7/31/2014 - Judge Andrew Napolitano Townhall.com
It has been well established under the
Constitution and throughout our history that the president's job as the chief
federal law enforcement officer permits him to put his ideological stamp on the
nature of the work done by the executive branch. The courts have characterized
this stamp as "discretion."
Thus when exercising their discretion,
some presidents veer toward authority, others toward freedom. John Adams
prosecuted a congressman whose criticism brought him into disrepute, an act
protected by the First Amendment yet punishable under the Alien and Sedition
Acts, and Thomas Jefferson declined to enforce the Acts because they punished
speech, and pardoned all those convicted. Jimmy Carter asserted vast federal
regulatory authority over the trucking and airline industries, and Ronald
Reagan undid nearly all of it.
The president has discretion to adapt
law enforcement to the needs of the times and to his reading of the wishes of
the American people. Yet that discretion has a serious and mandatory guiding
light -- namely, that the president will do so faithfully.
The word "faithfully" appears
in the oath of office that is administered to every president. The reason for
its use is to assure Americans that their wishes for government behavior, as
manifested in written law, would be carried out even if the president
personally disagrees with the laws he swore to enforce.
This has not always worked as planned.
President George W. Bush once famously signed into law a statute prohibiting
federal agents without a search warrant from reading mail sent to persons other
than themselves -- and as he was literally holding his pen, he stated he had no
intention of enforcing it. That was a rejection of his presidential duties and
a violation of his oath.
But today, President Obama has taken
the concept of discretion and so distorted it, and has taken the obligation of
faithful enforcement and so rejected it, that his job as chief law enforcer has
become one of incompetent madness or chief lawbreaker. Time after time, in
areas as disparate as civil liberties, immigration, foreign affairs and health
care, the president has demonstrated a propensity for rejecting his oath and
doing damage to our fabric of liberty that cannot easily be undone by a
successor.
Item: He has permitted unconstitutional
and unbridled spying on all Americans all the time, and he has dispatched his
agents to lie and mislead the American people and their elected representatives
in Congress about it. This has resulted in a federal culture in which the
supposed servants of the people have become our permanent and intimate monitors
and squealers on what they observe.
Item: He has permitted illegal
immigrants to remain here and continue to break the law, and he has instructed
them on how to get away with it. His encouragement has resulted in the flood of
tens of thousands of foreign unaccompanied children being pushed across our
borders. This has resulted in culture shock to children now used as political
pawns, the impairment of their lives and the imposition of grievous financial
burdens upon local and state governments.
Item: His agents fomented a revolution
in Libya that resulted in the murder of that country's leader, the killing of
the U.S. ambassador and the evacuation of the U.S. embassy. His agents fomented
a revolution in Ukraine that resulted in a Russian invasion, an active insurgency,
sham elections and the killing of hundreds of innocent passengers flying on a
commercial airliner.
Item: He has dispatched CIA agents to
fight undeclared and secret wars in Yemen and in Pakistan, and he has
dispatched unmanned drones to kill innocents there. He has boasted that some
secret reading of public positive law permits him to kill whomever he wishes,
even Americans and their children.
Item: His State Department has treated
Hamas -- a gang of ruthless murderers whose stated purpose is the destruction
of Israel -- as if it were a legitimate state deserving of diplomatic niceties,
and this has encouraged Hamas to persist in attacking our only serious ally in
the Middle East.
Item: His Department of Veterans
Affairs has so neglected patients in government hospitals that many of them
died, and it even destroyed records to hide its misdeeds. His Internal Revenue
Service has enforced the law more heavily against his political opponents than
against his friends, and it has destroyed government computer records in order
to hide its misdeeds.
Item: He has relieved his friends of
the burdens of timely compliance with Obamacare, and he has burdened his
enemies with tortured interpretations of that law -- even interpretations that
were rejected by the very Congress that enacted the law and interpretations
that were invalidated by the Supreme Court.
He has done all these things with a
cool indifference, and he has threatened to continue to do so until the
pressure builds on his political opponents to see things his way.
The Framers could not have intended a
president so devoid of fidelity to the rule of law that it is nearly impossible
to distinguish between incompetence and lawlessness -- and I am not sure which
is worse. Archbishop Fulton Sheen often said he'd prefer to deal with a smart
devil than a stupid one.
But the Framers did give us a remedy,
and the remedy is not a frivolous lawsuit that the federal courts will no doubt
reject as a political stunt. The remedy is removal from office. This is not to
be undertaken lightly, as was the case when this remedy was last used. But it
is the remaining constitutional means to save the freedoms the Constitution was
intended to guarantee.
The choice is between two more years of
government by decree or two years of prosecution. It is a choice the president
has imposed upon us all.
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