Excerpts from recent editorials in the U.S. and abroad:

From the June 2 Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail:

President Barack Obama is at it again. In 2010, the 44th president pushed for a so-called reform of the nation’s health-care system.

He and tunnel-visioned fellow Democrats Nancy Pelosi, then House Speaker, and Harry Reid, Senate President, eschewed all legitimate Republican concerns about a major government policy change simply because they had the votes in Congress to pass their bill then.

What followed was a very rough roll-out of the health care law, smoothed only slightly through a bevy of executive orders by the president to change parts of the law.

Unfortunately, there is no legal precedent nor Constitutional power for the president to make many of the changes he has made without congressional approval ”“ but he dared not bring the act back before the U.S. House where a Republican majority had since taken over ”“ primarily due to voter anger at his party’s shoving through a major policy change.

Now the president has done it again. Showing continued callousness, if not actual disdain, toward representatives in the U.S. Congress who were elected by the people, the President’s Environmental Protection Agency issued the Clean Power Plan to begin to do the things the president couldn’t get Congress to do with his Cap and Trade bill: stifle the production and use of the nation’s most abundant, economical natural resource for the generation of reliable, low-cost electric power.

The EPA showed its true objectivity on the issue when it held a series of public meetings while drafting its new policy. Those meetings occurred in 11 urban centers ”“ from San Francisco to Boston ”“ nowhere near any region of the country where hard-working people actually produce coal ”“ and ultimately electric power ”“ through their own blood, sweat and tears.

Why is it that Obama’s big legacy proposals wind up as big fights?

Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush reached out to the opposition party and worked to develop a coalition of leaders toward big goals such as No Child Left Behind and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

While Obama seems preoccupied with leaving a lasting legacy, he’s likely to be remembered for his arrogant “I am the King” approach to advance his policies his way, regardless of what he considers two minor irritants, the U.S. Constitution, and representative government.

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