Lawless

By now, the entire spiral arm has heard about the decision of His Majesty Barack Hussein Obama the First (long may he reign) to suspend the enforcement of America's immigration and port-of-entry laws as they pertain to younger illegal aliens. This, of course, is the king's privilege under the American system of unlimited monarchy, so it caused hardly a stir at the royal court, though a few visitors from the provinces were heard to mutter "Can he really do that?"

We should be profoundly grateful that Providence has bestowed such a wise and generous autocrat upon us. Why, under the previous, never-to-be-revived scheme of Constitutionally defined powers, the president had no lawmaking power. He was obliged to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" -- laws made by others of lesser station, some of them mere commoners! Such a constraint would have deprived our illegals of the incalculable benefits of His Majesty's compassion. Why, it would have left all those helpless Hispanic youths with nowhere to go! That they were all legally still citizens of other countries, and had either graduated high school or had been honorably discharged from the United States' armed forces, would matter not a farthing. Surely those young illegals would have suffered mass death out of despair at being shorn of their American refuge.

Hm? What's that? Oh, excuse me, Gentle Reader. Someone is prodding me and murmuring "wake up...wake up" too insistently to be ignored any longer. Bide a moment while I deal with the intrusion.

***

Ah. That's better. I haven't been getting enough sleep lately, and recent developments have had me wondering if there's any percentage in waking up. Though I do believe I would eventually miss my wife, my animals, my power tools, and blogging.

It's time for the entire country to undertake a serious contemplation of the man who currently inhabits the White House and his use of the "executive order." No one has given the executive order a serious analysis since the New Deal. It has absolutely no Constitutional foundation, yet president after president has used it as if he possessed a lawmaking power equal, if not superior, to that of Congress. The consequences have been very bad for the Constitutional order.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to give the "executive order" national prominence. His first such, as far as I am aware, was his order directing all Americans to surrender their gold holdings to the federal government. He issued several others during his thirteen years in office, gradually undermining the separation of the legislative from the executive power.

FDR benefited from a completely compliant Congress, and after some judicious terrorizing, a compliant Supreme Court. More, the Great Depression had, in the words of Republican Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, persuaded the nation that "if this nation ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now." Consequently, Roosevelt never faced serious opposition to his methods. No one dared to go up against a president that popular, with so many new tools of coercion at his disposal.

FDR was fairly blatant about what he had done. Quoth Garet Garrett in "The Revolution Was:"

Two years later [FDR] was saying to Congress "In thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power." Who had opposed this extension of government power? He asked the question and answered it. The unscrupulous, the incompetent, those who represented entrenched greed—only these had opposed it. Then he said: "In the hands of a people's government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets, of an economic autocracy, such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people."

But note Garrett's comment on the matter:

There, unconsciously perhaps, is a complete statement of the revolutionary thesis. It is not a question of law. It is a question of power. There must be a transfer of power. The President speaks not of laws; he speaks of new instruments of power, such as would provide shackles for the liberties of the people if they should ever fall in other hands. What then has the government done? Instead of limiting by law the power of what it calls economic autocracy the government itself has seized the power.

This may be the most open-eyed and candid assessment of FDR's methods that has ever been penned. In effect, FDR said, "I had to become a dictator to protect you from them!"

Dare to give FDR's statement this entirely accurate and proper coloration, and his defenders will march upon you in a body. How dare your breathe your retrograde criticisms upon the greatest president in American history -- the man who saved us from the Great Depression and steered the nation through the Second World War! You are unfit to call yourself an American! Silence and begone!

Nevertheless, I will ask: Who is His Majesty Obama the First protecting us from?

***

I'm a Constitutional absolutist. I make no pretense otherwise. Either the Constitution of the United States is the Supreme Law of the Land, or it is not. If it is, then its words mean exactly what they say, not some other trendy thing modern power-mongers and their tame hair-splitters would prefer them to mean. More, under the overarching principle of constitutionalism, the federal government has only those powers delegated to it by the Constitution, defined and separated as its first three Articles define and separate them.

By openly refusing to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" (Article II, Section 3), Obama has declared that he will no longer perform the duties of president of the United States. More, he has arrogated to himself a lawmaking power never granted to the president. He is in violation of his oath of office, and no longer has any claim to the powers of the presidency.

Congress is unlikely to initiate impeachment proceedings against Obama. The best members of the GOP caucus fear him too greatly even to vote a contempt citation against his openly racist, demonstrably corrupt attorney-general.

The Supreme Court cannot act until someone brings a case against Obama for his open seizure of extra-Constitutional powers and blatant dereliction of presidential duty. Even should that wildly unlikely event come about, the Court does not possess a unilateral power to remove the president from office. Neither does it possess an enforcement arm capable of thwarting the will of the president -- and this president has displayed a perfect willingness to defy the courts several times already.

The law is now what a single man decrees it to be, when and as he deems it fitting to decree it. But when a man's whims determine what is and what is not lawful, there is no law as law has been understood since the earliest inception of jurisprudence. Force, not law, is now the standard. The United States of America has become lawless.

The Republic has fallen. We are now in an undisguised state of tyranny.

Let him save himself who can.