Constitutional Lawyer Jonathan Turley, a liberal, says the silence of the left on Obama’s lawlessness is bordering on a cult of personality:
I’m afraid this is beginning to border on a cult of personality for people on the left. I happen to agree with many of President Obama’s policies. But in our system it is often as important how you how you do something as what you do. I think that many people will look back at this period in history and see nothing but confusion as to why people remained so silent when the president asserted these types of unilateral actions. You have a president who is claiming the right to basically rewrite or ignore or negate federal laws. That is a very dangerous thing. It has nothing to do with the policies, it has to do with the power.
When asked by Megyn Kelly what’s to come of this kind of lawlessness and if it’s really that big of a deal, Turley says we’ve never seen presidential lawlessnes to this extent and warns of authoritarianism if this continues:
A system in which a single individual is allowed to rewrite legislation or ignore legislation is a system that borders on authoritarianism. I don’t believe that we are that system yet. But we cannot ignore that we’re beginning to become a system that is a pretense of democracy if a president is allowed to take a law and just simply say I’m going to ignore this, or I’m going to shift funds that weren’t appropriated by Congress to this area.
The president’s state of the union indicated this type of unilateralism that he has adopted as a policy. Now, many people view that as somehow it is empowering. In my view it is dangerous, that what he is suggesting is to essentially put our system off line. This is not the first time that convenience has become the enemy of principle. But we’ve never seen it to this extent.
Watch the full interview below: