Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Saturday once again cited federal drug laws as evidence that Barack Obama was a "lawless" president.
"And then there is the pattern of lawlessness in this administration," he said at the New Hampshire Freedom Summit. "Ignoring law after law after law. If this president doesn't agree with the law, he refuses to enforce it, whether it is immigration law or welfare laws or marriage laws or drug laws."
Cruz then cited what he and other Republicans consider the most egregious example of Obama's lawlessness, the Affordable Care Act.
"And then you take Obamacare -- please, take Obamacare!" Cruz continued. "Thirty times this president has simply unilaterally changed the law. There is no authority in the law for that. How many of you remember 6th grade civics? You remember 'Schoolhouse Rock?' How a bill becomes a law? Apparently, the president missed that day."
"We have never had a president assert the authority to ignore and unilaterally change the law the way this president is doing so, and this should trouble everyone, not just Republicans, but Democrats, Independents, libertarians, anyone who cares about rule of law and the Constitution, because when you have a president who can pick and choose which laws to follow and which laws to ignore, then you no longer have a president."
Cruz previously criticized the Obama administration in January for allowing Colorado and Washington state to legalize marijuana without the permission of Congress.
"You can go to Congress, you can get a conversation, you could get Democrats and Republicans who would say, ‘We ought to change our drug policy in some way,’ and you could have a real conversation, you could have hearings, you could look at the problem, you could discuss commonsense changes that maybe should happen or shouldn’t happen," the senator said during a speech. "This president didn’t do that. He just said, ‘The laws say one thing’ — and mind you these are criminal laws, these are laws that say if you do ‘X, Y, and Z’ you will go to prison. The president announced, ‘No, you won’t.’”
Cruz later reiterated that position to Reason magazine in February, saying the Obama administration's decision not to crack down on marijuana legalization set "a very dangerous precedent."
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