The president is not a sovereign and cannot change laws on a whim. Yet he has been doing this routinely. To “faithfully execute the laws” is his job description (and part of the oath he took). It is time to impeach the president for violating his oath of office.
We The People are long overdue for some serious talk about the rightful purpose of government and the actual powers of FedGov (as opposed to the powers it has unconstitutionally assumed). Impeaching Obama would stimulate pubic discourse on these very important matters.
It has been suggested to me by a correspondent that if the president is breaking the law, I should sue him in Federal Court.
My initial impression was that suing is ineffective. When POTUS can just wave his magic “Executive Privilege” wand and defy Congress, what chance have I?
Upon further reflection (I’m famous for over-thinking), a lawsuit is not only ineffective, it is not the proper remedy. If I break a law, I am arrested tried and put in jail; they do not sue me.
When POTUS breaks the highest law in the land, the only proper remedy is to charge him with that crime and try him — impeachment. This is the remedy provided by the Constitution. (The Constitution provides impeachment as a remedy for misbehaving public officials some six times, if I remember correctly.)
The only way to save the USA is to get back to basics. We did fine for over a century by (mostly) following the Constitution. But then, FDR started expanding government’s powers vastly (and unconstitutionally). His administration marked the Beginning of the End. The further we have strayed from the Constitution, the worse things have gotten. We are now approaching the End of the End. Only getting back to basics can save us.
The Constitution has been turned on its head. The Judiciary was intended to be the weakest of the three branches. It is, instead, the strongest, and it is largely unaccountable. It tells both the Executive and Legislative branches what they can and cannot do. This is not something the Constitution empowered the Judiciary to do; it is a power assumed unconstitutionally.
The Executive branch routinely legislates, as the Obama administration has repeatedly done. The president is supposed to “faithfully execute” the laws. Instead, POTUS selectively enforces laws, based on his political predilections and sometimes turns laws on their heads, enforcing them contrary to the way they are written.
Obama is not the only culprit here. I think that each president of the US starts believing it when the press refers to him as “the most powerful man in the world”. While POTUS arguably holds the highest office in the land, he is still supposed to be accountable. As president, he heads the Executive branch, which is not even the most powerful branch of Fedgov. The Legislature can override a presidential veto, which would seem to make the Executive branch the least powerful of the three branches of our currently employed FedGov. But when POTUS can execute the laws contrary to the way the legislature has written them, then the legislature is the weakest branch of FedGov.
So, the president violates the Constitution by not “faithfully executing” the laws as passed by Congress and we cower and tuck our tails rather than hold him accountable. We adopt a “you can’t fight city hall” attitude. Shame on us for not holding public officials accountable.
The Legislature was intended to be the most powerful branch and, not coincidentally, this puts most of the power in the hands of the people (the House of Representatives) and the states (the Senate — the states having since delegated their power to the people via the 17th amendment, leaving no effective representation in Congress for the state governments).
The Executive was to have been the second most powerful branch of FedGov with the Judiciary being the weakest.
Summarizing…
Intended ranking of FedGov branches’ relative powers, from most to least powerful:
- Legislative
- Executive
- Judicial
As practiced:
- Judicial
- Executive
- Legislative
It strikes me as most strange that, in a government “of the people, by the people and for the people”, as Lincoln described it, the most powerful branch of government is not accountable to the people — or anyone else!
The “American experiment” has been hugely successful, but is now coming to an end. This oldest nation on Earth [1] will soon come to an end. It need not; it can continue, but only if we get back to basics, back to the actual Constitution, not the Constitution as interpreted by a federal government whose three branches all believe there is nothing FedGov is not empowered to do.
[1]
There are few other nations that have lasted as long as the United States of America, formed by the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Pick a country, any country, and it has likely changed its form of government more recently than the USA. The Constitution was a brilliant piece of work. It has stood the test of time and would have continued to do so, had we hewn to it. Instead, in our collective hubris we believe that we know better than a bunch of old, dead, white guys.
“Brother, you asked for it!” — Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastión d’Anconia