Chelsea/Bradley Manning

With just a few days left in the White House, Barack Obama is burning the midnight oil to create his legacy, set his name in stone to be written about in the history books, and generally make a nuisance of himself.

Tuesday’s outrage de jour is Obama’s command to commute the prison sentence of Chelsea/Bradley Manning, letting him out of prison after serving six of his/her 35-year sentence.

He was known as Bradley when he was arrested, then announced he was transgender and goes by Chelsea, but is serving time in an all-male prison.

His crime was breaking the Espionage Act and leaking some 700,000 military documents and battlefield video to WikiLeaks when he was serving as an intelligence analyst in Iraq.

Republicans including some in the Colorado delegation are rightly outraged that Manning put American lives at risk, and that his treachery was barely unpunished.

 

U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner told Buzzfeed that he’s “concerned about what President Obama will do in the next 72 hours.” And so are we.

 

Perhaps Congress should consider a law that limits the authority of a president after an election has been held, assuming that president has not been reelected.

Obama has turned it into a free-for-fall, doing as much harm in his last eight weeks as he managed in the last eight years.