George Mason University law professor David Bernstein, who’s writing a book on the Obama administration, the Constitution, and the rule of law, shares some of his findings with Commentary readers.

Since 2009, Obama has claimed unprecedented power for himself while advancing a novel argument about his duty as president to ignore the separation of powers and act unilaterally to overcome congressional gridlock. “We can’t wait,” was his refrain—though he has, of course, been unable to cite a “we can’t wait” clause in the Constitution in defense of his actions.

Consider some of President Obama’s unilateral actions that have violated the Constitution’s separation of powers by bypassing Congress—exactly what candidate Obama swore he would not do:

• He has delayed, modified, and ignored various provisions of the Affordable Care Act (commonly called ObamaCare) with barely a pretext of the legal authority to do so;

• used the Constitution’s recess appointments power to appoint officials to high-level government positions when the Senate was not, in fact, in recess, as the Constitution requires;

• granted indefinite amnesty and work permits to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, with the promise of millions more to come;

• violated and undermined federal bankruptcy law to benefit the autoworkers’ union (which has been detrimental to bondholders, who had priority under the law);

• appointed high-level “czars” to evade the Constitution’s requirement that high-level government officials receive Senate approval; and

• ignored a law requiring the president to give 30 days notice to Congress before releasing prisoners from Guantánamo Bay.

The rule of law has suffered in many other ways under Obama, with his administration’s repeatedly having shown contempt for the norms of our legal and political process, including an extraordinary refusal to cooperate with congressional committees charged with overseeing various parts of the executive branch. The perpetrators of the IRS scandal, one of the most egregious misuses of government authority in recent times, have escaped not only punishment but also, for the most part, investigation by the Justice Department. Various government bodies have advanced radical theories of government authority and have been reversed 9–0 in an embarrassing series of Supreme Court defeats. As Jonathan Turley, a liberal law professor who has been critical of Obama’s abuses of executive authority, has observed, “While Obama did not create the uber-presidency, he has pushed it to a new level of autonomy and authority.”

One bright spot? The president’s executive overreach has led to more unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decisions, as the Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro recently discussed with Carolina Journal Radio/CarolinaJournal.tv.

This administration, just at the Supreme Court, has lost unanimously 13 times in the last three terms. That’s a pace that’s triple George Bush and double Bill Clinton. So they push through the envelope of kind of reasonable arguments and reasonable executive actions.