Obama’s increasingly imperial presidency

On a range of issues — from entitlement reform to guns to immigration to social policy — conventional conservatism has been branded as feverish, know-nothing extremism. Aided by a media that shares all of Obama’s sensibilities, the trick has been a cynical wonder that keeps enabling the most ideological administration in memory to claim the middle ground.

So, it is no surprise that the DC Circuit’s demonstration of a spine last week has triggered another bout of Obama’s strategy of de-legitimating opposition. The appeals court rejected three recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, and signaled that hundreds of regulatory rulings by the Board’s current, constitutionally flawed membership could be invalid unless the ruling ends up being set aside by the Supreme Court…

Of course, it is the ruling and not the defiance that has come under siege from Obama’s allies. The NLRB’s disdain for a federal appellate decision and its willingness to keep promulgating regulations that might not survive the next Supreme Court session looks like, frankly, the kind of intemperate, dead-end resistance Obama often attributes to his own adversaries.