Obama's Long Shadow

Editor’s Note: Regular readers may recall my note from two weeks ago, where I mentioned that I’d be paywalling the occasional article as a thank you to my paid subscribers. “Occasional” will likely be every other Sunday, which translates to about one article in ten. With the other nine remaining free-to-all, I hope no one will be too miffed. I do also hope, of course, that some of you might upgrade to paid. This blog is a labor of love, but it does consume time and resources. Cheers, P.

Harken back to days of yore, the dim and distant past when then-President Obama ominously noted "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."

That dim and distant past was January 2014, not even a decade ago. Obama was not merely avowing that he, like most of us, had tools of written and verbal communication at his disposal, he was informing the 113th Congress that, should it not advance his agenda, he'd take matters into his own hands and "git r done" via the already-vast and growing power of the executive branch.

If we roll the time machine back just a few more years, to that even quainter first decade of this millennium (in this case, 2008, when Obama was merely a senator and Presidential candidate, we unearth this nugget.

I taught constitutional law for ten years. I take the Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems that were facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all, and that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m President of the United States of America.

Obama swept into office on a wave of Hope and Change, unbridled optimism, and more than a little progressive hubris. His campaign-era conciliatory tones went out the window faster than a fart in a wind tunnel, and he took his Congressional supermajority (i.e. control of the House and 60 seats in the Senate) as an excuse to rampage an agenda that included a seismic alteration of one-seventh of the nation's economy (i.e. health care).

That Icarian excess was soon quashed.

First by the untimely death of the "Lion of the Senate" Ted Kennedy in August 2009, and the loss of his D-vote in a special election to Republican Scott Brown, who ran on a "stop ObamaCare" platform. Goodbye, supermajority. Hello, procedural stunts to pass the compromise-laden first draft of ObamaCare.

Then by the Tea Party movement, which was instrumental in swinging the House from 256-179 Democrat to 242-193 Republican, thereby killing any chance Obama had of getting his partisan agenda fulfilled by Congress. Oh, and for good measure, the Dems lost six seats in the Senate.