'Dealing With A Thrashing-About Lame Duck President'

“How should the new Republican-led Congress deal with the lame duck president?”, asks Hugh Hewitt:

Finally, when those appropriations bills roll off the assembly line courtesy of Chairman Rogers in the House and Chairman Cochran in the Senate, they should be festooned with “riders” that cut back the weeds of the six years of amateur leftism that has dominated President Obama’s tenure. The EPA, Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, IRS etc., all should be trussed up with language such as “No funds provided pursuant to this act shall be expended to list any new species as threatened or endangered or designate any land as critical habitat” and “No finds shall be spent rewriting the definition of navigable waters.” As a young General Counsel in the late Reagan years, my head spun trying to administer an agency legally weighed down by directives attached to appropriations riders from the Democratic Congress that indeed were law. The GOP must do the same to my counterpart third stringers left holding the bags as the more senior folks from Team Obama flee for K Street or home.

So do not let your hearts be troubled by the lame duck’s thrashing about these days and weeks before January. He can get a lot of people killed abroad, but he cannot change the laws at home, no matter what he thinks or does. The times they are a changin’. Thank God.

I hope he’s right, but I suspect the semi-retired failed community organizer can still cause a lot of damage to the nation — and the Middle East — in the time he has left in office before the world’s longest public speaking engagement and cocktail party begins.