Unfaithful to the law

How much longer will Americans have to endure a president who does not believe that he must, as the Constitution requires, “take care that the laws be faithfully executed?”

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to resume a review of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site in Nevada.

Because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and many residents of Nevada objected to the site on patently “not in my backyard” grounds, President Obama promised in his 2008 campaign to kill it. The commission, however, said he could not withdraw the Bush administration’s application for a license to operate the waste repository.

Supposedly independent, the commission, like similar bodies, has members and a chairman appointed by the president. Any president’s wants are usually accommodated. Obama made a former aide to Reid chairman of the commission, who stopped repository work, and later appointed another chairman of similar views.

Congress has ended funding for repository studies, but the commission has $11 million left over. That, said the two judges of the majority, must be spent as appropriated, even though it is not enough to finish all the once-planned studies. The commission, they said, was “simply flouting the law.”

The parade marches on: No deportations of young illegal immigrants, a delay in the employer mandate in Obamacare, set-aside of Obamacare requirements for members of Congress, appointment of members of the National Labor Relations Board without Senate confirmation, wiretapping reporters in violation of the Justice Department’s own regulations, directing federal prosecutors to omit facts in drug indictments that could trigger heavier sentences.

It will not stop until this official, who remains remarkably unfaithful to the law, leaves 
office.

Not me, but it could be.