… and of course the media will just, well, cover for him.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama defiantly dared congressional Republicans on Tuesday to try to block his efforts to act on his own and bypass a divided Congress that has thwarted his policy initiatives.
“So sue me,” he taunted on a sweltering day, as he pushed lawmakers to pay for road and bridge repairs. “I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something.”
Obama struck an aggressive tone in the face of a lawsuit threat from House Speaker John Boehner and in the wake of two defeats before the Supreme Court, including a unanimous decision from the court that he overreached when he appointed members of the National Labor Relations Board while the Senate was in recess. (more…)

Creepy factor HIGH. HatTip LetJusticePrevail who noticed something really odd in this “exclusive” NBC story Behind the Scenes with Valerie Jarrett.
From the video:

…”Today – rare access within the West Wing, where Jarrett’s office is prime real estate”…

As the words are narrated in the voice-over, the camera moves into her office.  At 1:01 of the video the camera quickly pans over part of Jarrett’s West Wing office displaying photographs and memorabilia.   If you look quickly you see this:

~ Image via screen grab from video ~

YIKES, talk about C-R-E-E-P-Y self idolatry !

Note – The original question of “constitutional authority” is never answered.

For *this* specific White House to make such a claim, against the visible history of their previous positions, one can only reasonably conclude the “Bathtub Principle” is being applied to the current al-Qaeda situation in Iraq.
This administration only feigns ignorance when feigning ignorance benefits their position and is part of their larger strategy.  “Wha,.. who… us”?  
WASHINGTON DC – Senior Obama administration officials’ closed-door briefing to senators Tuesday night revealed that the White House did not anticipate and was not prepared for the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), which has wreaked havoc in Iraq and seized many key cities in recent weeks.

Top State Department and Defense Department officials joined senators Tuesday evening for a briefing on the quickly developing chaos in Iraq and future U.S. plans for a response.
Sources familiar with the brief said that the administration officials repeated talking points issued over the past several days in both open and closed door meetings and had trouble communicating a concrete plan for response. (more…)

Now the question becomes… if the board appointments were illegal, then what happens to all those NLRB rules -2 years worth- that have been instituted since the Labor Board Members were unconstitutionally appointed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has limited a president’s power to make temporary appointments to fill high-level government jobs.
The court said Thursday that President Barack Obama exceeded his authority when he invoked the Constitution’s provision on recess appointments to fill slots on the National Labor Relations Board in 2012.
The justices said in their first-ever consideration of the Constitution’s recess appointments clause that Congress gets to decide when it is in recess and that there was no recess when Obama acted. The president said he made the appointments in the face of Republican refusal to allow the NLRB to function.  (read more)

Full Opinion HERE

WASHINGTON STATE –  The Department of Health and Human Services is considering temporarily housing as many as 600 undocumented children at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, said Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas Crosson, a Defense Department spokesman.
A wave of children has been crossing the border illegally recently. Most of them have fled violence from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
The Defense Department is already housing about 2,300 children at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas; Naval Base Ventura County, California; and Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Crosson said. (more…)

Exceptional article from Elliott Abrams outlining President Obama’s abject failure in the Middle East and the risks he has created.   Make sure to read the entire article – well recommended.

(Via Politico) There’s always Tunisia. Amid the smoking ruins of the Middle East, there is that one encouraging success story. But unfortunately for the Obama narratives, the president had about as much as to do with Tunisia’s turn toward democracy as he did with the World Cup rankings. Where administration policy has had an impact, the story is one of failure and danger.
The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained. (more…)

Most reasonable people would see the current IRS claims “we can’t find the missing emails” as essentially ridiculous at face value.  Of course the IRS could.    The reason they won’t is likely because of the content therein.
And that’s where things get sketchy.

The lead public face in the deception, Lois Lerner, and the secondary face, IRS commissioner John Koskinen, have the benefit of a blind and politically weaponized Federal Department of Justice (via U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder) with no interest in investigating them or their activity.
Because of the inherent risk to the White House -and the sheer scope of the larger named Democrats in office- the Justice Department (AG Eric Holder) will do nothing to bring the targeting scheme to sunlight.
It’s brutally obvious from the behavior of Lois Lerner and Commissioner Koskinen they are fully cognizant of this fortunate political alignment.
So what alternatives are available ? (more…)

The White House crew (McDonough, Blinkin, Rhodes, et al) know the toxic political danger of the current illegal immigration influx.   Despite the democrat narrative they know the majority of Americans are against this abject collapse of border control. 
Despite his own promotional advocacy which has led to the crisis, Obama has to deliver appearances of being on the right side of the people.   If the progressive ideology was allowed full sunlight Obama would find his administration in a larger position of impotency, and Democrats would suffer even greater losses in the upcoming election.
(WASHINGTON DC) – President Obama told his Mexican counterpart in a phone call Thursday that immigrants crossing into the U.S. illegally won’t qualify for legalized status or deferred deportation, including children.
The White House said Mr. Obama and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto discussed “a regional strategy” to address the surge of unaccompanied children coming from Central America, through Mexico, to the U.S.
With thousands of children trying to enter the U.S. illegally in recent months, Vice President Joseph R. Biden will visit Guatemala on Friday.
Mr. Biden will warn officials and parents that illegal immigration is dangerous and that youth won’t be allowed to stay in the U.S. (more…)

You can tell by the way President Obama frames the introduction his team is worried about the “optics” of his recent disconnect.