President Obama’s legacy is in jeopardy. The fates of his main achievements—Obamacare, his amnesty for five million illegal immigrants, the Dodd-Frank financial institution reforms—are now in the hands of the federal courts.
This is extraordinary. Until Obama, no president has been in a situation in which judges rather than the elected branches of government can decide if his successful initiatives—successful in having been enacted by Congress or himself—live or die.
The instigators of putting Obama in a legal box are Republican state attorneys general. Once they began banding together in lawsuits to protect states from encroachments by the federal government, they became a powerful force and a thorn in Obama’s side.
There are 27 of them, a majority of state AGs. And they are determined to elect three more in the next two years. When they met in Washington last week, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell showed up to encourage them. He committed himself to help elect a GOP attorney general in Kentucky’s odd-year election this November.
Read more from the Weekly Standard here.