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Dictatorship Is Alive And Well

George W. Bush once famously stated that “The United States is not a dictatorship. It never has been a dictatorship. It never will be a dictatorship, unless I’m the dictator.” We thought it was just him, but it appears to be an epidemic in the Republican Party.

First there was Rick Perry announcing what he would do with executive orders. He would rewrite the tax code. He apparently doesn’t understand that only Congress can change tax law. Well, there are a lot of things only Congress can do, but that never stopped George W. Bush from issuing an executive order to bypass Congress or using signing statements to void a rightfully passed law.

Now, Newt Gingrich has boarded the bandwagon. Newt said at the Values Voters Summit, “I would instruct the national security official in a Gingrich administration to ignore the Supreme Court on issues o national security.” Gee, he should know all about end-running the Supreme Court. When he decided to lead the charge to impeach and remove President Clinton, there were several Supreme Court rulings stemming from the McCarthy era concerning the investigative function of grand juries and the use of grand jury information to publicly humiliate the subject of an investigation that Gingrich and Independent Counsel Ken Starr ignored. The Bush/Cheney administration ignored United States and international law to torture prisoners, not even waiting for anything to get into the courts.

Maybe Americans have gotten too accustomed to executive orders and signing statements. We have forgotten that these things are designed to thwart the Constitutional limitations of powers and the separation of powers among the three branches of our government. They are the tools of those men that political scientists have identified as our three “constitutional dictators” – Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and George W. Bush. Lincoln needed to bypass Congress to conduct a war. If the Civil War had been left in the hands of the Congress, we’d all be whistling Dixie. Roosevelt needed to bypass Congress because he wanted to do something to reverse the Great Depression that had been voted against by previous congresses in previous recessions, specifically in 1877 and 1893 – go into debt to fund massive infrastructure projects to put Americans to work. When he let Congress decided what to do, in 1937, and they chose spending cuts, the recovery almost failed. George W. Bush did not have an excuse for nearly 300 executive orders and almost 100 signing statements that said, roughly, the executive branch will not enforce this law. He just didn’t want to be bothered dealing with a Senate that he lost by one member in 2001and a House that he lost in 2006.

When you listen to people complaining about President Obama doing nothing – try remembering that our Constitution places limits on the powers of the Presidency and very specifically separates the powers of the three branches. What they are calling “doing nothing” is a President actually doing his job in the most constitutionally correct manner we have seen in over a decade.

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