Shortly after noon today, President Barack Obama is expected to announce that religious employers will not have to cover birth control for their employees. His anticipated compromise solution may or may not quell the objections of those who considered the new requirement to be an attack on religious freedom. But regardless of the immediate concerns about this particular provision of the president's health care law, it is indisputable that any concession he might make is the result of a political backlash that threatened his chances at reelection. This begs the question once set free from concerns over his own job security, will this president ever reject a federal power grab in favor of religious freedom or any other of those pesky liberties afforded by the Constitution?

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We'll never definitively know whether Mr. Obama's intention to force people of faith to act against their own beliefs was a calculated ideological move or if our Candidate-in-Chief was simply pandering to the pro-abortion and anti-religion segments of his base. But regardless of his motivation, the result would have been the same - a decision made exclusively by the executive branch of government that would violate one of the founding principles of our nation. Assuming today's announcement is truly a change of course and not simply a minor tweak, the only thing that seems to have prevented this administration from so violating that principle is political backlash.

While the twenty-second amendment limiting any person to two elected terms as president is a good thing overall, it does come with the potentially dangerous consequence of allowing a president to abuse his considerable power during a second term by eliminating any concern of reelection. For an honorable man or woman guided solely by their oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," there should be no temptation to do anything else. But for someone who has declared his desire to fundamentally transform the United States and who used the power of his position to trample religious freedoms, retreating only when it became politically expedient to do so; it's easy and frightening to imagine what a second term devoid of such political concerns might bring.

No opposing campaign speech, influential endorsement, slick advertisement or catchy slogan can convince the American people that President Barack Obama does not deserve a second term more than what he has tried to do over the past three weeks.