By Thomas Sowell  Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University

Monday, June 23, 2014

Pundits are pointing to President Obama’s recent decline in public opinion polls, and they’re saying that he may now become another “lame duck” president, unable to accomplish much during his final term in office.

That has happened to other presidents, but it is extremely unlikely to happen to this president. There are reasons why other presidents have become impotent during their last years in office. Those reasons do not apply to Mr. Obama.

The Constitution of the United States does not give presidents the power to carry out major policy changes without the cooperation of other branches of government. Once the country becomes disenchanted with a president during his second term, Congress has little incentive to cooperate with him — and once Congress becomes uncooperative, there is little that a president can do on his own.

That is, if he respects the Constitution.

Mr. Obama has demonstrated, time and again, that he has no respect for the Constitution’s limitations on his power. Despite his oath of office, to see that the laws are faithfully executed, Mr. Obama has unilaterally changed welfare reform laws by eliminating the work requirement passed by Congress during the Clinton administration.

He has repeatedly and unilaterally changed or waived provisions of the Obamacare law passed by Congress during his own administration.

Mr. Obama has ordered Border Patrol agents not to carry out provisions of the immigration laws that he does not like. We see the results today in the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants entering the country unimpeded. (more…)

Mitt Romney now joins the long list of the kinds of presidential candidates favored by the Republican establishment– nice, moderate losers, people with no coherently articulated vision, despite how many ad hoc talking points they may have.

The list of Republican presidential candidates like this goes back at least as far as 1948, when Thomas E. Dewey ran against President Harry Truman. Dewey spoke in lofty generalities while Truman spoke in hard-hitting specifics. Since then, there have been many re-runs of this same scenario, featuring losing Republican presidential candidates John McCain, Bob Dole, Gerald Ford and, when he ran for reelection, George H.W. Bush.

Bush 41 first succeeded when he ran for election as if he were another Ronald Reagan (“Read my lips, no new taxes”), but then lost when he ran for reelection as himself– “kinder and gentler,” disdainful of “the vision thing” and looking at his watch during a debate, when he should have been counter-attacking against the foolish things being said.

This year, Barack Obama had the hard-hitting specifics– such as ending “tax cuts for the rich” who should pay “their fair share,” government “investing” in “the industries of the future” and the like. He had a coherent vision, however warped.

Most of Obama’s arguments were rotten, if you bothered to put them under scrutiny. But someone once said that it is amazing how long the rotten can hold together, if you don’t handle it roughly.

Any number of conservative commentators, both in the print media and on talk radio, examined and exposed the fraudulence of Obama’s “tax cuts for the rich” argument. But did you ever hear Mitt Romney bother to explain the specifics which exposed the flaws in Obama’s argument?

On election night, the rotten held together because Mitt Romney had not handled it roughly with specifics. Romney was too nice to handle Obama’s absurdities roughly. He definitely out-niced Obama– as John McCain had out-niced Obama in 2008, and as Dewey out-niced Truman back in 1948. And these Republicans all lost. (more…)

During a recent Fox News Channel debate about the Obama administration’s tax policies, Democrat Bob Beckel raised the issue of “fairness.”

He pointed out that a child born to a poor woman in the Bronx enters the world with far worse prospects than a child born to an affluent couple in Connecticut.

No one can deny that. The relevant question, however, is: How does allowing politicians to take more money in taxes from successful people, to squander in ways that will improve their own reelection prospects, make anything more “fair” for others?

Even if additional tax revenue all went to poor single mothers — which it will not — the multiple problems of children raised by poor single mothers would not be cured by throwing money at them. Indeed, the skyrocketing of unwed motherhood began when government welfare programs began throwing money at teenage girls who got pregnant.

Children born and raised without fathers are a major problem to society and to themselves. There is nothing “fair” about increasing the number of such children.

A more fundamental problem with the “fairness” issue raised by Beckel and many others is the slippery vagueness of the word “fair.” (more…)

• FEBRUARY 15, 2012

Notable & Quotable

Thomas Sowell defines ‘social justice.’