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THE LEGAL LIMIT: THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S
ATTEMPTS TO EXPAND FEDERAL POWER
U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Obama Administration DOJ’s
Expansive View of Federal Power
*
By U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)
Ranking Member,
Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on The Constitution,
Civil Rights and Human Rights
The Obama Administration, through its Department of Justice, has repeatedly advocated a
radical theory of sweeping federal power. The Administration’s view of federal power is so
extreme that, since January 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously rejected DOJ’s
arguments for more federal power nine times.
Notably, four Justices who were nominated by Democratic presidents denied the Obama
Administration’s overreaches—President Obama picked two of them himself. As Ilya Shapiro
noted in The Wall Street Journal on June 5, 2012, “When the administration can’t get even a
single one of the liberal justices to agree with it in these unrelated areas of law, that’s a sign there’s
something wrong its constitutional vision.”
If Obama’s Department of Justice were successful in its cases, the federal government would
have the power to:
• Attach a GPS to a citizen’s vehicle to monitor his movements, without having any cause
to believe that person committed a crime (United States v. Jones);
• Deprive landowners of the right to challenge potential government fines as high as
$75,000 per day and eliminate their ability to have a hearing to challenge those fines
(Sackett v. EPA);
• Interfere with a church’s selection of its own ministers (Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical
Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC);
• Override state law whenever the President desires (Arizona v. United States);
• Dramatically extend statutes of limitations to impose penalties for acts committed
decades ago (Gabelli v. SEC);
• Destroy private property without paying just compensation (Arkansas Fish & Game
Commission v. United States);
• Impose double income taxation (PPL Corp. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue);
• Limit a property owner’s constitutional defenses (Horne v. USDA); and
• Drastically expand federal criminal law (Sekhar v. United States)
If the Department of Justice had won these cases, the federal government would be able to
electronically track all of our movements, fine us without a fair hearing, dictate who churches
choose as ministers, displace state laws based on the President’s whims, bring debilitating lawsuits
against individuals based on events that occurred years ago, and destroy a person’s private
property without just compensation