President Barack practiced “open lawlessness” by bypassing the Senate to fill vacancies on a labor relations panel, Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer said on Friday.
Speaking at the National Review Institute 2013 Summit, Krauthammer was referring to a court ruling on Friday that found President Barack Obama violated the Constitution by bypassing the Senate to fill vacancies on a labor relations panel.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that Obama did not have the power to make the three recess appointments last year to the National Labor Relations Board.
“I think what happened today will give the administration some pause,” Krauthammer said on future executive orders.
He said that it creates an opportunity for the Republican-led House to hold hearings over the next two years on similar attempts by the administration to bypass the legislative process on issues such as immigration and regulations.
Krauthammer also said that over the next two years Republicans will need to continue to find solutions on issues such as the recent agreement on the debt ceiling. That agreement is designed to provide time for the House GOP to craft a budget and force the Democratic-controlled Senate to draft its own for the first time in four years.
“The fight will now be fair to both sides because the other side will have to show its cards,” Krauthammer said of the Senate.
He said that a strategy of threatening to allow the nation to breach its debt ceiling and allowing automatic tax increases and budget cuts to take effect – better known as going over the “fiscal cliff” – would only hurt congressional Republicans in the eyes of voters.
“You can’t call the bluff, or Obama will do it,” Krauthammer said. “Suicide is not a good option.”
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