Originally published December 5 2014
Rick Perry indicted for exercising governor's veto power; Obama gets free pass for repeatedly violating the law and deceiving Americans
by J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) Seasoned observers have often described American politics as a "blood sport," but in the age of Barack Obama and hyper-partisanship in Washington, politics has been transformed into much worse. It was always a "take no prisoners" profession, but when your opponent works to not just defeat you but punish you as well, just because you disagree ideologically, something is dangerously wrong with the system.
Such is a case involving Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a conservative Republican who has been at odds with the uber-liberal Obama Administration (and rival Democrats) from the outset. On Aug. 15, Perry was indicted on what can only be described as politically motivated charges of alleged felony abuse of his office; specifically, for "abuse of official capacity and coercion of a public servant," according to Courthouse News Service. His "crime"? Perry followed through on a threat to pull funding from Travis County District Attorney Mary Lehmberg's ethics investigation unit if she refused to resign from her post following a drunk driving arrest (and later conviction). She did, so he did.
Opponents of Perry say that amounted to illegal coercion; Perry and his supporters say the governor has the authority, under the Texas Constitution, to issue such line-item vetoes.
Punishing a governor for using constitutional power
"There are no laws that the legislature is entitled to enact without the possibility of gubernatorial veto, including really great laws that help keep the governor in check. It thus follows that the legislature can't outlaw the exercise of the governor's power to impose such a veto," wrote Eugene Volokh, who teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, a First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic and tort law, at UCLA School of Law, in The Washington Post. He believes that Perry is innocent of that which he is charged.
But that said, what Gov. Perry is being charged with pales in comparison to what President Obama has done to the U.S. Constitution while in office. It is a quite a list, in fact, as assembled by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, onetime Solicitor General for the state of Texas, Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice and adjunct professor of law at the University of Texas.
As reported by The Daily Caller, Cruz recently released a report detailing 76 "lawless" abuses of power by the Obama Administration. The report, titled The Legal Limit Report No. 4, examines both well-known and little-known alleged abuses of power.
And then there is Obamacare
"Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the President's persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat," Cruz said in the report's introduction.
"President Obama has openly defied [the rule of law] by repeatedly suspending, delaying, and waiving portions of the laws that he is charged to enforce. When President Obama disagreed with federal immigration laws, he instructed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the laws. He did the same thing with federal welfare law, drug laws, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act," wrote the Texas senator. "In the more than two centuries of our nation's history, there is simply no precedent for the White House wantonly ignoring federal law and asking others to do the same."
Some of the abuses include:
-- Obama unilaterally has implemented several aspects of the DREAM Act -- never-passed legislation that would have conveyed amnesty on a large portion of the country's illegal immigrant population;
-- Signed orders ending some restrictions on terror asylum; and
-- Recognized same-sex marriage in Utah despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that stayed a court order allowing it to take place.
Read the full report here: DailyCaller.com.
Then, of course, there is MIT Prof. Jonathan Gruber, the administration's point man and architect of Obamacare, who lied repeatedly (as did the president) to get the law passed and to hide its true costs from the American people and the federal scoring agency -- the Congressional Budget Office -- responsible for calculating its costs.
Sources:
http://www.courthousenews.com
http://dailycaller.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com
http://www.naturalnews.com
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