Faithless Execution. Andrew C McCarthy

solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.⁹

      The president has serially usurped the power of Congress to write and amend the laws. When Congress has declined to enact his unpopular policy initiatives, such as the legalization of illegal immigrants and a cap-and-trade law that could fatally cripple the coal industry, he has presumed to legislate unilaterally and unconstitutionally, under the guise of executive orders and agency regulations.

      The president has willfully defrauded the American people in the enactment and implementation of Obamacare. In addition, he has unilaterally and unlawfully amended and “waived” the statute’s terms—guided by his knowledge that timely, lawful application of the deeply unpopular law would be devastating to his party’s electoral prospects and would have made him a one-term president.

      His administration has sicced the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies on his political opponents—frustrating the capacity of conservative groups to have the powerful impact on the 2012 presidential election that they had on the 2010 midterms. Simultaneously, the administration has manipulated the law and the public fisc for the benefit of Obama’s political cronies. Contrary to the impression Obama conveys when his subordinates are caught using bureaucratic muscle to reward friends and harass foes—a frequent occurrence—the president is principally responsible for the misfeasance and malfeasance of his administration. He is not just an innocent bystander.

      On Obama’s watch, the Justice Department has enforced the laws in a politicized and racially discriminatory manner. It has, furthermore, filed and threatened vexatious lawsuits against sovereign states to obstruct their lawful execution of public policy—particularly, the enforcement of laws against illegal immigration and election fraud. The president’s attorney general, Eric Holder, has exhorted state attorneys general to become more like him—to adopt the practice of ignoring the laws they are sworn to enforce when those laws depart from Obama’s progressive pieties.

      Holder’s department orchestrated the astounding “Fast and Furious” operation, in which large quantities of firearms were knowingly sent to vicious drug gangs in Mexico. Top administration figures are, of course, rabidly anti-gun. Yet the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), in collusion with Justice Department lawyers, encouraged arms dealers to make illegal gun sales to “straw purchasers”—faux buyers whose true intention is to transfer the weapons in bulk to persons (usually illegal aliens and other criminals) who are not legally eligible to obtain them. At best, the ATF agents foolishly believed the straw purchasers would lead them to violent gangs against whom they could make a splashy case. More plausibly, the ideologues expected that the guns would end up tied to various atrocities, thus bolstering their political argument that America’s gun culture fuels international violence. Thousands of guns were allowed to walk, no meaningful prosecutions were developed, and, predictably, things went horribly wrong: some of the ATF guns have been tied to the murder of Brian Terry, a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

      Congress has tried to investigate Fast and Furious, just as it tries to investigate a web of administration scandals that would make Richard Nixon and John Mitchell blush. The president frivolously invoked executive privilege to stall the probe, after Holder was held in contempt of Congress for his misleading testimony and refusal to turn over Justice Department memoranda.

      That, by the way, was before Mr. Holder provided misleading testimony to Congress about his role in the investigation of a Fox News journalist—right around the time the Justice Department secretly issued sweeping subpoenas for the phone records of Associated Press reporters, flouting the department’s traditional deference to free-press rights explicitly protected by the First Amendment.

      More recently, the department has embarked on an invidious felony prosecution against Dinesh D’Souza for allegedly illegal contributions to a Senate campaign. D’Souza, an influential conservative, is the author of The Roots of Obama’s Rage and co-producer of the related movie, 2016: Obama’s America, both of which were popular with the public and despised at the White House. The D’Souza case is the one panned by Alan Dershowitz as “selective” and “outrageous.” The piddling sum allegedly involved, $15,000, is well beneath the Justice Department’s norm for criminal enforcement; it falls into the category that is routinely settled with a fine paid to the Federal Election Commission. Certainly it is not in the same stratosphere as the Obama campaign’s own multimillion-dollar campaign finance violations, which are felonies that the same Justice Department opted not to prosecute.

      The president instigated a war, unauthorized by Congress and in the absence of any threat to the United States, against the Libyan regime of Muammar Qaddafi. At the time, the Obama administration was supporting Qaddafi’s government with public funds and portraying it as a key American counterterrorism ally. As is the president’s wont, the war against Qaddafi was fraudulently conducted: the public was told that the military assault was an impartial humanitarian enterprise to halt fighting between the Libyan government and insurgent forces; in fact, the American-led coalition one-sidedly bludgeoned the Qaddafi regime, while the administration secretly green-lighted arms shipments and funding for the jihadist-ridden insurgents.

      As was easily foreseeable, the unprovoked military adventure empowered anti-American terrorists. In addition to facilitating the arming of jihadists during the war, in violation of American criminal laws against material support to terrorism, the president’s policy enabled jihadists affiliated with al-Qaeda to seize parts of the regime’s arsenal in the chaotic aftermath of Qaddafi’s assassination. Thus fortified, terrorists conducted violent operations against American and other Western targets in the region.

      Despite the threat to the United States exacerbated by his policy of empowering Islamists, Obama repeatedly claimed to the public, in the run-up to the 2012 election, that his leadership had “decimated” al-Qaeda and left the terror network “on the path to defeat.”¹⁰ His administration, meanwhile, facilitated the virulently anti-American Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt and, again in violation of American laws against supporting terrorists, issued a visa to a member of an Egyptian terrorist organization—formally designated as such under U.S. law—so he could consult with top administration officials at the White House.

      At home, the administration consulted with “experts” it has refused to identify in purging information about Islamic supremacism—the ideology that drives our enemies—from materials used to train law enforcement, intelligence, and military personnel responsible for our security. The obsession with bleaching the Islam out of Islamic terrorism reached mind-boggling lengths with the administration’s refusal to brand the Fort Hood massacre—in which thirteen Americans, mostly military personnel, were killed and dozens more wounded—as an act of terrorism.

      For a year leading up to the attack at Ford Hood in November 2009, the gunman, Nidal Hasan, a psychiatrist and commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, had been exchanging international emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, a top al-Qaeda terrorist who had ministered to the 9/11 suicide-hijackers. Breathtakingly, government investigators who knew about these emails, and were also aware of lectures in which the psychiatrist spewed anti-American jihadist rhetoric, dismissed all this as “academic research” that indicated no terrorist threat. After the massacre, the worst domestic terrorist attack since 9/11, General George Casey, army chief of staff, bleated that a “greater tragedy” than the mass murder and maiming would be “if our diversity becomes a casualty.” The administration fraudulently labeled the killings of U.S. troops who were about to deploy to a war zone as “workplace violence,” not international terrorism—a finding that denied Purple Hearts to the soldiers killed and wounded in the attack.

      Meanwhile, Obama was imposing unconscionable rules of engagement on American combat forces in Afghanistan. Our troops are now expected to fight a war against terrorists who hide among (often sympathetic) civilians while not engaging the enemy if there is a possibility that civilians could be harmed. U.S. ground forces are also routinely denied air cover, again for fear of harming Afghan civilians. Since Obama took the helm and incoherently announced a troop escalation coupled with a troop withdrawal, American combat deaths have more than doubled, while the