The president of the US is not a king. President Biden is doing his best to ignore this Constitutional stricture.
Those of us who were taught in traditional, non-woke classrooms learned that the Constitution separated powers between Congress, which makes laws, and the president, who carries them out. The courts are there to resolve disputes over what the laws mean. The Founding Fathers designed this system, as John Adams wrote in the Massachusetts constitution of 1780,” to the end it may be a government of laws, and not of men.” Presidents can give orders to the people who work for them in the executive branch, but they aren’t supposed to make laws although they can suggest them to Congress.
Our presidents have been forgetting this in recent years. While the problem is bipartisan, the presidencies of Biden and Obama have been the worst offenders In using executive orders and administrative agencies to write new laws.
Biden had issued 79 of them so far but this doesn’t really illuminate the bigger problem. There is nothing wrong with executive orders that explain presidential policies so the executive branch can follow them. The worst mischief emanates from orders issued by the alphabet bureaucracy of regulatory agencies and Cabinet departments.These agencies attempt to make sweeping changes that really should be the province of Congress.
So when Congress wouldn’t pass Obama’s proposals to give legal status to illegal aliens, he just ordered them himself. “I have a pen and a phone,” he said, as if this made him the whole government. He later admitted that he saw no legal precedent to allow his creation of immigration policies but to this day they have not been totally rebuked. Sensing an opening, he came up with an ambitious plan to curb atmospheric emissions that gradually uncloaked his real ‘regal’ project, the Green New Deal.
Biden had put his mentor, Obama, to shame. In addition to his own barrage of Green New Deal and woke social policy orders, he used the COVID pandemic to claim “emergency” powers without precedent in American history and, in some precincts, still linger three years later though the “emergency” ended over a year ago according to all the major health care policy-makers.
The Supreme Court already blocked Biden from using workplace-safety laws as an excuse to create a national vaccine mandate through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and-even more ridiculously-a nationwide tenant-eviction moratorium through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Congress never empowered the CDC the nation’s landlord, and even Biden admitted he was just buying time until the court could hear the case and stop him.
Presently the court heard challenges to Biden’s attempt to spend half a TRILLION dollars canceling college and graduate-school tuition debts of 43,000,000 people. Who will pay the tab? You and I through an increase to an already unsustainable national debt. Biden’s bogus logic is to use the emergency powers embedded in the HEROES Act passed after 9/11, the purpose of which was to allow presidents suspend some of the student-loan rules for soldiers serving abroad. His own Department of Education and then House Speaker Pelosi warned him he didn’t have the power to do this.
The authors of the Constitution understood that the most dangerous power of all was when kings could rule without having to ask for money. The English “Glorious Revolution “ of 1688-89 put an end to kings trying to rule without calling Parliament to raise money. King James II was overthrown by men worried that he’d get money elsewhere by selling out the country to foreign leaders-which at the time meant King Louis XIV of France.( Isn’t this scenario eerily familiar to Biden and his cronies selling off large swaths of America to China today?)
The French kings ruled without their legislature-The Estates-General-until 1789; when they finally got so deeply in debt they needed to summon it, they ended up with the French Revolution. Similarly, Otto von Bismarck built the German Empire before WWI by proving the Prussian king could go to war without raising funds via Prussia’s parliament; that set a precedent that put no limits on the Kaiser until he provoked WWl.
The Constitution is supposed to prevent that happening here, because it gives Congress the power of the purse. Biden is neither a king nor a kaiser. If he wants half a TRILLION dollars, he should ask Congress.