Sen. Cruz Releases Fifth Legal Limit Report about the Obama Administration’s Attempts to Expand Federal Power

WASHINGTON, DC -- U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, today released the fifth report on the Obama Administration’s attempts to expand federal power that documents the many times the Supreme Court has unanimously rejected its legal arguments.
 
Legal Limit No. 1 documented cases decided unanimously against the Obama Administration from January 2012 to June 2013. Today’s fifth report includes all other cases, dating back to January 2009 when Obama was sworn into office, that the Obama Administration has lost unanimously. Four of those cases were decided by the Supreme Court in its most recent term.
 
“When President Obama’s own Supreme Court nominees join their colleagues in unanimously rejecting his Administration’s call for broader federal power twenty times since Obama took office, the inescapable conclusion is that the Obama Administration’s view of federal power knows virtually no bounds,” said Sen. Cruz.
 
As Legal Limit No. 1 outlines, the Court struck down the Administration’s federal overreaches nine times. If Obama’s DOJ had been successful in those cases the federal government would have the power to:

• Attach GPSs to a citizen’s vehicle to monitor his movements, without having any cause to believe that a person has 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 take away their ability 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 through the Presidential fiat (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 property owner’s constitutional defenses (Horne v. USDA); and
• Drastically expand federal criminal law (Sekhar v. United States).

In the newly-released report, Sen. Cruz catalogs the most recent cases decided in 2014 and the previous cases decided in President Obama’s first three years in office. If President Obama’s lawyers had won these cases, the federal government would have the power to:

• Unilaterally install officers and bypass the Senate confirmation process (NLRB v. Noel Canning);
• Search the contents of cell phones without a warrant (Riley v. California);
• Use international treaties to displace state sovereignty over criminal law (Bond v. United States);
• Expand federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws (Burrage v. United States);
• Apply arbitrary immigration rules (Judulang v. Holder);
• Bring prosecutions after statutory deadlines (United States v. Tinklenberg);
• Ignore certain veterans’ challenges to administrative agency rulings (Henderson ex rel. Henderson v. Shinseki);
• Override state prosecutorial decisions by treating minor state drug offenses as aggravated felonies under federal law (Carachuri-Rosendo v. Holder);
• Undermine Congress’s power to define criminal laws and the jury’s role in criminal cases (United States v. O’Brien);
• Charge drug buyers with crimes committed by drug sellers (Abuelhawa v. United States); and
• Ignore mental states needed for federal criminal convictions (Flores-Figueroa v. United States).

All of Sen. Cruz's Legal Limit reports may be viewed here.

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