upon the American President.

Who should have stopped Congress from doing this? We, the People should have.

Why didn’t we? We weren’t paying attention!

The following is an excerpt from my recently published book,

Promises of the Constitution: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

which outlines the duties of the chief executive. Organized into short, 1½ page vignettes, each topic in Promises gives you a clear, simple explanation which can easily be read in 3-5 minutes.

The following is from section 10: The Constitution: Enforcing and Interpreting the Lawand it is titled What the President Does.

The office of chief executive was originally intended to be one of limited responsibility, as the Constitution assigns only six duties to the president. Over the last 225 years, the executive office has changed dramatically.

Today, the president has thousands of duties connected to hundreds of government departments. Innumerable current problems can be traced to this fact. The Founding Fathers feared that enlargement of this office would tend to transform the president into a king, and they tried to prevent it. By following their counsel and constitutional system, we could have avoided massive bureaucracy and regulation, as well as a monarchical president.

 The chief executive’s six constitutionally sanctioned duties, as found in the original Constitution, are listed below.

• Chief of state over all Americans, which now number over 330 million.

• Commander-in-chief over the military, which now numbers 3 million.

• Chief executive officer over the executive branch of government. The president also appoints Supreme Court justices, ambassadors, and consuls, who are then confirmed by the Senate.

• Chief diplomat in handling foreign affairs, with power to enter into treaties with the consent of the Senate. If the treaty involves commercial transactions, the House must also ratify it.

• Chief instigator of needed legislation. The president may recommend but may not draft or lobby for legislation.

• Conscience of the nation in granting pardons or reprieves when justice requires them, although he cannot pardon for impeachment.

 A partial list of just the major categories of presidential responsibilities today is almost incomprehensible. He is responsible to maintain full employment of the work force, ensure a high level of economic prosperity, and develop a national housing program. He supervises the underwriting of billions of dollars in private loans and insurance programs and administers Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. He is responsible for the education of our children and the settlement of major union-management disputes. He administers national health care, the environmental protection programs, and 30 percent of the nation’s

land area. He is responsible for our energy resources, our industries, our communications networks, and the production and distribution of our food and drugs.

 This gives us a clear definition of bloated government. Because it is impossible for one person to perform even minimal oversight in all the above-mentioned categories, the government has developed a massive bureaucracy to fulfill these responsibilities through a maze of regulations.

This represents a far cry from limited government and shows what has gone seriously wrong.

 This grand scale of government overreach is expensive. Every tax-paying American today contributes thousands of dollars annually to maintain this massive bureaucracy. It is also inefficient. Any voluminous organization tends to be sluggish, wasteful, and disorganized. Finally, it is susceptible to corruption. It places huge amounts of money in the hands of government appointees nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate who can use it to purchase programs, manipulate alliances, and influence the will of the people. Bureaucrats and politicians alike benefit as Congress participates or looks the other way. Incoming presidents replace bureaucrats from the outgoing administration with their own appointees as political payoff for services rendered. This political largess to a favored few adds further expense and imbalance to government.

 The current system is expensive, inefficient, and fundamentally compromised.

The original system designed for America worked very well for over one hundred years.

 

We need it back.

 

See www.promisesoftheconstitution.com for further information and samples of the book.

 

- Pam