Constitutional attorney David Rivkin discussed the legal implications of President Obama’s announcement on gun control on Fox and Friends on January 16, 2013.
“We did not know for sure, we clearly know one thing, he cannot do by executive order anything that Congress has not delegated. […] He cannot ban high capacity magazines by executive order. ” – Rivkin in response to Brian Kilmeade’s question on what to expect today.
Democrats regard federalism as quaint, Republicans at least pay lip service to it
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley
In the presidential debates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney ranged across dozens of topics, but an important one didn’t come up: federalism. And no wonder.
The idea that the Constitution grants only limited and enumerated powers and leaves the remainder to the states is foreign to those who believe that the national government should or even could address voters’ every concern. But contrary to the view widely shared by the political class, Washington—in particular, Congress—does not have the power to pass any law it wants in the name of the “general welfare.”
Politicians should take heed. Voters are increasingly focused on the proper role of government in society: Witness the rise of the tea party and unease over the massive debt caused by entitlements and other government handouts. The continuing loud objection to ObamaCare’s takeover of health care shows that voters want to preserve the Constitution’s architecture of limited federal power.
The organizing principle of the administration’s foreign policy is one of weakness and passivity, coupled with a conspicuous rhetorical abdication of American leadership, write David Rivkin and Lee Casey.
by David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey | September 21, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
A few days ago on The Daily Beast, Leslie Gelb praised President Obama’s handling of the unfolding crisis in the Middle East last week and evidently discerns no connection between the ensuing wave of anti-American violence and the broader parameters of American foreign policy. He is wrong on both counts. The administration’s crisis management has been mediocre. Even more fundamentally, the current assault on America’s position in the Middle East is attributable not to the trailer for an obscure anti-Muslim movie, but to Obama’s own foreign-policy failures.
The administration’s crisis-management strategy continues to emphasize its regret about that film, Innocence of Muslims. This was manifest not only in the original (and subsequently retracted) statement from our embassy in Cairo, but in all statements by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president. But deploring efforts to denigrate Muslim religious beliefs is only the first half of the sentence. The administration should have also robustly propounded its commitment to the virtues and values of free expression in a free society, and why this must necessarily encompass offensive speech. Whenever the White House mentions the First Amendment these days, it is done mostly in a defensive mode, by way of explaining (almost in sorrow) to the Muslim world why the U.S. government cannot legally suppress anti-Muslim films rather than a compelling explanation of why such films should not be suppressed. As Clinton stated on Sept. 14, “I know it is hard for some people to understand why the United States cannot or does not just prevent these kinds of reprehensible videos from ever seeing the light of day.” But simply saying that free speech is enshrined in our Constitution “is not enough” the administration must explain why that is a good thing to which they too should aspire.
President has taken a hatchet to welfare reform, the immigration laws, and ‘No Child Left Behind.’
(published in The Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2012)
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
On July 12, President Obama unilaterally gutted the Clinton administration’s signature achievement—welfare reform. The 1996 welfare-reform law, while passed with strong bipartisan support, has been the bane of progressives, who have never accepted its fundamental principle that those who can work must work. Over the last year, the Obama administration also took the hatchet to the immigration laws and to the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” statute.
These actions have two things in common. First, they were announced with much fanfare and designed to appeal to the president’s liberal base. Second, and much worse, they were implemented by suspending enforcement or waiving applications of laws Mr. Obama does not like.
The president cannot write—or rewrite—the laws. The Constitution makes Congress the legislature, and the president cannot simply ignore its decisions.
PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown talked to Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School who had Chief Justice John Roberts and President Obama as students, and David Rivkin, who represented the states that challenged the health care law, about what the Supreme Court’s landmark health care ruling meant and its broader impacts. The following segment highlights David Rivkin’s interview and remarks.
On January 4, 2012 President Barack Obama made four recess appointments. On that day, he appointed three people to serve on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and installed Richard Cordray as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CRPB).
These “recess appointments” were immediately challenged as unconstitutional since the House was not officially in recess.
On February 1, 2012 Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) held a hearing on the recess appointments. Legal experts disagreed sharply on their legality.