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The Hill has an important warning for the GOP. The next election cycle will find many more Republicans than Dems defending seats. A list of 10 most vulnerable, on both sides, is provided.
Senate Republicans will have to work hard to retain their recently won majority as they face a tough 2016 electoral map.
They have 24 seats up compared to Democrats’ 10, including seven in states President Obama carried twice. Democrats won’t have any red-state senators facing reelection and could be buoyed by a favorable presidential-year electorate.
Republicans do have some margin for error after their sweeping 2014 win netted them nine seats for a 54-seat Senate majority. Democrats won’t have it easy either, with Senate Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) facing a strong challenge.
But Democrats are cautiously optimistic they can win back control just two years after losing it — and Republicans admit that they have a fight on their hands.
“It’ll be tough but it’s definitely not impossible. We only need four seats if we win the White House and we start off with four very vulnerable Republicans,” said one national Democratic strategist.
“There are just some hardcore blue presidential states,” said a national Republican strategist.
Here are 10 senators in danger of losing in 2016. …
Of course, we have to depend on the Supreme Court to rein in the lawless president. Victor Davis Hanson writes on the one man revolution.
Until now there were two types of peaceful American change. One was a president, like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, working with Congress to alter American life from the top down by passing a new agenda. The other was popular-reform pressure, as happened in the 1890s or 1960s, to change public opinion and force government to make new laws or change existing ones.
Barack Obama has introduced a quite different, third sort of revolution. He seeks to enact change that both the majority of Americans and their representatives oppose. And he tries to do it by bypassing Congress through executive orders and presidential memoranda of dubious legality.
Take so-called climate change. Even when Obama enjoyed a Democrat-controlled Congress, he could not ram through unpopular cap-and-trade legislation. Now he promises to reduce carbon emissions through executive orders. He just signed a climate-change “accord” with China, bypassing the U.S. Senate, which by law must approve treaties with foreign powers.
Polls show that a majority of Americans oppose amnesties and want immigration laws enforced. The 2014 midterm elections were a reminder of those realities. No matter. Obama just did what for six years he warned was illegal: bypass immigration law and grant millions exemptions from enforcement through what he once called “a pen and a phone.” …
USA Today OpEd by Cornell law prof William Jacobson highlights three areas of presidential lawlessness.
… Three areas of the Obama administration going it alone stand out: Immigration, Obamacare and the environment. Immigration is perhaps the most dramatic example.
Legalizing and eventually providing a path to citizenship for the estimated 10-12 million illegal immigrants is a top administration priority. But that priority hit a roadblock in the form of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and soon, Senate. Out of frustration, Obama has taken unilateral action to evade the immigration laws.
Prior to 2014, the administration already had imposed non-repatriation policies at the border, and established the “mini-dream” policy, precluding deportation of people who were brought to the country illegally as minors and met certain other criteria. These policies, however, only applied to a relatively small portion of the total illegal immigrant population. So more was needed, and that “more” would not be coming from Congress.
Accordingly, soon after the 2014 midterm elections, Obama announced executive action to extend legalization for up to 5 million more immigrants, focusing on those who were in the country illegally but whose children were U.S. citizens by virtue of their birth here. Nearly two dozen times in the past Obama had stated publicly that he could not constitutionally undertake such actions, but he did it anyway. …
For the most part, the media and the academy have been cheer leaders for the president as law breaker. Prof Jacobson, above, is an example of one who has not been corrupted. And now comes Laurence Tribe, once a law professor of the president, who claims in a WSJ OpEd the EPA is using unconstitutional edicts to control coal used in electric generating plants.
As a law professor, I taught the nation’s first environmental law class 45 years ago. As a lawyer, I have supported countless environmental causes. And as a father and grandfather, I want to leave the Earth in better shape than when I arrived.
Nonetheless, I recently filed comments with the Environmental Protection Agency urging the agency to withdraw its Clean Power Plan, a regulatory proposal to reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s electric power plants. In my view, coping with climate change is a vital end, but it does not justify using unconstitutional means.
Although my comments opposing the EPA’s proposal were joined by a major coal producer, they reflect my professional conclusions as an independent legal scholar. I say only what I believe, whether I do so pro bono, or in this case having been retained by others. After studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA’s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority.
The Clean Power Plan would set a carbon dioxide emission target for every state, and the EPA would command each state, within roughly a year, to come up with a package of laws to meet that target. If the agency approves the package, the state would then have to impose those laws on electric utilities and the public. …
Byron York outlines what the GOP congress could do to stop unilateral presidential actions. It’s not enough. We need the Supreme Court to issue forceful unambiguous decisions.
Give Barack Obama credit for keeping his promise. “This is going to be a year of action,” the president pledged last January. And indeed, with a series of unilateral executive actions in the last few months of the year, he made it so.
Now, as a new year arrives, the job for the new Republican majority on Capitol Hill is to keep Obama in check as he strives to bypass lawmakers and make 2015 another year of (unilateral) action.
Obama’s original promise was entirely understandable. He entered 2013 fresh from a solid re-election victory, determined to score legislative wins on gun control, immigration, spending, and other knotty issues. It all ended in disappointment. As 2014 dawned, Obama promised — to Republicans, threatened — to take a new path.
He did, by using executive fiat to confer quasi-legal status on millions of illegal immigrants, to reshape relations with Cuba, and to make a climate deal with China, among other actions. As 2015 arrives, Obama and his Democratic supporters are drawing one key lesson from the experience: take executive action, make it broad and far-reaching, and do it sooner rather than later. …