Charles Krauthammer: Barack Obama Is a Narcissist ‘Surrounded by Sycophants’

Mediaite.com:

Columnist Charles Krauthammer joined radio host Hugh Hewitt today to diagnose what he believes the problem is with President Obama: he’s a narcissist who surrounds himself with yes-men. He said, “Obama is clearly a narcissist in the non-scientific use of the word. He is so self-involved, you see it from his rise.”

Krauthammer argued that Obama views himself “in very world historical terms” which makes him amateurish. He also picked up on the repeated usage of first-person pronouns in the president’s announcement of Osama bin Laden‘s death, “as if he’d pulled the trigger.”

Hewitt asked whether outside pressure from people like David Petraeus is moving Obama at all. Krauthammer doubted it, because, he said, Obama “lives in a cocoon surrounded by sycophants”:

There’s not anyone of independent stature around him. There was in the first term, because he needed them to prop him up. But now that he entered a second term, he’s the master of the universe, so there’s nobody around him. He is impervious to outside advice, real advice that he takes.

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Charles Krauthammer: Obama's Criticism of House Immigration Bill 'Ridiculous'

FOXNews.com:

Charles Krauthammer said Friday on "Special Report with Bret Baier" that President Obama's criticism of the House over its failure to pass an immigration bill was "ridiculous," as he was mocking Republican lawmakers for something Democrats are also guilty of. 

Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor, said that if Obama is going to criticize the House for passing a border crisis bill they know the president will veto, he also has to criticize Senate Democrats when they pass legislation the House won't accept. 

"Is that a criterion that would determine what a House or Senate is going to do, whether the other guys are going to accept it? It's ridiculous," he said. 

Krauthammer suggested that the best course for both the Senate and the House would be to pursue a combination of amnesty and enforcement.

"Of the 11 million, ultimately, I would say, we're going to have to give them residence here, in a generous rate.  We're not going to deport them," he said. "But I think we're going to have to promise the American people...this is the last 11 million. I guarantee you that if Americans believed that there will be enforcement, and this is the last cohort of illegals to be legalized, you would get 80 percent support for that duel approach."

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Supreme Court Unanimously Rejects Obama Recess Appointments

HotAir.com:

The Supreme Court dropped a huge bomb on the Obama administration, unanimously rebuking the President for arrogating to himself the determination of when Congress is in session for the purpose of making recess appointments. According to reports on the opinion, the court may have taken a middle path on what a recess actually is, toning down one appellate court ruling that only allowed for recess appointments between formal sessions:

The US Supreme Court today limited a president’s power to make recess appointments when the White House and the Senate are controlled by opposite parties, scaling back a presidential authority as old as the republic.

The case arose from a political dispute between President Obama and Senate Republicans, who claimed he had no authority to put three people on the National Labor Relations Board in January 2012 when the Senate was out of town.

He used a president’s power, granted by the Constitution, to “fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate.” But the Republicans said the Senate was not in recess at the time the appointments were made, because every three days a senator went into the chamber, gaveled it to order, and then immediately called a recess.

By a unanimous vote, the Supreme Court agreed that the Senate was not in recess, holding that it’s up to both houses of Congress to define when they’re in session or in recess. As a result of the decision, the Senate can frustrate a president’s ability to make recess appointments simply by holding periodic pro forma sessions, a tactic used in recent years by both political parties.

According to NBC’s Pete Williams, the opinion provides a timeframe for Congress and the White House to follow in the future:

That will certainly make it easier to play keep-away from the President. A minority on the court wanted to limit the recess power to strictly the period between sessions, as did one appellate court, but in the end a 5-4 majority decided to allow for a looser interpretation of “recess.” Certainly, if Congress wants to stop recess appointments from being made, it will be fairly easy to gavel into session every nine days.

The question will now be what happens to the NLRB rulings during the period when recess appointments provided a quorum. The answer appears to be that they can be successfully challenged and set aside. That was the context of the challenge to the recess appointments in the first place — lawsuits against regulation created in that period that alleged they were illegitimate. This ruling means that the Supreme Court 
unanimously agrees on that point, a severe rebuke to the “constitutional scholar” President and his abuse of power. More practically, though, the recent appointments to the NLRB can reconstitute that regulation if they wish, so the victory may be short lived for the plaintiffs.

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