These are frustrating times
for the President. Having been swept into office with a seemingly strong
mandate, he enjoyed a Congress controlled by members of his own party for the
first two years of his term. However, midterm elections brought gridlock and
a close division of power between the two parties. With a crucial re-election
campaign coming up, there is desperation in the president's desire to "do
something" in spite of his severely weakened mandate.
Getting something done is
proving to be a monumental task. This may be news to the supposed
constitutional scholar who is now our president, but if the political process
seems inconvenient to the implementation of his agenda, that is not a flaw in
the system. It was designed that way. The drafters of the Constitution
intended the default action of government to be inaction. Hopefully, this
means actions taken by the government are necessary and proper. If federal
laws or executive actions can't be agreed upon constitutionally- which is to
say legally- such laws or actions should be rejected.
The vision of the founders was
to set up a government that would remain small and unobtrusive via a system
of checks and balances. That it has taken our government so long to get this
big speaks well of the original design. The founders also knew the
overwhelming nature of governments was to amass power and grow. The
Constitution was to serve as the brakes on the freight train of government.
But the Obama administration,
like so many administrations in the 20th century, chooses to ignore the
Constitution entirely. The increasingly broad use and scope of the Executive
Orders is a prime example. Executive Orders are meant to be a way for the
president to direct executive agencies on the implementation of
congressionally approved legislation. It has become increasingly common for
them to be misused in ways that are contradictory to congressional intent, or
to bypass Congress altogether in enacting political agendas. The current
administration has unabashedly stated that Congress's unwillingness to pass
the president's jobs bill means that the president will act unilaterally to
enact provisions of it piecemeal through Executive Order. Obama explicitly
threatens to bypass Congress, thus aggregating the power to make and enforce
laws in the executive. This clearly erodes the principles of separation of
powers and checks and balances. It brings the modern presidency dangerously close
to an elective dictatorship.
Of course, the most dangerous
and costly overstepping of executive authority is going to war without a
congressional declaration. Congress has been sadly complicit in this
usurpation by ceding much of its war-making authority to the executive
because it wants to avoid taking responsibility for major war decisions, but
that is part of our job in Congress! If the President cannot present to
Congress and the people a convincingly strong case for going to war, then
perhaps we should keep the nation at peace, rather than risk our men and
women's lives for ill-defined reasons!
This administration certainly
was not the first to behave in ways that have defied the Constitution to
overstep its bounds. Sadly, previous administrations have set precedents that
the current administration is only building upon. It is time for Congress to
reassert itself and its constitutional role so that future administrations
cannot continue on this dangerous path.