
Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president's persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. On Monday, Mr. Obama acted unilaterally to raise the minimum wage paid by federal contracts, the first of many executive actions the White House promised would be a theme of his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
The president's taste for
unilateral action to circumvent Congress should concern every citizen,
regardless of party or ideology. The great 18th-century political
philosopher Montesquieu observed: "There can be no liberty where the
legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body
of magistrates." America's Founding Fathers took this warning to heart,
and we should too.
Rule of law doesn't simply mean that society
has laws; dictatorships are often characterized by an abundance of
laws. Rather, rule of law means that we are a nation ruled by
laws, not men. That no one—and especially not the president—is above the
law. For that reason, the U.S. Constitution imposes on every president
the express duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."
Yet
rather than honor this duty, President Obama has openly defied it by
repeatedly suspending, delaying and waiving portions of the laws he is
charged to enforce. When Mr. Obama disagreed with federal immigration
laws, he instructed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the laws.
He did the same thing with federal welfare law, drug laws and the
federal Defense of Marriage Act.
On many
of those policy issues, reasonable minds can disagree. Mr. Obama may be
right that some of those laws should be changed. But the typical way to
voice that policy disagreement, for the preceding 43 presidents, has
been to work with Congress to change the law. If the president cannot
persuade Congress, then the next step is to take the case to the
American people. As President Reagan put it: "If you can't make them see
the light, make them feel the heat" of electoral accountability.
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