For some while I've asked without satisfactory answer whether the Obama precedent of fiat, unilateral, rule-by-decree, because-I-say-so governance will die with the Obama presidency, or if maybe it will be applied to Democrat presidencies but not Republican ones, or if any president henceforth might follow the Obamian precedent and do just as he darn pleases, enforcing or not enforcing the law as he would prefer it to have been written, conveniently redefining "treaty" and "war" so as to circumvent Constitutional demands of Congressional assent, enacting society-wide and calamitous legislation by parliamentary trick and over the screams of the American people, and governing very largely through executive orders and administrative rule-makings.
Obama is objectively lawless; the catalogue of his lawlessness may be had from those researchers and authors and bloggers not driven by the cataloguing to despair for the Republic and despair of living. In times past academics and politicos and have invoked that old name of "imperial presidency" and abused it to damn any president and presidential policy they happen not to care for, but Obama's is an imperial presidency in the true and full sense, an approach to governance as seen in the emergency measures of the Civil War and world wars or in the New Deal excesses of Franklin Roosevelt, as for instance piling judges onto the Supreme Court 'til he'd made himself a friendly majority and effectively extinguished the judiciary as independent of his will.
Barack Obama is of course contemptuous of America, or else those haters of America in this country and globally wouldn't have recognized in him one of their own and descended into slavering Obama-adulation, so one is left to suppose that to advise Obama that this fiat or that would defy the Constitution or conventions of the United States, is to argue for it, to his way of thinking. Plus which Obama is nothing if not a creature of the post-1968 hard-Left, and the Left since its advent in the mad and bloody French Revolution has always and everywhere an impulse to totalitarianism: see for e.g. Animal Farm by Orwell whose words are paraphrased in the paragraph prior.
Elected Republicans have had no answer to Obamian because-I-say-so governance. To take the example of Obama's lawless executive order legalizing millions of illegal aliens, which unilateralism Obama himself had pronounced impossible and unconstitutional something over twenty times as president, the Republican idea was the classical and constitutional one, that Congress is invested by the Constitution with the "power of the purse" and may nullify an executive action by declining to fund it. That of course went noplace, made a good excuse for bad press for the Republicans in Congress by the Democrats who are the press, and left the conservative base of the Republican Party frustrated and worse.
And so we come to Donald Trump. Trump promises his presidency will be an end to that abuse and defrauding of the 14th Amendment which goes by the name of "anchor babies", to take but one example. When reflexively the elites and the go-along-to-get-along gang commence their amateur legal lectures on judicial precedent and all that rot, Trump spits back however sloppily that every American knows this practice of hurrying the Mexican girl over the border and into the emergency room for the free (i.e., paid for by someone other than the Mexican girl) delivery of her baby in United States jurisdiction, so as to anchor the mother and her family to the United States through this "American citizen" Mexican infant, is nothing resembling the intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment much less the Founders of the Republic; the Constitution and immigration law are abused and defrauded by these anchor babies, he's the man to put that right, and the elites can go cry into their milk and cookies.
To be a leftist in the 21st Century is to hate America and to make war daily in ways great and small on all things recognizably American, so it has been an alloyed joy to the Left to observe Obama do as they would have him do and at the same time to extend a contemptuous and insolent middle-finger to the Constitution which they regard as some relic of barbarism. But if the gentle reader will pardon the cliche, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
When Julius Caesar upturned centuries of Roman republicanism, the ancient constraints on political power repudiated and the democratic Plebeian Council and constitutional Senate rendered pretenses, Rome was the tyranny of one man ever after. Caesar was not the one to formalize Rome's transformation from republic to monarchy-by-another-name, but he had crossed the Rubicon, in more ways than one. The Obama precedent of because-I-say-so governance may not be so irrevocable as Caesar's, but were Obama to be succeeded by a president whose instincts and impulses are disposed in that direction, that successor would find all the precedent he could hope for in Obama's two terms. It's as the English historian William Warde Fowler wrote in the 19th Century of Caesar's autocracy, that "it struck the keynote by which a clever successor might tune the system to the sensitive ear of the Roman world."
Any Democrat president henceforth may be expected to demand no fewer prerogatives than Obama got away with, and by now we're fully a century past the first "Progressive" Democrat president, namely Wilson, who regarded the Constitution expressly as an obsolescent obstacle to "progress", so what constraint is left to tether and fetter any Democrat president? Republicans elevate the Constitution and the founding principles of the Republic practically to a theology, and God bless them for it, but mightn't the next Republican president find he couldn't afford to play by the rules while the other side played anything-goes? And anyway Donald Trump is not a classical Republican, and is accustomed to the miniature tyranny of boss in a business bearing his name.
Those American people rallying to Donald Trump have observed this Age of Obama and the futility of resisting Obamian lawlessness with Constitutional law, and they appreciate that America is in collapse, that much has been lost and much is in jeopardy, and that it will take some extraordinary reaction to put right what has gone wrong. The Republican Party is not wrong but it is cowed and certainly it's been ineffective. And so it may be that this Trumpian ascendancy in the Republican primary is in part a reaction to Obama and his lawlessness and to the collapse and ruin of America which is not Obama's error but his policy and purpose, and a reaction also to the futility of the by-the-rules Republican answer to Obamaism.
I grind no axe for Donald Trump or against him, and neither do I venture a forecast for the primary and general elections, but were Trump to win the primary and the presidency, would he not be the type to take Obama's because-I-say-so governance for his precedent, if not also to run with it? Maybe that's to misjudge the man, or maybe some force would constrain a President Trump from doing as President Obama has been at liberty to do. But were the next president to claim the powers of the last then what consistent and coherent argument could be raised against him?
Obama is objectively lawless; the catalogue of his lawlessness may be had from those researchers and authors and bloggers not driven by the cataloguing to despair for the Republic and despair of living. In times past academics and politicos and have invoked that old name of "imperial presidency" and abused it to damn any president and presidential policy they happen not to care for, but Obama's is an imperial presidency in the true and full sense, an approach to governance as seen in the emergency measures of the Civil War and world wars or in the New Deal excesses of Franklin Roosevelt, as for instance piling judges onto the Supreme Court 'til he'd made himself a friendly majority and effectively extinguished the judiciary as independent of his will.
Barack Obama is of course contemptuous of America, or else those haters of America in this country and globally wouldn't have recognized in him one of their own and descended into slavering Obama-adulation, so one is left to suppose that to advise Obama that this fiat or that would defy the Constitution or conventions of the United States, is to argue for it, to his way of thinking. Plus which Obama is nothing if not a creature of the post-1968 hard-Left, and the Left since its advent in the mad and bloody French Revolution has always and everywhere an impulse to totalitarianism: see for e.g. Animal Farm by Orwell whose words are paraphrased in the paragraph prior.
Elected Republicans have had no answer to Obamian because-I-say-so governance. To take the example of Obama's lawless executive order legalizing millions of illegal aliens, which unilateralism Obama himself had pronounced impossible and unconstitutional something over twenty times as president, the Republican idea was the classical and constitutional one, that Congress is invested by the Constitution with the "power of the purse" and may nullify an executive action by declining to fund it. That of course went noplace, made a good excuse for bad press for the Republicans in Congress by the Democrats who are the press, and left the conservative base of the Republican Party frustrated and worse.
And so we come to Donald Trump. Trump promises his presidency will be an end to that abuse and defrauding of the 14th Amendment which goes by the name of "anchor babies", to take but one example. When reflexively the elites and the go-along-to-get-along gang commence their amateur legal lectures on judicial precedent and all that rot, Trump spits back however sloppily that every American knows this practice of hurrying the Mexican girl over the border and into the emergency room for the free (i.e., paid for by someone other than the Mexican girl) delivery of her baby in United States jurisdiction, so as to anchor the mother and her family to the United States through this "American citizen" Mexican infant, is nothing resembling the intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment much less the Founders of the Republic; the Constitution and immigration law are abused and defrauded by these anchor babies, he's the man to put that right, and the elites can go cry into their milk and cookies.
To be a leftist in the 21st Century is to hate America and to make war daily in ways great and small on all things recognizably American, so it has been an alloyed joy to the Left to observe Obama do as they would have him do and at the same time to extend a contemptuous and insolent middle-finger to the Constitution which they regard as some relic of barbarism. But if the gentle reader will pardon the cliche, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
When Julius Caesar upturned centuries of Roman republicanism, the ancient constraints on political power repudiated and the democratic Plebeian Council and constitutional Senate rendered pretenses, Rome was the tyranny of one man ever after. Caesar was not the one to formalize Rome's transformation from republic to monarchy-by-another-name, but he had crossed the Rubicon, in more ways than one. The Obama precedent of because-I-say-so governance may not be so irrevocable as Caesar's, but were Obama to be succeeded by a president whose instincts and impulses are disposed in that direction, that successor would find all the precedent he could hope for in Obama's two terms. It's as the English historian William Warde Fowler wrote in the 19th Century of Caesar's autocracy, that "it struck the keynote by which a clever successor might tune the system to the sensitive ear of the Roman world."
Any Democrat president henceforth may be expected to demand no fewer prerogatives than Obama got away with, and by now we're fully a century past the first "Progressive" Democrat president, namely Wilson, who regarded the Constitution expressly as an obsolescent obstacle to "progress", so what constraint is left to tether and fetter any Democrat president? Republicans elevate the Constitution and the founding principles of the Republic practically to a theology, and God bless them for it, but mightn't the next Republican president find he couldn't afford to play by the rules while the other side played anything-goes? And anyway Donald Trump is not a classical Republican, and is accustomed to the miniature tyranny of boss in a business bearing his name.
Those American people rallying to Donald Trump have observed this Age of Obama and the futility of resisting Obamian lawlessness with Constitutional law, and they appreciate that America is in collapse, that much has been lost and much is in jeopardy, and that it will take some extraordinary reaction to put right what has gone wrong. The Republican Party is not wrong but it is cowed and certainly it's been ineffective. And so it may be that this Trumpian ascendancy in the Republican primary is in part a reaction to Obama and his lawlessness and to the collapse and ruin of America which is not Obama's error but his policy and purpose, and a reaction also to the futility of the by-the-rules Republican answer to Obamaism.
I grind no axe for Donald Trump or against him, and neither do I venture a forecast for the primary and general elections, but were Trump to win the primary and the presidency, would he not be the type to take Obama's because-I-say-so governance for his precedent, if not also to run with it? Maybe that's to misjudge the man, or maybe some force would constrain a President Trump from doing as President Obama has been at liberty to do. But were the next president to claim the powers of the last then what consistent and coherent argument could be raised against him?
