Candidate message on ‘constitutional crisis’

Ben Sasse

Ben Sasse

As reported  by Conservative Intel, President Obama has created a constitutional crisis by announcing he’ll just enforce whatever parts of the Affordable Care Act he feels like, regardless of the law as written. Ben Sasse, a U.S. Senate candidate in a crowded GOP primary in Nebraska, latched on to this theme right after Obama’s health care presser last week.

His video isn’t exactly the most innovative use of social media in campaign history, and it isn’t going to get Sasse a television contract on FOX News. But it still got over a quarter million views after a number of conservative sites (including The Drudge Report) linked.

Sasse — the president of a small Lutheran college in Nebraska — thus got his face all over the conservative blogosphere amid an open-seat primary where the candidates are all vying to show who’s the most conservative. (Sasse has the endorsement of the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives fund, his chief rival Shane Osborn has FreedomWorks’ backing.)

The reason this worked is that Sasse (whom we interviewed recently) is hitting a note conservatives have been tuned in to for some time. The themes of executive overreach and “government by man” have been consistent ones in Obama’s presidency — given selective immigration enforcement, waivers for education funding, arbitrary (and probably illegal) delays to various other parts of Obamacare, illegal recess appointments, and unauthorized American involvement in Libya’s civil war.

Obama is certainly not the first president to adopt such unilateral measures, but he might be the first to act  so proud of it (remember the “We Can’t Wait” slogan?) as he did during the 2012 campaign. And he’s arguably done this sort of thing a lot more than his predecessors, despite having explicitly promised that he wasn’t going to be that sort of president.


Read more at Conservative Intel by clicking here.