By Timothy P. Carney
WashingtonExaminer.com

President Obama launched a U.S. war in Libya two months ago with no congressional approval. Under the Constitution and under the War Powers Act, which allows the president to wage defensive wars for up to 60 days without prior approval, Obama probably broke the law.

Now that 60 days have passed since the United States joined the hostilities, Obama's war is more clearly illegal. But nobody should expect this to matter to a president with a long record of disregarding legal and constitutional limits on presidential and federal power.

Presidential arrogation of power is nothing new. President George W. Bush's lawyer John Yoo declared in a post-9/11 memo that no congressional "statute .... can place any limits on the president's determinations" about how to fight terrorism, proclaiming such decisions "are for the president alone to make."

But Barack Obama ran against this imperial mind-set. On war powers, he said, "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

More broadly, he declared, "No more ignoring the law when it's inconvenient. That is not who we are. . . . . We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers."

Now that he's president, Obama apparently believes the inverse: Stubborn rulers should not be subject to the whims of the law.

We shouldn't be surprised, considering the truth behind the observation from a character in Robert Frost's poem "Build Soil": "[W]hat are wars but politics transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?" Obama is waging war the same way he has waged politics.

Obama in 2009 threw out bankruptcy law and precedent when he handed ownership of Chrysler to his political patrons, the United Auto Workers, publicly and privately threatening the creditors who objected.

Obama's National Labor Relations Board has gotten in the game by blocking Boeing from making its jets at its new factory in South Carolina.

This administration regularly flouts and bends its own ethics rules. Lobbyists fresh from Google and Goldman Sachs came to the White House and helped craft policies directly affecting their former employers -- sometimes in concert with their old lobbyist colleagues. H&R Block's chief executive officer joined the administration and drafted tax-preparation regulations that help H&R Block.

More importantly, Obama seems to regard the Constitution's limits as quaint. We see it in his rhetoric and his actions.

"There are some who question the scale of our ambitions," Obama said in his inaugural address, "Who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans." About these "cynics," Obama responded: "The ground has shifted beneath them .... the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply." One such "stale political argument" checking politicians' "ambitions" is apparently the notion that the federal executive's powers are limited and enumerated.

Obamacare's linchpin -- a federal requirement that every person buy and hold health insurance -- is a fine example of Obama's disdain for the notion of enumerated powers. The administration's lawyers have their constitutional defenses in court, but those arguments are more semantical than sincere. The telltale is the blatant contradiction between the politicians' claims (it's not a tax!) and the lawyers' claims (it's only a tax!).

Elena Kagan, Obama's Supreme Court pick, refused, as solicitor general, to answer whether the Commerce Clause would justify a federal mandate that everyone eat broccoli. In the name of hope and change, all is permitted.

It's not just the administration. Disdain for constitutional limits on federal power is widespread on the Left. The derogatory term "Tenther" was coined in 2009 (invoking the "birther" conspiracy theory that Obama is not an American citizen) to mock those conservatives and libertarians who want more deference to the 10th Amendment's declaration that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Advocating stricter adherence of the Constitution will get you called racist. Al Gore once said, in effect, that a "strict constructionist" is someone who sees blacks as three-fifths of a person.

Start with an administration set on "changing America," and that rejects strict construction, the 10th Amendment, and the separation of powers, and you get what we have in Libya today: an illegal war, and a White House that doesn't mind.

Timothy P.Carney, The Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.