The Patriot Post® · James Madison Thwarts Obama From Beyond the Grave

In his last press conference of the year, Barack Obama began whining when asked about the Electoral College, which on Monday voted for Donald Trump to become the next U.S. president, and in the process denied the Oval Office to Hillary Clinton, who would have continued and expanded Obama’s lawless behavior and his trampling of the Constitution.

And therein lies Obama’s disdain and contempt for the Constitution; it is an impediment to his desire for imperial executive rule and the creation of a permanent socialist democracy in America. The “fundamental transformation of the United States,” if you will.

“So there are some structures in our political system, as envisioned by the Founders, that sometimes are going to disadvantage Democrats,” Obama bitterly complained. Fortunately, he’s right.

After tossing a bone to our electoral process — “it’s the American people’s job, and now the electors’ job to decide my successor” — Obama proceeded to complain about the Electoral College, which gave Donald Trump an overwhelming electoral victory despite losing the aggregate popular vote by more than 2.5 million votes, or 2.1%.

Obama described the Electoral College as “a vestige [and] a carryover from an earlier vision of how our federal government was going to work that put a lot of premium on states.” He continued, “It’s the same type of thinking that gives Wyoming two senators with about half a million people, and California with 33 million gets the same two.”

For once, when speaking of the Constitution, Obama is right. The Founders did put a premium on the power and influence of the states in limiting the power of a majoritarian government, which they saw as a necessary evil but a danger to the rights of citizens. Democrats constantly speak of America as a democracy, when the truth is that America has never been a democracy — it’s a republic. In fact, the Founders took great care to prevent the evils of democracy, which is little more than mob rule.

To better understand the brilliance of the Electoral College, one has only to look at where Trump won versus where Clinton won. There are 3,142 counties in the United States. In the 2016 election, as the election map by county shows, Trump won 2,623 to Hillary’s 490. America is a sea of Republican red with densely populated pockets of Democrat blue in the major urban areas like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. In fact, if you take away Clinton’s 4.3 million vote margin of victory in California, Trump wins the rest of the country by about 1.5 million votes.

And that is exactly why the Founders created the Electoral College; so that presidents would be forced to represent every American, and not just those in the major cities.

Make no mistake. Obama, though feigning an air of detachment, is livid with the results of the election. Why? Because Obama knows full well that his policies have been extremely unpopular, and that without Hillary in the White House, his legacy, such as it is, is toast.

He has run roughshod over the Constitution and the separation of powers, achieving most of his “accomplishments” through “a phone and a pen,” as he liked to say. His so-called achievements were primarily the result of unlawful executive orders, regulatory overreach and blatant violations of the Constitution. All the while, he mockingly told Republicans to sue him if they didn’t like it — which they did, winning an astonishing 44 cases in which the Supreme Court issued unanimous rulings against Obama. He lost even more in lower courts.

The Obama years have been a case study in abuse of power, unconstitutional actions and despotism. Obama’s signature achievement, “ObamaCare,” barely passed on a party-line vote near midnight on Christmas Eve, and only then after Harry Reid openly bribed and/or threatened any Democrat senator who did not fall in line. Once signed into law, the bastardized monstrosity, cobbled together in a festering tapestry of legislative creepy-crawlies oozing forth from the minds of radical leftist Democrats, immediately began to run into major logistical and actuarial problems.

“No worries,” cried Obama, “I’ll rewrite the law myself!” And he did, literally dozens of times, extending deadlines, issuing waivers to Democrat donors, shifting money from Medicare to ObamaCare without an appropriation by Congress, issuing ACA tax credits for illegal immigrants, exempting labor unions, refusing to enforce abortion restrictions, etc.

This, of course, was just one of many times that Obama showed his utter contempt for the Constitution’s limitations on his power.

Obama weaponized the IRS, using it to attack and harass conservative critics. He declared the right to determine when the Senate — part of a co-equal branch of government — was officially in session, making recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board despite the Senate still being in pro forma session (this was one of the unanimous SCOTUS decisions against Obama). He threatened colleges with loss of federal funding and investigations by the Justice Department if they didn’t crack down on “unwelcome” speech (i.e., conservative speech), and, as reported in Forbes, demanded that sexual harassment complaints at colleges be heard in “quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trial, and convict based on a mere ‘more likely than not’ standard.”

Obama also instituted a de facto amnesty for illegals. He launched an unauthorized war against Libya. His EPA interpreted the Clean Water Rule so broadly that the feds can regulate large water puddles on private property. The same EPA vastly expanded the scope of the Clean Power Plan such that it was able to begin forcing dozens of coal plants to shut down.

Even all this is just the tip of the iceberg, as evidenced by this list of Obama’s unconstitutional actions compiled by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), including his unlawful dismissal of work requirements for welfare recipients, his demand for Boeing to fire 1,000 employees and shut down a new plant in right-to-work South Carolina, his unlawful moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, his violation of decades of bankruptcy law in bailing out GM/Chrysler by giving favored terms to unsecured creditors — the UAW — while forcing secured creditors — including pension plans for millions of middle class Americans — to take massive losses.

Sadly, decades of horribly inadequate or inaccurate public education has left a vast portion of American citizens ignorant about the principles and structure of our republican/federalist government, and why it’s a safeguard for individual liberties against the encroaching power of a leviathan government.

Obama spent the last eight years acting like a king, when in reality he is nothing but a petty tyrant with a slick PR machine and obedient legions of minions willing to do his bidding.

Luckily, James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” foresaw such tyranny, and created a complex system which distributed powers among the branches and levels of government, and in doing so he has thwarted Obama’s aims from beyond the grave.