By Diana West
Friday, February 07, 2014
One of the hats I wear is that of Washington
correspondent for Dispatch International, a European weekly newspaper co-edited
by Danish journalist and historian Lars Hedegaard. The name may ring a bell
with U.S. readers because last February, a man dressed up as a postman with a
fake package tried to assassinate Hedegaard, a noted critic of Islamization and
proponent of free speech, at his home in Copenhagen. International headlines
followed.
One year later, Hedegaard lives under state protection
and there have been no arrests. But that's not what this week's column is
about.
A few days ago, Hedegaard wrote me with a new assignment:
"Would you write something about a disturbing
phenomenon: the fact that Obama rules by decree and neglects the Constitution.
How can this go on? Nixon was a complete amateur compared to this would-be Kim
Jong-un. It looks like a coup d'etat. Nobody talks about it in Europe."
So that's what America looks like from 4,000 miles away.
Given the lack of context "over there," my
overview had to start with the basics of Barack Obama's presidency: numerous
unconfirmed "tsars" (like George W. Bush), sweeping executive orders
and massive amounts of regulation. "I've got a pen and I've got a
phone" is the way the president recently described his tools of power,
noticeably omitting whether he also had a copy of the U.S. Constitution. By the
time I'd recapped the so-called unilateral presidency for the European reader,
I was newly aghast.
For many Americans, living through the Obama era
day-by-day, executive order by executive order, 100 regulations by 100
regulations (there were 80,000 pages of new regulations in 2013 alone), our
nation's transformation becomes so much enveloping static. Yes, there are
shrieks and screams (over Obamacare's rollout, for instance), but mostly people
seem to shut out the background noise of an aggressively collectivizing
government doing business. Outrages against the Constitution clank and sputter
-- What? The executive branch can't write legislation! -- but they never really
backfire on Obama. His poll numbers dip, yes. White noise ensues.
Such ambivalence may stem from the fact that many
Americans are not well educated about how our government of three co-equal
branches is supposed to function. Confession: Despite private school and an Ivy
League education, I didn't really get the picture until later in life.
Barack Obama, the government's chief executive, is
seizing powers that belong to the legislative branch. He's not the first
president to do so; not by a long shot. That's also part of the ambivalence
problem. Obama fits an accepted historical mode of abuse exemplified, for
example, by the even more dictatorial FDR. Meanwhile, as Obama's defenders
correctly note, Obama, having issued 168 "decrees," ranks on the low
end among modern presidents. What distinguishes Obama's fiats in our time,
however, as Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told CNSNews.com, is that Obama "has
repeatedly made use of executive orders to change statute, to change law, to
change legislation enacted by Congress."
A president can't do that. The crisis exists because the
legislative branch is letting him.
The crisis is compounded because most of the media
supports these seizures of power. The New York Times' take on the State of the
Union address (Rush Limbaugh calls it the "State of the Coup,") is
typical: "Taking the offensive by veering around Congress isn't new for
the administration, but it is more important than ever."
"Veering around Congress" is a neat phrase for
serial abuse of power. During a December hearing before a House Judiciary
subcommittee on "The President's Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute
the Laws," liberal law professor (and onetime Obama voter) Jonathan Turley
stated: "The problem with what the president is doing is that he's not
simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He's becoming the very
danger the Constitution was designed to avoid."
The president is quite open about his intentions. "Wherever
and whenever I can take steps without legislation ... that's what I'm going to
do," Obama declared in his State of the Union. The line received vigorous
applause from Democrats in the House chamber. Yes, they support the president's
agenda, but weren't they also applauding their own superfluity?
That's what I thought before I heard Rep. Sheila Jackson
Lee, D-Texas, say that writing executive orders for the president to sign --
not writing legislation for Congress to vote on, mind you -- should be "our
No. 1 agenda." The 10-term congresswoman, while launching the new and
Soviet-sounding "Full Employment Caucus" at a recent press
conference, promised to "give President Obama a number of executive orders
that he can sign with pride and strength."
This is the formula for one-party rule. As such, it is
outrageous, but it is just more static.
To be sure, some conservative Republicans -- Sen. Mike
Lee, as well as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, for
example -- are speaking out against what Cruz calls the "imperial
presidency." But will their impassioned voices become static, too?
What to do with a president who rewrites his own laws,
enacts legislation that has failed (repeatedly) to pass into law, and creates
legislation through executive agency regulation? Obama has done all of the
above, and more -- for example, rewriting parts of Obamacare, implementing much
of the repeatedly rejected DREAM Act, and creating cap-and-trade carbon
restrictions, also rejected by Congress, through a web of EPA regulations. He
promises to raise the minimum wage for federal workers, and is reported to be
exploring how to unilaterally lift sanctions on Iran. Just this week,
head-spinningly, Obama lifted a ban on aliens who supported terrorists, thereby
permitting them to enter the country. As for his promise that if you like your
doctor, you can keep you doctor, that, we know, was pure fraud.
The boldest proposition on the table so far -- not
moving, I will add -- is for Congress to stop funding executive orders that
upset the Constitution's "balance of powers." This is an obvious
"check" to restore "balance." Fine. Yes. Go for it.
But Obama's systematic assaults on constitutional
governance require more than defunding, and more than static. They require,
first and most urgently, a full airing. Impeachment, which may begin with an
impeachment inquiry, is the means the Constitution provided us. It offers the
way "forward," as the president might say, to re-establish that
America is a nation of laws, not men.
Otherwise, it's not.
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