President Barack Obama said the Supreme Court decision halting his executive actions to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants won’t discourage him from making other such moves without going through Congress.

“It does not have any impact from our perspective on the host of other issues we are working on because each one of these issues has a different analysis and is based on different statutes and different interpretations of our authority,” Obama said in the White House briefing room Thursday.

The president cited climate change as an example, saying his participation in related international efforts doesn’t involve the same principle as his executive amnesty, namely “a theory of prosecutorial discretion that in the past every other president has exercised.”

Rather, Obama said, his climate change agenda is “based on the Clean Air Act, the EPA and previous Supreme Court rulings.”

The Supreme Court’s deadlocked 4-4 decision announced earlier in the day lets stand an appeals court decision upholding an injunction against the Obama administration actions in November 2014 to shield up to 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation and allow them to work here legally.

Texas and 25 other states filed the lawsuit, United States v. Texas.

“On the specifics of immigration, I don’t anticipate that there are any additional executive actions that we can take,” Obama told reporters. “We can implement what we’ve already put in place that has not already been affected by this decision.”

“We have to follow now what has been ruled on in the Fifth Circuit because our Supreme Court could not resolve the issue and we are going to have to abide by that ruling until an election and a confirmation of a ninth justice of the Supreme Court so that they can break this tie,” he said, “because we’ve always said we are going to do what we can lawfully through executive action.”

Obama has used executive actions on other high-profile issues such as gun control, the environment, transgender policy in schools, and his own health care law. Such moves prompted Republican members of Congress to question whether the president has the authority to act in such ways.

While the president may be correct that the Supreme Court decision has no legal bearing on other executive actions, he should not feel more comfortable in acting without Congress, said Elizabeth Slattery, a legal fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

“He certainly shouldn’t feel emboldened to take even broader authority,” Slattery told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

Slattery said she believes the president is on shaky legal ground in regard to executive actions.

“The president has an abysmal record in the Supreme Court. He lost 9-0, with his own court appointees ruling against him,” Slattery said, referring to a case in which the court rejected Obama’s attempts to make a so-called recess appointment to the National Labor Relations Review Board when the Senate actually was not in recess.

“That’s not how the Constitution works,” she said.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said the final ruling was meaningful in upholding the Constitution’s separation of powers.

“Today, Article I of the Constitution was vindicated,” Ryan, R-Wis., said in a formal statement. “The Supreme Court’s ruling makes the president’s executive action on immigration null and void. The Constitution is clear: The president is not permitted to write laws—only Congress is. This is another major victory in our fight to restore the separation of powers.”

In March, the Republican-controlled House voted to authorize Ryan to file a brief in support of the 26 states in the immigration case.

Obama dismissed the Supreme Court’s tie vote and used it to underline his own frustrated attempt to fill the seat of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February.

“The Supreme Court wasn’t definitive one way or the other on this,” Obama said. “The problem is they don’t have a ninth justice. So, that will continue to be a problem. With respect to Republicans, what it tells you is, if you keep on blocking judges from getting on the bench then courts can’t issue decisions. What that means is you’re going to have the status quo frozen.” (For more from the author of “Obama Says He Won’t Let Defeat on Amnesty Deter Other Executive Actions” please click HERE)

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As Barack Obama becomes the lamest of lame ducks, you can count on him to take every opportunity to aim a parting shot at what’s left of the American economy and the U.S. Constitution. In recent weeks he has abused his executive authority on guns, overtime pay, gender-bending bathroom rules on states and parents, and U.S. “boots on the ground” in Libya, Yemen and Syria.

Unsurprisingly, the GOP leadership in Congress is utterly ineffective in blocking him.

Even worse, on some matters top Congressional Republicans have shown their readiness to carry Obama’s water for him. The best-known examples are the 2014 $1.1 trillion “Cromnibus” abomination (which funded Obama’s illegal actions on immigration) and approval of “Obamatrade” authority last year to expedite horrible deals like TTIP (the “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” with the European Union) and TPP (the “Trans-Pacific Partnership”), which Donald Trump rightly has called “insanity.”

Now there’s yet another monstrosity waiting in the wings. Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew are trying to shoehorn the United States into a global financial reporting scheme that would trash American sovereignty, suck money out of the U.S. economy, and violate constitutional principles, such as respecting the Senate’s advice and consent to treaties and requiring warrants for searches of personal data.

Unfortunately, the Republican leadership in the Senate is lining up to help Obama and Lew do it.

At issue are seven obscure tax treaties being held up by Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT). Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-TN) is trying to pry loose Paul’s and Lee’s “hold” on the treaties and to rubber stamp them without fixing data reporting standards that violate the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The two Senators are happy to quit blocking the pacts, which are otherwise acceptable, if they are amended to remedy that defect.

A Dear Colleague letter signed by Corker – but clearly drafted by Lew’s Treasury Department – claims to debunk Paul’s and Lee’s objections in what amounts to a rehash of Obama administration talking points. For example, the letter (evidently prompted by my recent commentary opposing the treaties) claims blocking them won’t prevent operation of a little-known 2010 law called the “Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act” (FATCA), which the Obama administration has sought to implement using a series of unauthorized and unratified “intergovernmental agreements.” With all due respect to Chairman Corker, this claim is inaccurate. For example, Article 5(1) of the relevant agreement with Switzerland says in so many words that FATCA requests ‘shall not be made prior to the entry into force’ of a treaty the two Senators have a hold on. If that’s not blocking, what is?

From the standpoint of American jobs and foreign investment in the U.S., there is even more at stake. Since the “Panama Papers” story broke, foreign officials have accused the United States of acting as a tax haven as well as permitting states like Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming not to disclose “beneficial ownership” of corporations. There have been calls to blacklist the United States, and even to apply sanctions against us.

Barack Obama has invited these attacks on America by his administration’s practice over the past five years of subjecting our trading partners to one-sided, costly and humiliating FATCA demands under threat of financial sanctions. They have capitulated, in part because Obama – as noted above, with no legal authority – has promised foreign governments the U.S. would provide reciprocal data under the FATCA agreements he refuses to submit to the Senate as treaties. Now he expects Congress to make good on his imprudent and legally deficient pledges.

It’s important to keep in mind the seven tax treaties are themselves innocuous and even desirable from the standpoint of avoiding double taxation for Americans doing business overseas. But contrary to Chairman Corker’s letter, ratifying them without fixing their constitutional defects facilitates their use as vehicles for data reporting under the legally dubious FATCA “intergovernmental agreements,” many of which also require “reciprocal reporting” from domestic U.S. institutions to foreign governments. This would hit U.S. banks, credit unions, insurance companies, mutual funds, etc. with costs comparable to those FATCA imposes on foreign institutions, which run into the millions per financial institution (for example, Canada’s Bank of Nova Scotia alone already had spent $100 million as of 2013). Imposing the same burdens here in the U.S. would mean billions of dollars extracted from American consumers and taxpayers, spurring massive capital flight from the United States and lost jobs. That’s why U.S. credit unions have written to the Congressional leadership to oppose domestic expansion of FATCA, which would “increase regulatory burdens on American credit unions and banks without resulting in a single dollar of new tax revenue to the Treasury.”

Finally, the seven treaties are a stalking horse for another item on Obama’s and Lew’s political bucket list: a so-called “Protocol amending the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters” that would lock in a FATCA-like international “common reporting standard” as treaty obligation. The result would be essentially FATCA gone global—sometimes called GATCA – which in would be set for a global tax under United Nations auspices, pressure on the U.S. to raise our domestic tax rates and subjecting our country to the oversight of bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and other international organizations.

Republican leaders should not provide ex post facto authority for Obama’s and Lew’s reciprocal FATCA and GATCA schemes, which would also hand embattled IRS Commissioner John Koskinen sweeping new regulatory powers. It comes as no surprise that President Obama seeks to impose these burdens on America as his parting gift. What is deplorable is that any Republican leader would help him do it. Instead of promoting Obama’s global regime, it’s time for Senate Republicans to put America first. They should join Senators Paul and Lee in ensuring these treaties are not ratified until Obama leaves office, and get ready to send President Donald Trump a FATCA repeal bill early next year if President Obama succeeds. (For more from the author of “Why Is the Senate GOP Leadership Helping Obama Pass Job-Killing Treaties?” please click HERE)

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