The unchecked expansion of federal control continues apace, according to Henry Lamb (of Sovereignty International) at RenewAmerica:

The genius of the American system of governance created by the U.S. Constitution is the delicate balance of power between the federal government, state and local governments, and the people. The founders recognized the people as the source of power; the people came first. It was the people who organized states. The states created a federal government and through the Constitution, limited the power of the new government to those specific powers set forth in Article 1, Section 8. All unspecified powers were explicitly retained by the states or the people.
In the first 200 years, the United States of America produced greater wealth and prosperity than the rest of the world had produced in 2000 years. Why? Because individuals were free to pursue their own individual happiness.
Throughout its entire history, however, there have been those who believe that government is, or should be, the source of power; that the people are, or should be, subjects of the state. Since the 1970s, these people have used “environmental protection” as an excuse to expand the power of government. They argued that free people, in their pursuit of personal happiness, were polluting the environment. Therefore, government had to restrain free people in order to save the earth.

The President, with the permission of an inattentive if not collusive Congress, is enacting binding legislation without Constitutional checks and balances being brought into play:

President Obama’s most recent Executive Order is another example of government’s ever-expanding reach. First, Obama created an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force in June of 2009. This group worked a year to produce a report that recommends how government can better protect the environment relating to the oceans and the Great Lakes. The Executive Order essentially adopts the recommendations in the report as national policy, and creates a new bureaucracy called the National Ocean Council to implement all the recommendations in the report.
The two most egregious recommendations are: controlling activities on land that affects the ocean, and ratification of the [U.N.-backed] Convention on the Law of the Sea.

—Mike Gray