Go Ahead, Make …
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law”, because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million human beings collected together are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
My, my, my, but Thomas Jefferson had Obama figured out before Obama was even a glimmer of lust in his fragile “mother’s” mind. One of these fine days the locks will be broken on his infamous lock-box and the truth will out on a lawless imposter.
In this piece by George Will in National Review Online the ever-contentious debate of Constitutionality bares its political soul yet again, an occurrence that nevertheless, seems to propagate more from the liberal-progressive Democrat-Marxist realm than it does from the more “laissez` faire” behavior of free-market capitalist conservatives. As Will opines in his opener: Serious as the policy disagreements roiling Washington are, none is as important as the structural distortion threatening constitutional equilibrium. Institutional derangement driven by unchecked presidential aggrandizement did not begin with Barack Obama, but his offenses against the separation of powers have been egregious in quantity, and qualitatively different.
The Founding Fathers (as described in the Jefferson quote) never envisaged present circumstances would ever exist; a dictator supported by a Senate majority and judiciary, protected by the media, our nation being taken over without opposition, with one half of its citizens being forced to pay support for the other half; a lawless imposter.
When a President violates his oath by failing to enforce just laws, and by dictatorially making laws himself, the proper course of action is not nettlesome litigation but exercise of the power of impeachment, which the Founding Fathers provided for this very form of behavior. We Americans must agree in sufficient numbers, so that we demand that two-thirds of our Senators remove Obama from office. And every day we watch in desperation, as Obama proceeds with his promise to fundamentally destroy the United States of America as a lawless imposter.
The framers were influenced greatly by the English civil wars. They wrote the Constitution based on the assumption that the relationship between the legislative and executive branches would be antithetical towards each other; both seeking to aggrandize their own power. The Constitution was designed to keep these two branches in a perpetual state of tug-of-war, with the weakest branch – the judicial branch – being the umpire against a lawless imposter.
They never anticipated a two-party system with the president at the head of his party (even though the party system began soon after the Constitution’s ratification) acting in concert with a deferential Congress. The growth of the administrative state, in which Congress has ceded its law-making power to the president, has thrown our system out of whack, leading us into a lawless imposter. Both branches are accountable to the electorate and that is from where the change needs to come, not the judiciary.
If we’re not concerned enough to hold elected members accountable, then we don’t deserve the nation the founders envisioned, and we finish up with a lawless imposter.
Over to George Will …
George Will…
What philosopher Harvey Mansfield calls “taming the prince” — making executive power compatible with democracy’s abhorrence of arbitrary power — has been a perennial problem of modern politics. It is now more urgent in America than at any time since the Founders, having rebelled against George III’s unfettered exercise of “royal prerogative,” stipulated that presidents “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Serious as the policy disagreements roiling Washington are, none is as important as the structural distortion threatening constitutional equilibrium. Institutional derangement driven by unchecked presidential aggrandizement did not begin with Barack Obama, but his offenses against the separation of powers have been egregious in quantity, and qualitatively different.
Regarding immigration, health care, welfare, education, drug policy, and more, Obama has suspended, waived, and rewritten laws, including the Affordable Care Act. It required the employer mandate to begin this year. But Obama wrote a new law, giving to certain-sized companies a delay until 2016, and stipulating that other employers must certify they will not drop employees to avoid the mandate. Doing so would trigger criminal perjury charges; so, he created a new crime, that of adopting a business practice he opposes.
Presidents must exercise some discretion in interpreting laws, must have somelatitude in allocating finite resources to the enforcement of laws, and must havesome freedom to act in the absence of law. Obama, however, has perpetrated more than 40 suspensions of laws. Were presidents the sole judges of the limits of their latitude, they would effectively have plenary power to vitiate the separation of powers, the Founders’ bulwark against despotism.
Congress cannot reverse egregious executive aggressions such as Obama’s without robust judicial assistance. It is, however, difficult to satisfy the criteria that the Constitution and case law require for Congress to establish “standing” to seek judicial redress for executive usurpations injurious to the legislative institution.
Courts, understandably fearful of being inundated by lawsuits from small factions of disgruntled legislators, have been wary of granting legislative standing. However, David Rivkin, a Washington lawyer, and Elizabeth Price Foley of Florida International University have studied the case law and believe standing can be obtained conditional on four things:
