Floor Statement on House Consideration of H.R. 4138, the “ENFORCE the Law Act”
Chairman Goodlatte: Our system of government is a tripartite one, with each branch having certain defined functions delegated to it by the Constitution. The President is charged with executing the laws; the Congress with writing the laws; and the Judiciary with interpreting them.
The Obama Administration, however, has ignored the Constitution’s carefully balanced separation of powers and unilaterally granted itself the extra-constitutional authority to amend the laws and to waive or suspend their enforcement.
This raw assertion of authority goes well beyond the “executive power” granted to the President and specifically violates the Constitution’s command that the President is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
From Obamacare to welfare and education reform, to our nation’s drug enforcement and immigration laws, President Obama has been picking and choosing which laws to enforce. In place of the checks and balances established by the Constitution, President Obama has proclaimed that “I refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer” and that “where [Congress] won’t act, I will.” Throughout the Obama presidency we have seen a pattern: President Obama circumvents Congress when he doesn’t get his way.
But the Constitution does not confer upon the President the executive authority to disregard the separation of powers and rewrite Acts of Congress based on his policy preferences. It is a bedrock principle of constitutional law that the President must “faithfully execute” the laws passed by Congress.
We cannot continue to allow President Obama to ignore the constitutional limits on executive power. The President’s far-reaching claims of executive power, if left unchecked, will vest this and future presidents with broad domestic policy authority that the Constitution does not grant.
As prominent law professor Jonathan Turley—who testified that he voted for President Obama— warned in testimony before the Judiciary Committee, “[t]he problem with what the President is doing is that he’s not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He’s becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid. That is the concentration of power in a single branch.”
That is why I joined with Representative Gowdy and Chairman Issa to introduce H.R. 4138, the ENFORCE the Law Act. This legislation puts a procedure in place to permit the House, or the Senate, to authorize lawsuits against the Executive Branch for failure to faithfully execute the laws. The courts have held that lawsuits alleging institutional injuries must be brought by the injured institution itself, and H.R. 4138 is solidly in line with those judicial precedents.
In addition, because it is an Act of Congress, the ENFORCE the Law Act can apply special court procedural rules to significantly increase the speed at which cases challenging the President’s failure to faithfully execute are considered by the courts. These provisions are critical to ensure the President cannot simply stall a lawsuit until his term is up.
In addition, these provisions are similar to those that were in the Line Item Veto Act. Litigation challenging the constitutionality of the line item veto proceeded through the district court and was decided by the Supreme Court within seven months of being filed.
The ENFORCE the Law Act will help overcome the hostility the courts have shown toward deciding disputes between the political branches in the past. The Constitution’s framers did not expect the Judiciary to sit on the sidelines and watch as one branch aggrandized its own powers and exceeded the authority granted to it by the Constitution. Rather, the Constitution gives the federal courts very broad jurisdiction to hear “all Cases . . . arising under this Constitution [and] the Laws of the United States.”
However, over time, the courts have read their own powers much more narrowly, refusing to exercise a vital check over unconstitutional action by the executive branch. When the courts refuse to step in and umpire these disputes, they cede the field to this and future Presidents. The separation of powers is not strengthened by the refusal of the Judicial Branch to referee the division of power between the branches.
As then-Senator Obama observed in 2008, “One of the most important jobs of the Supreme Court is to guard against the encroachment of the Executive Branch on the power of the other branches. And, I think [the Chief Justice] has been a little bit too willing and eager to give an administration, whether it’s mine or George Bush’s, more power than I think the Constitution originally intended.”
The ENFORCE the Law Act will help ensure that when Congress brings a lawsuit against the Administration for its refusal to enforce the laws, the courts take up the case and decide it expeditiously.
This legislation is a good first step toward ending this crisis and restoring balance to our system of government. I urge my colleagues to support this legislation and reserve the balance of my time.