The Patriot Post® · Obama's Failures Aren't His Fault?

Socialists love to centralize power in the hands of a few likeminded elites. In order to justify this unconstitutional usurping of the rightfully recognized sovereign governing authority of the states, a large national crisis is useful to convince the broad majority of the citizenry that only an organized centralized authority can effectively combat said crisis. The Left has been playing this power-grabbing game for a long time. After all, as Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously said in 2008, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Mere days from leaving office, Obama is still tirelessly working from that old play sheet, this time in the form of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Last Friday, after the intelligence community’s report on Russian hacking, Obama issued yet another executive order. He designated state and local voting systems as “pieces of critical infrastructure,” effectively giving the Department of Homeland Security authority to “protect” them from hackers.

John Yoo, a law professor at UC Berkeley, was critical of this move, stating, “While the federal government has the general power to protect the nation’s cyber infrastructure, it cannot intrude into areas of state sovereignty without clear constitutional mandate.” When has that ever stopped Obama?

Ironically, as Obama has grabbed and centralized more power via his executive actions throughout his time in office, he has seen his party suffer massive defeats at the polls both nationally and at the state level. When questioned by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos about the level of his responsibility for those losses, Obama responded, “I take some responsibility for that.” But then he quickly pivoted, shook off any real culpability and blamed the circumstances at the time he took office. He declared, “Partly because my docket was really full here I couldn’t be both chief organizer of the Democratic Party and function as commander in chief and president of the United States.” If only there were two of him.

The real lesson here? The problem with centralizing too much power is that in the end it’s impossible to actually meet the many demands. Individuals are better at recognizing and meeting their immediate needs than is some distant government bureaucracy with “big picture” goals. If Obama’s attention was divided, it was his own doing thanks to power grabs like the latest one on voting systems.