This is NOT Chicago!

In this country, there are city charters that give the mayors a lot of power and others which have relatively weak mayors. I understand (though I've not read the charter in any detail) that Chicago has a charter that, on its face, provides for a relatively weak mayor. But in fact, not only two generations of Richard Daleys, but even earlier mayors of Chicago, found it possible to exercise far more powers than Chicago's charter allowed them. Chicago has a “weak-mayor” charter, but it has had very strong mayors in fact.

Why is this important to us, outside the city of Chicago? Because we currently have a President, Barack Obama, who may have been born in Honolulu (despite “birther” claims), but whose political life has all been spent in Chicago. And he seems to think that the national government is to be run like Chicago's — with an executive who is not bound by a Constitution's limited allocation of powers. First he simply construed the Constitution in ways it had never been construed before, like making “recess appointments” when the Senate was not really in recess but simply off for a weekend. Now he's actually creating new legislation, which Congress has never approved (and in fact voted down) — as in his recent unilaterally-implemented DREAM Act. But this is not Chicago. We believe in our Constitution. And hopefully the American people will tell Barack Obama this, in the only way that will get it across to him, by electing someone else this November. And the obvious choice for “someone else,” of course, is Mitt Romney, who will restore this country to Constitutional government.