Obama's Disdain For The Constitution Means We Risk Losing Our Republic
President Barack Obama takes the oath of office. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By M. Northrop Buechner
Since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, he has
changed it five times. Most notably, he suspended the employer mandate
last summer. This is widely known, but almost no one seems to have
grasped its significance.
The Constitution authorizes the President to propose and veto
legislation. It does not authorize him to change existing laws. The
changes Mr. Obama ordered in Obamacare, therefore, are unconstitutional.
This means that he does not accept some of the limitations that the
Constitution places on his actions. We cannot know at this point what
limitations, if any, he does accept.
By changing the law based solely on his wish, Mr. Obama acted on the
principle that the President can rewrite laws and—since this is a
principle—not just this law, but any law. After the crash of Obamacare,
many Congressmen have implored the President to change the individual
mandate the same way he had changed the employer mandate, that is, to
violate the Constitution again.
The main responsibility the Constitution assigns to the President is
to faithfully execute the Laws. If the President rejects this job, if
instead he decides he can change or ignore laws he does not like, then
what?
The time will come when Congress passes a law and the President
ignores it. Or he may choose to enforce some parts and ignore others (as
Mr. Obama is doing now). Or he may not wait for Congress and issue a
decree (something Mr. Obama has done and has threatened to do again).
Mr. Obama has not been shy about pointing out his path. He has
repeatedly made clear that he intends to act on his own authority. “I
have the power and I will use it in defense of the middle class,” he has
said. “We’re going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or
without Congress.” There are a number of names for the system Mr. Obama
envisions, but representative government is not one of them.
If the President can ignore the laws passed by Congress, of what use
is Congress? The President can do whatever he chooses. Congress can
stand by and observe. Perhaps they might applaud or jeer. But in terms
of political power, Congress will be irrelevant. Probably, it will
become a kind of rubber-stamp or debating society. There are many such
faux congresses in tyrannies throughout history and around the globe.
Mr. Obama has equal contempt for the Supreme Court. In an act of
overbearing hubris, he excoriated Supreme Court Justices sitting
helplessly before him during the 2010 State of the Union
address—Justices who had not expected to be denounced and who were
prevented by the occasion from defending themselves. Mr. Obama condemned
them for restoring freedom of speech to corporations and unions.
Ignoring two centuries of practice, President Obama made four recess
appointments in January 2012, when the Senate was not in recess. Three
courts have found that his appointments were unconstitutional, and the
Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case. If the Supreme Court finds
against him, what will Mr. Obama do?
We can get a hint by looking at how other parts of his Administration have dealt with Court decisions they did not like.
The Attorney General’s Office is the branch of government charged
with enforcing federal laws. After the Supreme Court struck down the key
provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Attorney General Holder
announced that he would use other provisions of the act to get around
the Court’s decision.
The Supreme Court has defined the standard for sexual harassment as
“severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” behavior to a “reasonable
person.” In open defiance of that ruling, the Obama Department of
Education has declared a new definition of sexual harassment for
colleges, that is, “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including
“verbal conduct,” even if it is not objectively offensive—thus
reinforcing the reign of terror over sex on college campuses. If a young
man’s request for a date turns out to be unwelcome, he is guilty of
sexual harassment by definition.
The lack of respect for the Supreme Court by the Obama administration
is manifest. They feel bound by the Court’s decisions only if they
agree with them. If they disagree, it is deuces wild; they will embrace
any fiction that nullifies the Court’s decision.
The direction in which Mr. Obama is taking us would make possible the
following scenario. A Republican Congress is elected and repeals
Obamacare over a Democratic President’s veto. The President refuses to
enforce the repeal. The Supreme Court rules that the President’s refusal
is unconstitutional. The President denounces that ruling and refuses to
be bound by it.
If the President persists in rejecting all authority other than his
own, the denouement would depend on the side taken by the Armed Forces.
Whatever side that was, our national self-esteem would be unlikely to
recover from the blow of finding that we are living in a banana
republic.
The shocking fact is that our whole system of representative
government depends on it being led by an individual who believes in it;
who thinks it is valuable; who believes that a government dedicated to
the protection of individual rights is a noble ideal. What if he does
not?
Mr. Obama is moving our government away from its traditional system
of checks and balances and toward the one-man-rule that dominates third
world countries. He has said that he wants a
fair country—implying that, as it stands, the United States is
not a fair country—an unprecedented calumny committed against a country by its own leader.
What country does he think is more fair than the United States? He
has three long years left in which to turn us into a fair country. Where
does he intend to take us?
Mr. Obama got his conception of a fair country from his teachers. A fair country is an
unfree
country because it is regimented to prevent anyone from rising too
high. Their ideal is egalitarianism, the notion that no one should be
any better, higher, or richer than anyone else. Combined with a dollop
of totalitarianism, egalitarianism has replaced communism as the
dominant ideal in our most prestigious universities. Mr. Obama and his
colleagues are the product of those universities, and they have their
marching orders.
The most important point is that Mr. Obama does not consider himself
bound by the Constitution. He could not have made that more clear. He
has drawn a line in the concrete and we cannot ignore it.
Those who currently hold political office, and who want to keep our
system of government, need to act now. Surely, rejection of the
Constitution is grounds for impeachment and charges should be filed. In
addition, there are many other actions that Congressmen can and should
take—actions that will tell Mr. Obama that we have seen where he is
going and we will not let our country go without a fight.
At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin
Franklin was asked what form of government had been created. “A
republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”
We are losing it. If Mr. Obama’s reach for unprecedented power is not
stopped, that will be the end. Everyone who values his life and liberty
should find some way to say “No!” “Not now!” “Not yet!” “Not ever!”
M. Northrup Buechner is Associate Professor of Economics at St. John’s University, New York.
