The Imperial President


July 18, 2011 by Bob Livingston

OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA

Barack Obama has become the Imperial President.

Having just shed the shackles of monarchy, the Founding Fathers were loath to establish a government with an all-powerful chief executive. To prevent it, they created a government divided into three equal branches. Their idea was that each branch would check the other in order to limit government’s growth.

But the anti-Federalist Cato, thought to be New York Governor George Clinton, warned in Letter V to the citizens of New York that the compact under consideration did not provide strong enough checks and balances. He wrote:

Before the existence of express political compacts it was reasonably implied that the magistrate should govern with wisdom and Justice, but mere implication was too feeble to restrain the unbridled ambition of a bad man, or afford security against negligence, cruelty, or any other defect of mind. It is alledged that the opinions and manners of the people of America, are capable to resist and prevent an extension of prerogative or oppression; but you must recollect that opinion and manners are mutable, and may not always be a permanent obstruction against the encroachments of government; that the progress of a commercial society begets luxury, the parent of inequality, the foe to virtue, and the enemy to restraint; and that ambition and voluptuousness aided by flattery, will teach magistrates, where limits are not explicitly fixed to have separate and distinct interests from the people, besides it will not be denied that government assimilates the manners and opinions of the community to it. Therefore, a general presumption that rulers will govern well is not a sufficient security. You are then under a sacred obligation to provide for the safety of your posterity, and would you now basely desert their interests, when by a small share of prudence you may transmit to them a beautiful political patrimony, that will prevent the necessity of their travelling through seas of blood to obtain that, which your wisdom might have secured: It is a duty you owe likewise to your own reputation, for you have a great name to lose; you are characterised as cautious, prudent and jealous in politics; whence is it therefore, that you are about to precipitate yourselves into a sea of uncertainty, and adopt a system so vague, and which has discarded so many of your valuable rights. Is it because you do not believe that an American can be a tyrant? If this be the case you rest on a weak basis; Americans are like other men in similar situations, when the manners and opinions of the community are changed by the causes I mentioned before, and your political compact inexplicit, your posterity will find that great power connected with ambition, luxury, and flattery, will as readily produce a Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian in America, as the same causes did in the Roman empire.

Sadly, it turns out he was correct. Congress has abdicated its responsibility, the Federal judiciary has become the oligarchy Thomas Jefferson warned about, and the result is we now have an imperial Presidency.

The imperial Presidency has its roots in 1861 and Abraham Lincoln, who had no regard for the Constitution and the rule of law.

The Southern States had every right to secede under the Constitution. In his inaugural address, President Thomas Jefferson said, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.â€