Obama’s threat to constitutional liberty
**Posted by Phineas
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy posted an article at PJMedia yesterday that begins by excoriating President Obama for saying, in his announcement that his administration would no longer enforce a portion of federal law, that the children of illegal immigrants, though not born here, were “Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper.” McCarthy takes Obama to task, because “the paper” the president dismisses is our social contract: the Constitution and the laws enacted under it by a democratically elected legislature, a constitution and laws which Obama has sworn to uphold to the best of his ability.
If that were the end of it, this would be merely an incident in which we would shake our heads at the supposed constitutional scholar’s cavalier attitude toward the Constitution.
But there’s much more. Using this as a jumping off point, McCarthy describes the more fundamental danger Obama’s politics (and, by extension, those of the broader progressive movement) pose to constitutionalism and the rule of law: A Nation of Paper, Not of Men.
Obama is not merely failing to enforce the immigration laws. He is destroying the system on which our liberty depends, a system he swore to safeguard. This oath was a solemn one, of far greater consequence than, say, a pitcher’s oath to testify truthfully to Congress about steroid use — an incident over which the federal government has spent millions of taxpayer dollars in an effort to convict Roger Clemens of a felony, notwithstanding the utter absence of any federal interest in the integrity of professional baseball.
We are entitled to conclude Obama defrauded the American people in taking his oath of office. He prefaced the oath by unabashedly declaring his intention to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” He followed the oath with a series of usurpations designed to do just that. This highlights another mendacious aspect of Obama’s pandering to the hard Left on illegal immigration and, symmetrically, on election fraud (the policing against which he similarly obstructs).
The president says the young illegal aliens he has in mind are “Americans” except on paper. But who is Obama to say what an American is? By his own self-heralding, he is here to transform the United States. His mantra is “change.” He has stacked his Justice Department and the rest of the Executive Branch sprawl with progressive operatives whose obsession is to transmogrify America culturally, economically, and politically — to alter our very nature. When Obama talks about someone being “an American” or something being one of “our values,” he is not talking about the America that is; he is invoking the authoritarian, collectivist, redistributionist, post-sovereign, transnational America of his design.
It ought not matter whether we agree or disagree with Obama’s policy objectives on immigration — or the glut of areas from the use of force to labor relations to state sovereignty to socialized medicine to debt to diet, etc., on which he presumes to dictate rather than honor the law. Our social compact as a body politic demands that policy objectives be pursued within a system of divided powers in which the prerogatives of the president and of the federal government are strictly limited. Obama rejects this bedrock principle. Therefore, we must reject him.
(Emphases added.)
A creature of Chicago’s toxic mix of Leftism and gangster government, the end state of “Obamaism” is the transformation of the United States into a personalist authoritarian regime –a “banana republic”– in which the Leader has almost unfettered power. McCarthy hones in on the heart of the problem: the attitudes behind the policies, attitudes that admit of no real limits to government power, attitudes that transform the citizen into a client dependent on his patron’s favor. It is, at its core, the polar opposite of the Founders’ vision of the role of government.
It is the vision of the tyrant.
We can’t know how far Obama would take us down this road, should he win a second term, but he will try to take us as far as he can, whether with a pliant Congress, or bypassing them through the vast administrative powers of the presidency, or simply declaring it so even when he doesn’t have the authority.
It is the nature of the tyrant.
The transformation of America the left hopes for won’t come about through military coup or canceled elections (those are fantasies from the fever swamp), but through administrative action and, as in ObamaCare, the passage of laws that trample on our natural rights. Gradually, bit by bit, as we adjust in each case to the “new normal.” Per McCarthy, we must reject that and we must reject Obama, lest we acquiesce by our inaction and inattention.
And it is in this upcoming November, I firmly believe, that we will deliver that rejection with unmistakable clarity.
RELATED: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a speech at AEI the other day on how the Obama administration and others threaten the First Amendment. I think you’ll find it well-worth watching.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)