There are some very serious issues at stake in this year’s
election — so many that some people may not be able to see the
forest for the trees. Individual issues are the trees, but the
forest is the future of America as we have known it.
The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is
being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration,
during the process of dealing with particular issues.
For example, the merits or demerits of President Obama’s recent
executive order, suspending legal liability for young people who
are here illegally, presumably as a result of being brought here as
children by their parents, can be debated pro and con. But such a
debate overlooks the much more fundamental undermining of the whole
American system of Constitutional government.
The separation of powers into legislative, executive, and
judicial branches of government is at the heart of the Constitution
of the United States — and the Constitution is at the heart of
freedom for Americans.
No President of the United States is authorized to repeal parts
of legislation passed by Congress. He may veto the whole
legislation, but then Congress can override his veto if they have
enough votes. Nevertheless, every President takes an oath to
faithfully execute the laws that have been passed and sustained —
not just the ones he happens to agree with.
If laws passed by the elected representatives of the people can
be simply over-ruled unilaterally by whoever is in the White House,
then we are no longer a free people, choosing what laws we want to
live under.
When a President can ignore the plain language of duly passed
laws, and substitute his own executive orders, then we no longer
have “a government of laws, and not of men” but a President ruling
by decree, like the dictator in some banana republic.
When we confine our debates to the merits or demerits of
particular executive orders, we are tacitly accepting arbitrary
rule. The Constitution of the United States cannot protect us
unless we protect the Constitution. But, if we allow ourselves to
get bogged down in the details of particular policies imposed by
executive orders, and vote solely on that basis, then we have
failed to protect the Constitution — and ourselves.
Whatever the merits or demerits of the No Child Left Behind Act,
it is the law until Congress either repeals it or amends it. But
for Barack Obama to unilaterally waive whatever provisions he
doesn’t like in that law undermines the fundamental nature of
American government.
President Obama has likewise unilaterally repealed the legal
requirement that welfare recipients must work, by simply redefining
“work” to include other things like going to classes on weight
control. If we think the bipartisan welfare reform legislation from
the Clinton administration should be repealed or amended, that is
something for the legislative branch of government to consider.
There have been many wise warnings that freedom is seldom lost
all at once. It is usually eroded away, bit by bit, until it is all
gone. You may not notice a gradual erosion while it is going on,
but you may eventually be shocked to discover one day that it is
all gone, that we have been reduced from citizens to subjects, and
the Constitution has become just a meaningless bunch of paper.
Obamacare imposes huge costs on some institutions, while the
President’s arbitrary waivers exempt other institutions from having
to pay those same costs. That is hardly the “equal protection of
the laws,” promised by the 14th Amendment.
John Stuart Mill explained the dangers in that kind of
government long ago: “A government with all this mass of favours to
give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of
bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it
master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of
rare and extraordinary public excitement.”
If Obama gets reelected, he knows that he need no longer worry
about what the voters think about anything he does. Never having to
face them again, he can take his arbitrary rule by decree as far as
he wants. He may be challenged in the courts but, if he gets just
one more Supreme Court appointment, he can pick someone who will
rubber stamp anything he does and give him a 5 to 4 majority.
COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM
