I continue to contend that the dangerous thing about Obama’s presidency is not that he is grabbing power like a tyrant and abusing it so, but that the country is letting him get away with it.
I just had brought to my attention a syndicated column by George Will that appeared late last week, “Executive discretion: Will Congress challenge Obama?”
In the column, he talks about the “dismay” of Congress over Obama’s “interpretation” of “executive discretion.” And then he concludes with this distressingly wimpy solution: “His departures from the norms proper to the take care clause may yet cause Congress to take better care of its prerogatives.”
Our Constitution, Mr. Will, is a brilliant document, and it recognizes the natural human tendency to seek power. There is a solid remedy built into it for such situations as this, and it is called impeachment. Yes, the usurping of power, which is what we’re seeing here, is dangerous to our system of government and is an impeachable offense. President Nixon’s abuse of executive discretion was mild compared to Obama’s. He was upset over the amount of money Congress had appropriated for certain activities, that it was unnecessary to spend so much, so he thought he’d spend just part. Yet that was included in the list of impeachable offenses in his articles of impeachment. How we have deteriorated in a short forty years!
I know why George Will didn’t say the I-word – he wants to keep his gig at the Washington Post. In the climate created by the toxic combination of a fawning press and a corrupt opposition party, the timid, who love the perks of influence, dare not propose the obvious solution: Impeach Pres. Obama. Yes, yes, the Senate is controlled by the Democrats and would never convict him. But the House has the power, nay the duty, to impeach and such an action would be logged in the history books as a black mark against Obama. If that isn’t done, it will be that much more difficult to deal with future violators. And you know that there will be future violators. Such power is tempting and societies, especially corrupt ones like ours, tend to gravitate toward tyrants.
Look at the delicious combination of power that, in our supposed “democracy”, we have granted the executive. The list of regulations (which, I will remind you, are created by unelected bureaucrats appointed by the president) is so vast and so complex that no one can even tell us how many there are. Attorney Harvey Silvergate has postulated that the average American commits three felonies a day without even knowing it. That gives the executive the power to target anyone it chooses and then to find some regulation they have violated and put them in jail. Given enough time, the government now has the tools to successfully intimidate any opposition. So are we still the “land of the free?” Not as free as we used to be, but probably more free than we will be after another 20 years of this.
And those in the media and in Congress who won’t stand up to this are complicit in making this happen.