Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Michael McConnell, a friend to many of us at MOJ, writes:
President Obama's decision last week to suspend the
employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act may be welcome relief to businesses
affected by this provision, but it raises grave concerns about his understanding
of the role of the executive in our system of government.
Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution states that
the president "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." This is a
duty, not a discretionary power. While the president does have substantial
discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about
whether to do so.
This matter—the limits of executive power—has deep
historical roots. During the period of royal absolutism, English monarchs
asserted a right to dispense with parliamentary statutes they disliked. King
James II's use of the prerogative was a key grievance that lead to the Glorious
Revolution of 1688. The very first provision of the English Bill of Rights of
1689—the most important precursor to the U.S. Constitution—declared that "the
pretended power of suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal
authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal."
...
The employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act contains
no provision allowing the president to suspend, delay or repeal it. Section
1513(d) states in no uncertain terms that "The amendments made by this section
shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013." Imagine the outcry if
Mitt Romney had been elected president and simply refused to enforce the whole
of ObamaCare.
This is not the first time Mr. Obama has suspended the
operation of statutes by executive decree, but it is the most barefaced....
...
As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838),
allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress "would
be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress,
and paralyze the administration of justice."
Friday, July 5, 2013
As Fr. Araujo says, there is much to ponder in Pope Francis' encylical, including a few passages that relate directly to our project. I'll quote one such passage but before that I note that the word "gaze," which appears 13 times in the letter, stood out to me. For example, "Christians learn to share in the same gaze of Jesus" and "The gaze of science thus benefits from faith: faith encourages the scientist to remain constantly open to reality in all its inexhaustible richness."
Here is a passage from paragraph 55:
If we remove faith in God from our cities, mutual trust would
be weakened, we would remain united only by fear and our stability would be
threatened. In the Letter to the Hebrews we read that “God is not ashamed to be
called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them” (Heb 11:16). Here
the expression “is not ashamed” is associated with public acknowledgment. The
intention is to say that God, by his concrete actions, makes a public avowal
that he is present in our midst and that he desires to solidify every human
relationship. Could it be the case, instead, that we are the ones who are
ashamed to call God our God? That we are the ones who fail to confess him as
such in our public life, who fail to propose the grandeur of the life in common
which he makes possible? Faith illumines life and society. If it possesses a
creative light for each new moment of history, it is because it sets every
event in relationship to the origin and destiny of all things in the Father.
Monday, July 1, 2013
St. Gregory's University, the oldest higher education institution in the state of Oklahoma and the only Catholic university in Oklahoma, will become the only Catholic university in the nation with shared institutional ownership between a religious order (Benedictine) and diocesan hierarchy (the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa).” Archbishop Coakley said. “It’s my hope that this new form of governance will allow the university to play an even more central role in advancing the church’s mission of Catholic education in our state.”
This is great news for the university, the church in Oklahoma, and the state. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am Vice Chair of the University's Board.
Imagine a parallel universe in which the media coverage of legislators' recent efforts to pass gun control omitted any reference to last year's slaughter of 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
David Freddosso explores the media's silence about the underlying reasons that Texas and other states are attempting to pass new regulations on the abortion industry.
As of Friday, the pink sneakers Davis wore on Tuesday night while standing up for late-term abortion were mentioned in more than 90 newspaper articles and 15 television segments, according to the Lexis-Nexis database. Yet a far more relevant detail — the reason this law was ever considered — received just four mentions in the papers and two on FOX News.
That reason, of course, concerns the lack of regulation that enabled the notorious Philadelphia abortionist and now-convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell.
UPDATE: I have added the link. Sorry, I thought I had done that when I first posted. Thanks WmBrennan for the heads up.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals gave Hobby Lobby a partial victory today in its suit claiming that the HHS contraceptive mandate violates Hobby Lobby's rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The court said:
We hold that Hobby Lobby and Mardel are entitled to bring claims under RFRA, have established a likelihood of success that their rights under this statute are substantially burdened by the contraceptive-coverage requirement, and have established an irreparable harm. But we remand the case to the district court for further proceedings on two of the remaining factors governing the grant or denial of a preliminary injunction.
