Congress passes statutes that authorize executive agencies to "do stuff" within the scope of the statutes.
How those agencies go about doing whatever it is they are supposed to do is governed by a set of general procedures laid out in the Administrative Procedure Act when, for example, it comes down to developing a specific rule in order to "do stuff" that the statute told them to do.
Within that scope are also questions of interpretation which are, in the first instance, perfectly within the authority of the executive branch, presided over by the president, to interpret and apply.
The president is perfectly within his or her authority to lay out how a statute is going to be interpreted and applied by executive agencies.
These people are simply ignorant of how the US government is organized and functions on a day to day basis.
If the president is exceeding his or her authority, the House has every right to draft articles of impeachment, specifying how the president abused his or her authority, and send it over to the Senate for trial. The GOP has a majority in both houses. Have you seen their articles of impeachment? No, and neither have I.
Additionally, remember their other plan to route around impeachment by filing a lawsuit against all the unconstitutional usurpatin' the president was up to? Yeah... um... how did that work out for them?
Interpreting and applying the law is, in the first instance, within the scope of the executive branch. While everyone is taught in high school civics class some formulation along the lines of "Congress passes laws, the Executive enforces them, and the Courts interpret them", that's something of an oversimplification. In order to "enforce" a law, you have to develop your own interpretation of what the law means.
For example, let's say that Congress passes a law saying "No one can wear red clothing on Tuesday."
In order to enforce that law, and absent any further detail from Congress, then someone in the administration has to decide what "red clothing" is.
Is it intended to mean only outerwear, or does underwear count?
And what is "red" - is it any shade of red, or any color that includes red tones, such as purple (which combines blue and red) or orange (which combines yellow and red)?
If Congress had to answer those kinds of questions in order to get a law written, nothing would ever get done, even if Congress was of a mind to get anything done.
The entire discussion revolves around two imbecilic notions which Americans generally have:
1. It's possible to write a simple rule. No, it's not. You can take "No one can wear red clothing on Tuesday", show a bunch of people various shades of colors, and get wildly different ideas of which ones are "red" and which ones are not "red". You can also get disagreement on whether it is meant to apply to clothing normally visible, or even what is meant by "Tuesday" (Is it the local time zone? Daylight hours only (when the colors are visible)? Etc.. The fact of the matter is that there are 330 million people who are going to be affected by this law, and not all of them are going to immediately agree on whether hats or shoes are, or are not, "clothing".
So, in order to even enforce a "simple rule" like "No red clothing on Tuesday" the person enforcing it is going to have to work out a notion of what is "red", what is "clothing" and possibly even when "Tuesday" begins or ends (what if you are on an airplane flying from Hawaii to New York, and....)
2. "Only courts interpret laws". No, they don't. The executive branch gets the first crack at interpreting any law. That's a necessity of enforcing and applying a law. Within the scope of that initial interpretation, there is generally a wide latitude of deference given to it, since there is a presumption that executive agencies possess more expertise in the interpretation and application of their particular law than does a federal judge. But if Congress thinks the executive is doing it wrong, the Congress has the simplest of options at its disposal - i.e. amend that law to deal with that particular interpretation, and on up the scale to impeachment if they feel like it. Likewise affected parties can in most instances bring their own court actions if they think the executive is interpreting it wrong.
But instead of actually doing what it is in their power to do, our Congress takes the politically lazy course of spewing spittle about how "Obama is destroying the Constitution" as if the Congress had no power to actually do anything about it if that were the case, since the general electorate thinks we elect a king every four years.
If your teabagger friend believes that Obama is violating the Constitution, then ask your friend which of his favorite Congresscritters is drafting up articles of impeachment to deal with it. The mechanism is right there.
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