Obama Breaks Yet Another Key Campaign Promise

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 15, 2010

In the face of rapidly growing populist anger, the Obama administration has signaled that it will fall back on a form of power well known to all successful dictators – rule by decree – and that Obama will use the very instrument he campaigned against to ram through the new world order agenda – Executive Orders, and lots of them.

“With much of his legislative agenda stalled in Congress, President Obama and his team are preparing an array of actions using his executive power to advance energy, environmental, fiscal and other domestic policy priorities,” reports the New York Times.

Despite the fact that Obama campaigned on the platform of eliminating abuse of executive powers which occurred under Bush, he is on course to pass more executive orders than Bush did during his eight years in the White House.

During a May 2008 campaign event in Colorado, Obama promised to “not use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress,” and yet the administration’s announcement that they will use not merely signing statements, but wholesale Executive Orders, as a means of enforcing what Congress refuses to pass, is exactly that – an end run around the Constitution.

The government is keenly aware of the depth of unpopularity for measures like cap and trade, health care, bailouts, and other big government initiatives, which is why they are moving to rush them through by authoritarian decree before we see mass national strikes, protests and civil unrest.

Obama’s promise on signing statements was completely contradicted by his aides last month, who said that he “still reserves the right to ignore sections of bills he considers unconstitutional if objections have been lodged previously by the executive branch,” reports the NY Times.

Indeed, back in August the Times‘ Charlie Savage wrote that Obama “has issued signing statements claiming the authority to bypass dozens of provisions of bills enacted into law since he took office,” thereby doing exactly what he promised not to.

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Over the course of his two terms in office, Bush had a total of 289 Executive Orders. After a little over a year in office, Obama has already passed 39 Executive Orders, meaning he is on course to be in the 300’s presuming he is re-elected in 2012.

Perhaps Obama’s most notorious Executive Order is the Establishment of the Council of Governors, which creates a body of ten state governors directly appointed by Obama who will work with the federal government to help advance the “synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities in the United States”.

Critics have expressed fears that the order further blurs the lines between state and federal power, as well as greasing the skids for more military involvement in domestic affairs, and has stoked fears that Obama may be laying the groundwork for his promised “national civilian security force”.

Hopefully, since Obama has broken just about every major promise he made during the campaign, while not scaling back but expanding U.S. military operations abroad, his agenda to create what many have denounced as a brown shirt domestic cadre, not too far removed from the ominous “green police” depicted in the recent Audi commercial, will also fall by the wayside in the face of vociferous populist anger towards his policies.