Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley Teed off on the American Judiciary — in His “Constitutional Tipping Point” — Separation of Powers — Testimony to Congress

08 March 2014

President Obama’s relegation to himself of authority — that defies the Constitution’s separation of powers provisions — has caught even a politically liberal law professor’s ire

Jonathan Turley is a respected constitutional law professor at George Washington University.

He testified before the House Judiciary Committee a few days ago, implicitly lambasting both the President’s unconstitutional seizures of authority and the judicial branch for letting him get away with those:

I do not subscribe to the common view that our current dysfunctional government is solely the result of political division and deadlock . . . .

I believe considerable blame rests not with the “political branches” but with the Judicial Branch.

By refusing to review many separation-based conflicts, the Court has left these controversies to simmer and has left the branches to use raw power moves to block each other.

[T]he Supreme Court has removed itself from separation of powers cases . . . in the name of separation of powers.

We now face a situation where major alleged violations of the Constitution are raised but there is no one who clearly has the standing to force judicial review.

Congress’ lackadaisically inclined willingness to let the Executive Branch assume autocratic powers via administrative fiat makes everything worse

Professor Turley testified that:

Most of the legal obligations faced by citizens now come from hundreds of thousands of regulations that are promulgated without direct congressional action and outside the system created by the Framers to force compromise and consensus in a representative system.

Not only has the judiciary permitted the Executive Branch to seize more than its share of power, but Congress has colluded in that erosion. The Legislative Branch allows Executive agencies to perform their regulatory function at the Devil’s level of detail.

Meaning that Executive administrative agencies now create substantive policy that Congress is too timid or too divided to legislate.

The President is not a dictator, said Turley

Just a “tipping point” threat to the way that American government is supposed to work:

I do not view President Obama as a dictator, but I do view him as a danger in his aggregation of executive power.

It is the danger described by Louis Brandeis in his dissent in Olmstead v. United States, where he warned that the “greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

What is required is for members to recognize that there is a horizon for this country that extends beyond the term of the current president.

We are now at the constitutional tipping point for our system.

If balance is to be reestablished, it must begin before this President leaves office and that will likely require every possible means to reassert legislative authority.

Stated this time-limiting way, it is difficult not to see President Obama as an imminent danger to the continuing existence of Separation of Powers doctrine.

Recall that this call to action is coming from a liberal law professor, who highly respects the President. This is not the Right Wing’s characteristically air-headed sensationalizing.

The moral? — Obviously un-Constitutional, but no one in authority cares

With self-interested people running American government (from both inside and outside), no one really cares about the Constitution.

People and corporations at the top levels of political and economic power, including the Supreme Court, implicitly collude to compartmentalize the System, so as to allow each to the collect its share of, usually plundered, loot.

Note

To see how aspects of legalized American robbery work, read:

David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind (2013)

The thievery is done with government approval and assistance.

For those in power, why give up the top-distributed lucre by rocking the boat and letting America’s ordinary people know how they have been hornswoggled at every turn?

The Founders’ plan for checking humanity’s moral baseness, via the implementation of competing and power-cognizant branches of Government, has failed.

PeteFree.com

Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley Teed off on the American Judiciary — in His “Constitutional Tipping Point” — Separation of Powers — Testimony to Congress