Via Media Matters.
Monica Crowley: We are a nation of laws, not a men. We are governed by the rule of law. The President doesn't get to decide which laws he likes and which laws to enforce. That is a form of dictatorship.
Megyn Kelly: If a Republican President just decided not to enforce the laws that protects gays, because we don't believe in those - there would be quite a national outcry.
Crowley: If President Bush had done that there would be calls for his impeachment
I really hate to burst their bubble over a Fox, but President Bush Did Do That with Civil Rights Enforcement, the War Crimes Act, FISA (Domestic Spying) and Torture - and yeah - some of us did call for his Impeachment.
There were actually so many good reasons to Impeach Bush - I had to do a Series of Diaries on it. Part1 (Intelligence Fraud), Part2 (Domestic Espionage), Part3 (War Crimes, Torture, Murder) and Part4 (Criminal Negligence). On multiple occasions and in multiple ways President Bush not only refused to enforce the laws - he directly violated them.
But first let me point out that the Obama Administration is Still Enforcing DOMA since it remains the law of the land. They simply aren't going to defend it in court in the same way that the then Governor of California (Shwarzenegger) and Attorney General (Brown) refused to defend Proposition 8.
Further there is another law, the Mathew Sheperd Hate Crimes Act which Obama signed into law which didn't even exist when Bush was President so in actual fact - he really didn't do squat to protect the rights of gays because he didn't have to.
All Obama is doing is making a determination, based on several judicial opinions, that this law is unconstitutional - The fact that it directly violates the 14th Amendment is self-evident - but this determination isn't all that different from Bush determining that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to "Enemy Combatants" - except that Geneva says that it does, and eventually so did the Supreme Court in Hamdan V Rumsfeld.
On January 24, 2002 Alberto Gonzales advised Bush that:
"It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441 [the War Crimes Act]," Gonzales wrote. The best way to guard against such "unwarranted charges," the White House lawyer concluded, would be for President Bush to stick to his decision--then being strongly challenged by Secretary of State Powell-- to exempt the treatment of captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from Geneva convention provisions.
"Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that (the War Crimes Act) does not apply which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution," Gonzales wrote.
The President doesn't determine what the law is or isn't - but Bush did.
He also issued hundreds of Signing Statement which completely reinterpreted the laws - an how Bush would enforce that law - as he saw fit.
For example he chose to ignore the Homeland Security Law.
President Bush has once again decreed that his personal pen is the highest law of the land. In a statement issued on October 4, 2006, he announced that he would ignore many provisions of the Homeland Security appropriations act he signed earlier in the day. His action vivifies that the rule of law now means little more than the enforcement of the secret thoughts of the commander in chief.
...
The new law declared that only the Homeland Security Department’s privacy officer could alter or delay the department’s mandatory report on how its actions and policies affected Americans’ privacy. Congress included this safeguard because of the Bush administration’s long record of intruding into Americans’ lives — from the Total Information Awareness system, to vacuuming up information on airline passengers, to stockpiling phone records of millions of citizens.
After he signed the bill, Bush announced that he is effectively entitled to edit the report as he pleases. But his “right to edit” means that he is entitled to delete information and thereby prevent Congress from learning of how the feds continue to shred privacy.
So let's not even begin to take Fox's call of Obama as "Dictator" serious, when they Never even began to make such drastic arguments about anything extra-legal that Bush attempted to do for year and years.
Vyan