The Constitution designs a system of checks and balances for our nation, and executive amnesty for immigrants here illegally unilaterally decreed from the White House would seriously undermine the rule of law.

Our founders repeatedly warned about the dangers of unlimited power within the executive branch; Congress should heed those words as the president threatens to grant amnesty to millions of people who have come to our country illegally.

To be clear, the dispute over executive amnesty is not between President Obama and Republicans in Congress; it is a dispute between President Obama and the American people. The Democrats suffered historic losses in the midterm elections largely over the prospect of the president's executive amnesty. 

President Obama was correct: His policies were on the ballot across the nation in 2014. The elections were a referendum on amnesty, and the voters soundly rejected it. There was no ambiguity.

Undeterred, President Obama appears to be going forward. It is lawless. It is unconstitutional. He is defiant and angry at the American people. If he acts by executive diktat, President Obama will not be acting as a president, he will be acting as a monarch.

Congress, representing the voice of the people, should use every tool available to prevent the president from subverting the rule of law.  Here are two of them.

I have to keep this short as I'm soon boarding a very long flight to China.  Jack Kelly will be manning the HFR ramparts while I'm gone, but I have to tell you this now.

The story starts with an obscure state politician representing District 67 of the Utah House of Representatives named Marc Roberts.  If you look at that official state government website, you won't see anything unusual.

Like most pols, he also has his own site: marcroberts67.com.  How many elected politicians start their site off with a quote from Bastiat's The Law?  Followed by a statement of commitment to State Sovereignty and the Tenth Amendment?

Yet it's not Roberts' words that are most interesting, however, it's what he is doing.  He may have found the Achilles' Heel of the NSA.

You may have heard of the gigantic $1.5 billion, one million square-foot date collection center the NSA is building in Bluffdale, Utah called Bumblehive.  It will require 1.7 million gallons of water a day to cool the massive NSA computers spying on all of us.  Roberts knows how to cut off the water supply.

"Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

This statement by Michelle Obama on Feb. 18, 2008, at an appearance at UCLA, initially struck me as supremely arrogant and frightening... because it is supremely arrogant and frightening; and it is an honest expression -except for the putting-down-divisions part - of what Obama has tried to do as President.

It is an expression of progressive presumptuousness: trying to make people better; thinking the right leaders can mold us into the kind of people that the progressives think that we should be.

But let's look at it from a different angle; perhaps we should be thanking Michelle Obama for her challenge that we start living up to and acting upon the principles of America's founding.

A Special Announcement from To The Point

With the victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts this week, the Democrats have abandoned their maniacal attempt to pass ObamaCare "health reform" legislation.

Yet it is little known that a significant part of the ObamaCare program has secretly already been voted into law as part of the stimulus bill Congress passed in February, 2009.  This is $20 billion for "death panel" health rationing boards.

The mortal threat that ObamaCare poses to the health and freedom of all Americans cannot be eliminated until the sections of the stimulus bill authorizing funding for the health rationing boards is repealed.

Today (1/22), Congressman Thad McCotter (R-MI) introduced legislation to do just that:  The Freedom from Rationed Health Care Act.  The Bill number is HR 4500.