The Obama administration has systematically targeted critical congressional powers, including the authority to enact laws. It has rewritten such statutes as the Affordable Care Act, the Controlled Substances Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act. And it has effectively blocked Congress’s “power of the purse”—eviscerating authorities essential to maintain the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.

The recent standoff over the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill is only the latest effort by President Obama to thwart Congress’s constitutional authority to limit the president’s use of federal funds to approved purposes. The administration’s basic position is that it is entitled to get its way on all of its spending requests. Any effort to impose budget caps or appropriations riders—all traditional congressional mechanisms—is illegitimate and the cause for the government shutdown, for which Congress is to blame.

By striking at Congress’s constitutional powers, particularly the power of the purse, Mr. Obama seeks an unprecedented aggrandizement of presidential power. One way to prevent that happening is by reforming the filibuster rule.

Spending battles and government shutdowns have taken place in the past. Yet the Obama administration’s strategy, denying the very legitimacy of Congress’s use of its appropriations power, is historically unprecedented. It has been abetted by Democratic senators who deploy the filibuster to keep spending legislation that the president opposes from an up-or-down Senate vote. Their goal is to spare the president any potential political damage from casting a veto, and to allow him to shift responsibility for government shutdowns from himself to Congress—undermining the paramount constitutional virtue of accountability. This situation has particularly vitiated the authority of the House of Representatives, which originates all of the spending bills. Read more »