Tuesday, September 8, 2015
From: Gary L. Bauer
Obama Breaks Law He Signed
A county clerk in Kentucky spent the holiday weekend in jail for refusing to follow the law. (More on that below.) But President Obama is also refusing to follow a law that he signed.
When the New York Times last year leaked the news that the Obama White House would not submit his nuclear deal with Iran to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, members of Congress were outraged. In a rare moment of bi-partisan agreement, Democrats and Republicans came together to demand that Congress have some say on the most important foreign policy decision of this administration.
In May, the Senate passed the Iran Nuclear Review Act by a vote of 98-to-1. The House of Representatives passed the bill by 400-to-25 and President Obama signed the act into law.
In order to get President Obama to accept congressional review of this deal, members of Congress agreed to turn the treaty ratification process on its head. Instead of the president needing a two-thirds super-majority vote to approve a treaty, opponents would need a two-thirds super-majority vote to block implementation of the deal.
Many conservatives, myself included, were not happy with this so-called “compromise.”
The most important concession that Congress extracted from Obama was that he had to submit to Congress the whole deal, including side agreements. It is now clear that he has failed to do that.
Over the weekend, Rep. Mike Pompeo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, and David Rivkin, a constitutional law expert, explained in the Washington Post that the Obama Administration was withholding a key side agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Moreover, the Iran Nuclear Review Act stated that the president had until September 7th — yesterday — to submit all “additional materials,” including “side agreements.”
Rep. Pompeo and Mr. Rivkin write that the House and Senate “should vote to register their view that the president has not complied with his obligations under the act . . . and that, as a result, the president remains unable to lift statutory sanctions against Iran.” Should the president attempt to do so, Congress should take him to court.
My friend Bill Kristol, chairman of the Emergency Committee for Israel, agrees with this analysis, and so do I. But it is up to the congressional leadership to make that happen.
Don’t Give Up!
Today, I addressed a press conference on Capitol Hill, hosted by the Endowment for Middle East Truth and other organizations concerned about our national security. I denounced the deal as a sellout of our security to a dangerous regime that calls for the destruction of Israel and the United States, and which is responsible for the death and maiming of thousands of U.S. soldiers.
Tomorrow, I will be speaking at a major rally against the Iranian nuclear deal hosted by the Tea Party Patriots. Speakers include Donald Trump, Senator Ted Cruz, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and other prominent public officials and grassroots leaders.
I am doing everything possible to fight this terrible deal and will continue speaking out even after the last vote is cast. Military leaders oppose this deal. Arms control experts oppose this deal. And the American people oppose this deal.
Christians & The Law
I am pleased to report that Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk Kim Davis has been released from jail. But I have been very disappointed by the parade of leading Republicans — Donald Trump, Governor Jeb Bush, Senator Marco Rubio, Governor Chris Christie and others — who are distancing themselves from Davis.
This sorry episode is yet another example of conservatives playing by one set of rules while the left plays by its own.
When the law was the Defense of Marriage Act, the president and attorney general of the United States refused to enforce it. President Obama has routinely refused to enforce various immigration laws or parts of Obamacare. Why were Obama and Holder not held to the same standard as Mrs. Davis?
Commentators insist that Davis is violating the law. What law? Congress has not passed a law recognizing same-sex marriage. Neither has Kentucky. In fact, 75% of Kentucky voters approved a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
The Supreme Court’s decision redefining marriage was a narrow five-to-four vote that upended hundreds of years of accepted law, defied the values of the American people and invalidated the votes of millions of citizens. And the court has been wrong before.
When it ruled that Dred Scott was the property of his slave master, was the proper response for Christians to promote slavery? When the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate but equal was constitutional, was complying with segregation the proper Christian thing to do?
Generations of Americans have admired the courage of those willing to risk jail for their beliefs, men and women like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. Perhaps the politicians who are piling on Mrs. Davis should read Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and ponder his thoughts about just laws being those that square “with the moral law or the law of God.”
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