Much is being made of House Speaker John Boehner’s stated intent to sue President Obama over his purportedly excessive use of, lets call it discretion, in implementing the laws that Congress has passed and he has signed. The President is mandated by the Constitution to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, but certainly there must be discretion in the details of execution and judgment regarding what “faithfully” means in practical terms.
Obama has a long list of recent quotes and soundbites that demonstrate his intent to pursue a legislative agenda via executive means, soundbites that stand in stark contrast with a quote from 2008:
The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States of America.
This usurpation of power by the executive branch from the legislative branches is, in a fashion, “cheating.” It’s breaking the rules of the game in order to gain personal benefit or advance a personal goal. As such, it reminded me of a scene from the movie The Sting, a true classic that, have you not seen it in a while (or ever) you should stop all you’re doing and track it down. In an early scene, Paul Newman’s character Henry Gondorff is working to rope in the mark, Doyle Lonnegan, played by Robert Shaw, by beating him in a poker game on a train traveling to Chicago. Gondorff acts boorish and arrogant, riling Lonnegan up to the point where Lonnegan decides he’s going to take Gondorff down by swapping in a pre-arranged deck of cards. By cheating.
I won’t spoil the scene, which is brilliantly staged, other than to note that Gondorff turns the tables on him. Later, one of Lonnegan’s henchmen questions why he didn’t say anything. Lonnegan’s retort:
What was I supposed to do – call him for cheating better than me, in front of the others?
raises a question – who’s the better cheater, Bush or Obama?
There’s little doubt about who’s the bigger cheater. Obama’s made his intent known, and has already rewritten or ignored a long range of laws. He’s boldly declared that he’s going to cheat and dared the Republicans to stop him. That dare has a bit of childishness about it, since he knows that as long as Harry Reid’s running the show over in the Senate nothing can reach him. It’s like a kid inside the schoolyard fence taunting kids on the outside, knowing full well they can’t get to him. Woe be unto that kid, however, should that fence be taken down. Still, for now BO can run his mouth, use his phone and wield his pen with near-term impunity. Apologists on the Left will offer up counts of executive orders signed by BO and Bush as a rebuttal to the charge that BO is overstepping, but without considering the content of those orders the argument is nothing more than sophistry.
Bigger, however, isn’t necessarily better. Magnitude/quantity are not the same as quality, and I’d argue that quality is far more important and relevant. A monster cheater who’s busted for it can end up with less than he started with, while a more reserved and subtle cheater could end up with the greater success.
How are we to judge quality of cheating? Do we go by outcome? Certainly, Gondorff was the better cheater. Gondorff’s cheat not only roiled Lonnegan enough to lure him into the longer con they were working, but took from Lonnegan enough money to finance the setting up of that long con, and he pulled it off without any other observers noticing anything was awry.
Or do we go by success? Who manages to accomplish the most by cheating that he couldn’t have otherwise accomplished? Do we judge that success in the short term or in the long term? Does it matter if those accomplishments are ephemeral or permanent? That’s a matter of perspective. If simply doing something is the end-goal, you get a very different answer from a metric based on permanency or long-term outcome.
Perhaps we measure the quality of the cheat and the cheater by deception. Lonnegan knew he had been cheated at cards, but the goal of the “sting” was to ensure that he didn’t know he was conned. In the end, he lost four hundred thousand dollars and was convinced that the loss was legitimate and irrecoverable. In the case of our two presidents, accusations of executive excess are made by their detractors and rebutted, ignored or dismissed by their defenders. Certainly, it’s not the case that the cheating is going undetected, so we’d have to judge by the equivalent result – who gets away with the cheat. Obama’s detractors suggest that his entire candidacy was a cheat, that he conned the public into putting him into office – twice. But, if everything he accomplishes as president is eventually undone, would we nevertheless consider him the better cheater?
No, the answer to the question depends on whose discretionary actions are still in effect a decade or two from now and who history judges as the better and more effective president.
Who’s the better cheater? Only time will tell.
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