Obama the Tyrant

saObama’s executive order granting amnesty to 4 million illegal aliens exposes yet again the hypocrisy and cynicism of the most partisan administration in recent history. Typical of a president who seemingly can’t remember or doesn’t care what he has publicly told the people, Obama went ahead and took action that more than 20 times he had publicly said he couldn’t legally take­­. And he did so not because of some pressing “crisis” of illegals living “in the shadows,” a rationale that ignores the real crisis–– illegal deadbeats and thugs serially passing though a porous border in order to create mayhem and disorder in our communities. Rather, this action was a rank partisan gift to vocal activists and clients of the Democratic Party.

More important, however, this latest instance of presidential overreach undermines the most important foundation of the Western political tradition going back to the ancient Greeks––the suspicion of any necessarily flawed man’s excessive power that inevitably flouts the limits imposed by the supreme law of the land.

In ancient Athens, for example, the turannos or “tyrant” was the exemplar of the dangers that flow from excessive power vested in one person. It wasn’t that the tyrant was completely evil and oppressive. Many Greek tyrants, like the Athenian Peisistratus, benefitted their communities. Yet given human nature, even a well-meaning leader given excessive power often will abuse it to gratify his own selfish desires, ambitions, and interests at the expense of the law and the freedom of his fellow citizens. In ancient Greek political thought, the tyrant became the monitory example of power’s ability to corrupt, and thus often was depicted as violent, paranoid, and excessive in his actions.

The American founders were intimately familiar with this tradition. For them a generalissimo like Julius Caesar, who violated the Roman Republican constitution and ruled as an autocrat until his assassination, was the warning against creating a too powerful executive. One of the most popular Romans of the pre-Revolutionary period was Cato the Younger, who committed suicide rather than submit to Caesar. Joseph Addison’s play Cato was the most popular theatrical production of this period. George Washington had it produced for his troops during the grim winter at Valley Forge, and Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death” was a paraphrase of a line from the play.

Thus when the Declaration of Independence says of George III, “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” the word “Tyranny” is not used lightly or metaphorically. George III is being placed into the long tradition of the tyrant whose oppressive rule, as Aristotle wrote, is “arbitrary power . . . which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No freeman willingly endures such a government.” That’s why our political ancestors fought the Revolution, and then wrote the Constitution as a safeguard against a future tyrant.

Indeed, in the debates of the delegates to the Constitutional convention, the fear that “power is of an encroaching nature,” as George Washington and others said, guided their crafting of the office of chief executive. In the debate over whether the President should be compensated for his service, Benjamin Franklin feared adding money to the attractions of power the chief executive would possess, “for the love of power and the love of money” when united in one office have “the most violent effects.” Presidential power will attract “the bold and the violent, the men of strong passions and indefatigable activity in their selfish pursuits.” Hence the Constitutional order checks the power of the executive by the legislature and the judiciary, with Congress given the power to make laws and impeach the executive, and the most democratic assembly, the House of Representatives, given the power of the purse in order to deny an overweening president the funds necessary to advance his ambitions. Finally, the states choose the presidential electors who elect the president, giving the states yet another check on presidential power through term limits and the ballot.

The 22nd amendment limiting the president to 2 terms is testimony to this traditional distrust of power, particularly because it was passed by Congress in 1947, a few years after the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a popular president elected 4 times. As Thomas Jefferson said in 1807, when the 2-term limit was a custom initiated by George Washington rather than established by law, “if some termination to the services of the chief Magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally four years, will in fact become for life.” This healthy fear of power continuing in one man’s hands for too long reflected the long tradition of the distrust of power based in turn on a tragic view of a flawed human nature. It explains the great care Alexander Hamilton takes in Federalist 69 to set out the differences between the president and a king, mainly because the former is subjected to numerous limitations on his power, making “difficult to determine whether that magistrate would, in the aggregate, possess more or less power than the Governor of New York.” Most important, this fear of power is the central assumption behind the mixed government and balance of governmental powers characterizing our Constitution.

Obama, of course, has rejected this venerable tradition and embraced that of the Progressive movement. Social and technological change, the Progressives argued, have rendered the Constitutional order an anachronism, making necessary a more powerful executive and federal government. Woodrow Wilson’s 1908 Constitutional Government in the United States set out the arguments for this idea. He complained that the chief executive was “only the legal executive, the presiding and guiding authority in the application of law and the execution of policy . . . He was empowered [by the veto] to prevent laws, but he was not to be given an opportunity to make good ones.” That complaint leads directly to Obama’s eagerness to make “good laws” as defined not by the people through their representatives, but by himself and his political faction.

And just as Obama, by legislating via executive order fiat, has proven he is impatient with the mixed government that puts limits on his policy ambitions, Wilson rejected the balancing of power and conflicting factions codified in the Constitution. Government, Wilson wrote, “is a living, organic thing, and must like every other government, work out the close synthesis of active parts, which exist only when leadership is lodged in some one man or group of men.” Here we see the imperial president’s preference for unaccountable technocrats and “experts” like the mendacious Jonathan Gruber, instead of working with the legislators elected by the people and subject to electoral accountability.

Finally, Obama has governed based on the Wilsonian preference for concentrating executive power rather than submitting it to Constitutional checks and balances. “You cannot compound a successful government out of antagonisms,” Wilson wrote. Of course, in Wilson’s view “successful” is defined as solving technical problems or achieving an ideologically biased “social justice,” unlike the Founders, who thought a successful federal government is the one that keeps separate the executive, legislative, and judicial powers and thus protects the freedom of the citizens. And instead of the Constitution’s realist acknowledgement that a vast country of various interests cannot be unified in one leader without risking the people’s freedom, Wilson wrote that we must “look to the President as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and of the nation.” The question begged, of course, is unified around what? Which interests or ideals? In reality, they will be reduced to those of one faction that will come to dominate the others, backed by the coercive power of the federal government and its cadres of unelected administrators and bureaucrats.

Obama has governed explicitly as such a “leader.” On every issue from the environment and health care to immigration––87 pages worth of executive diktats–– he has reduced the various and conflicting interests and ideals of the citizens and states to those of his own party and its progressive ideology. But this usurpation of power has come at the expense of state and individual political rights and freedom, not to mention the undermining of the Constitutional order designed explicitly to protect those rights and freedoms.

Obama has set a precedent that, if left unchecked, will be tempting for other presidents to follow, taking us even further down the road of tyranny. From ancient Athens to the Founders to those traditionalists today who understand the primacy of freedom in the architecture of our political order, such a leader has been characterized by one word––tyrant.

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  • JacksonPearson

    =i=i=i=i=

    • DowntotheBone

      “Is the Devil real?”

      Asked and answered….

      • cattastrophe

        Don’t give so much credit to a mere minion of the Devil.

  • http://johnnyangeladvocacygroup.net JohnnyAngel Advocacy Group

    And unfortunately McConnell & Boehner are right on Obama’s heels with their limp wristed idea of “governing”. They, as well as all the leaders of the GOP have succumbed to wealth and power diktats. They all need to be whipped and then locked in a cell with illegal gang member immigrants !! Then run out of Washington on a rail !!!

  • http://www.apollospeaks.com/ ApolloSpeaks

    DID YOU KNOW THAT OBAMA OMINOUSLY HELD HIS NEVADA AMNESTY RALLY IN A CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

    where a white, Morman, Romney-like businessman defeated Nevada’s first black Congressman on the sixth anniversary of Obama’s historic election? Was this a sign of things to come for 2016? I believe so.

    Click http://www.apollospeaks.com for this amazing, morale boosting story.

  • sendtheclunkerbacktochicago

    Eventually those who contribute to Front Page will concede that “sendtheclunkerbacktochicago” has been right all along about this Fraud in Chief. Obama is NOT a “natural born Citizen”, he knows it and he still was able to pull his SCANDAL off thanks to Republicans and the compliant Conservative Media. Worse yet, the Republicans and the compliant Conservative Media have allowed him, after the fact, to get away free with at least THREE felonies – a forged computer generated birth certificate, a forged Selective Service registration and a SS# that has been declared fraudulent more than once by E-Verify (042-68-4425). What is amazing is that the Republicans and the compliant Conservative Media rely on organizations like SNOPES and FACT CHECK as their reason for not pursuing the crimes. Would they take SNOPES and FACT CHECK into court as their proof of innocence (LMAO)? Would Bill O’Reilly take two “birth announcements” into court to prove Barry was born in Hawaii (LMAO). Republicans and the compliant Conservative Media should have their eyes wide open after 6 years of being lied to and wake up to the fact that Obama is indeed a full fledged FRAUD. This Liar in Chief is much more than a Tyrant.

    • Kevin Vail

      Even if he was born here he wasn’t raised in America with the values of patriotism and loyalty to this country. He was raised in a third-world country by a self-loathing white ex-pat and the Marxist revolutionaries she shacked up with.If he’s an American at all it’s only in a very technical, legalistic sense that has no bearing on who the man is.

    • SoCalMike

      Never forget the nefarious roll of the 4th Estate/5th Column that practically forced him on us.
      Long after the petulant child tyrant in chief is gone, these malignant tumors and venomous leftist parasites will still be festering and metastasizing.

  • http://www.clarespark.com/ Clare Spark

    The original Progressives were elitists, but not tyrants. Their aim was to co-opt the populist movement to counter what they considered to be the Red Menace. See http://clarespark.com/2009/09/19/populism-progressivism-and-corporatist-liberalism-in-the-nation-1919/. “Populism, progressivism, and corporatist liberalism in The Nation, 1919.” They were also uplifters, trying to assimilate recent immigrants away from European socialist temptations. See http://clarespark.com/2012/05/15/progressive-uplift-vs-new-left-nihilism/. “Progressive uplift versus New Left nihilism.”

    • http://www.chaverimisrael.org Norbert Haag

      I humbly have to disagree.

      The difference between the progressives and the socialists might in fact be that the progressive elitist where loathing the socialist, because their ancestry was “the mob” rather than the “aristocracy” they thought they where.

      In practice both are just another view on the same coin.

      They both are statist. Worshipping big government and the rule of a view.

      It is statism that is the biggest enemy and threat to a free people. Conservative statist are not better than socialist. They are of the same breed.

      Think Carl Rove or Jeb Bush or McConell and Boehner. They are no better than the current “leaders”. You will see, and those with open eyes and ears can already see, that they are as much a thread as the progressives.

      Because they are progressives.

    • CosmotKat

      But they hated what Mencken called the middle class…the boboosie. that hatred is on display today especially when considered in the Gruber comments

    • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

      I disagree also, and not so humbly as Norbert. You can’t be an “elitist” seeking power to remake society by force without being a tyrant as well. Today’s Progressives, the heirs of those from a century ago, are basically communists, and they’re no different than their ancestors. The only difference is in the way they discuss their desire for totalitarian power: the communists speak of class struggle while the progressives try to put a more positive face on control, suggesting that they want to “help” people achieve this or that. But in the end, it’s always what the progressives want for the individual, who is not allowed to have any desires not approved by the state. Think of the creepy Julia, Democratic Party mascot, who can’t do anything without Big Brother’s help and who doesn’t do anything Big Brother doesn’t want. This last part is what Progressives leave out when they present their program.

  • cree

    Yep, the framers saw Wilson, Obama types coming.

  • Geppetto

    And this poses the oft asked but yet to be answered question, what is to be done about it? And unless something is done and done decisively, this tyrant will become increasingly tyrannical for as long as he’s allowed to remain in office, and the damage he has done and will continue to do may be irreversible.

    Obama is certain of one major advantage that he enjoys and that is the adulation and dedicated support he receives from the “legacy media,” i.e., the video and print news media that captures the attention of a large segment of the American electorate and informs their opinions. Thus Obama knows that the one weapon the legislative and judicial branches of government have to
    stop him in his tracks, impeachment, has already been spiked by his media allies who will immediately attack any opposition to his overreach by a republican party that has time and time again demonstrated its unwillingness to face any confrontation with the media they deem to be politically damaging. Impeachment has already been deemed to be such an issue, if not The issue.

    The Progressive media have continued with the mendacious onslaught they launched to completely eviscerate and discredit the reputations of George W. Bush and the republican party and portray Barack Hussein Obama as a transformational, exemplary, champion of social justice, an African American destined to cure the “racial divide” and lift America up from “the swamp” left by
    8 years of republican “gross malfeasance.” The belated, contravening facts behind the mendacious fallacy of the media’s derogatory catch phrase, “Bush lied, people died” has done little to erase the damage to President Bush’s reputation. Such is the power of inculcation disguised as journalism.

    While the fawning, adulation for Obama has been somewhat tempered by his increasingly obvious overreach, perpetual mendacity, and undeniable narcissism, republicans have not enjoyed an equal measure of rejuvenation.

    So the somewhat tenuously, ill defined, “power of the purse” constitutionally held by the republican controlled House of Representatives, is what is being touted by republicans fortunate enough to get to state their case in the media, as the planned, “reasoned” approach to reining in Obama. Not impeachment
    and not the falsely portrayed “dire threat” of shutting down the government. Based on the experience with this approach previously, the republican controlled Congress, come January, 2015 had better have a strategy to counter the charge that they DO want to “shut down the government.” Obama Inc. has already steamrolled the previous republican effort to use the power of the purse and, with the full, complicit support of his media cabal, will succeed in doing so again unless the republican leadership is prepared to mount a serious offense. That the facts that refuted this charge were also available when Harry Reid was the Senate leader did not prevent the reliably placid republicans from being portrayed as “do nothing, partisan, obstructionists.”

    Exactly why is subject to dispute but surely, a significant factor must have been their inability to put the blame for what was falsely portrayed as a “dire situation,” i.e. shutting down the government, where it belonged; squarely on the shoulders of Harry Reid and Barack Hussein Obama. They will not have to deal with one of the obstructionist, Reid, in January so perhaps they can make this work. It remains to be seen.

  • truebearing

    “Obama has set a precedent that, if left unchecked, will be tempting for other presidents to follow, taking us even further down the road of tyranny.”

    While certainly true, this assumes there will be other presidents and not a lifelong “term” for Obama, followed by a succession of tyrants.

  • SoCalMike

    Obama is a Marxoid fascist tyrant but he’s not alone or unique by any stretch.
    The impulse of busy body freaks to use the law to force themselves on others to either spend the money of others or force them to conform or sacrifice is widespread among people.
    Far too many people I know wouldn’t hesitate to force people they disagree with into reeducation and concentration camps if they had the power.
    It kills them that they don’t.
    Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the vast majority, not all but easily the vast majority of these people are democrats.

    • I_Am_Me

      We are looking at a neo-Prohibition. But this time it’s a prohibition of cognitive liberty.

      And you are right on the do-gooder angle. The Prohibitionists were both Leftwing and Rightwing. As soon as you hear the word “reform”, grab your sidearm.

  • nhtom1

    Sorry if this is a duplicate:
    I could use some help here. Some leftist friends have pointed out the
    the Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order by Abraham Lincoln.
    Is there a comeback for that?

  • cattastrophe

    Obama is a lying treasonous tyrant.