Dan Liljenquist '01 Op-Ed on President Obama in Deseret News

Dan Liljenquist: President Obama Has Become a Constitutional Squatter

During my first year at the University of Chicago Law School, while wading through painfully obscure court decisions from hundreds of year ago, I learned that under English Common Law individuals who had no ownership rights in a piece of property could establish “squatters rights” by taking exclusive possession of the property and staying there for a long period of time. The courts of those days reasoned, correctly, that if a rightful property owner did not seek to exercise and enforce his rights within a reasonable amount of time, then he forfeited those rights to the squatter. The bottom line of this legal doctrine is that if you don’t stand up for your rights then you deserve to lose them.

During his administration, President Obama has become a Constitutional squatter, aggressively and unabashedly taking possession of legislative powers by refusing to enforce laws he disagrees with, by legislating through executive fiat and by rewriting laws through agency regulations. Congressional Republicans have been largely ineffective in stopping Obama’s power grab, primarily because Senate Democrats seem to be perfectly comfortable with the situation. For example, when President Obama announced this week that he would tackle immigration reform “on his own”, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) approved, saying “The President will borrow the power that is needed to solve the problems of immigration and shouldn’t be sued as a result of it.”

Since when does the president get to “borrow” Congress’ constitutional authority? Once borrowed, when precisely does this president intend to “return” such authority to Congress? The last time a senatorial body acquiesced such power to the executive was when Julius Caesar took full control of the Roman Empire. He never gave the power back.