Executive orders hurt Constitution

Published 8:31 pm Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Exactly 227 years ago today, one of the most important documents in human history was signed. Its most striking feature is its limit on the acquisition of power by any one branch of government, through the separation of powers.

Yes, you’ve heard that phrase before — perhaps in a long-forgotten history class.

But it’s worth considering anew. The framers of the Constitution were seemingly cynical about human nature.

But history before and since the document’s signing confirms their fears.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, “The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate, created and circumstanced, as would be a president of the United States.”

Added James Madison, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Thomas Jefferson put it even more succinctly: “The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.”

Yet now we are seeing the principle of separation of powers under attack. A frustrated President Barack Obama, himself a former constitutional law teacher, says he can no longer “wait” on Congress, so he’s attempting to enact his agenda through executive orders.

He’s now believed to be readying a set of executive orders on immigration, which could effectively “legalize” millions of illegal immigrants.

He used to say this kind of action would be improper.

“The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting, I promise you, not just on immigration reform. But that’s not how our system works,” he told activists in 2011. “That’s not how our democracy functions.”

But he did in 2012 anyway, with an order telling immigration officials to use “prosecutorial discretion” to achieve the goals of the DREAM Act, which would allow young illegal immigrants to stay in the country.

The Heritage Foundation offers other examples.

“Even though the Democrat-controlled Senate rejected the president’s cap-and-trade plan, his Environmental Protection Agency classified carbon dioxide, the compound that sustains vegetative life, as a pollutant so that it could regulate it under the Clean Air Act,” the group notes.

Likewise, “DOJ also has announced that it would stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act or defending it from legal challenge rather than seeking legislative recourse.”

No amount of frustration with Congress — which, we should add, has been controlled by his own party for much of his term — justifies rejecting the Constitutional fundamental safeguards.

The other branches of government have the power to stand up to Obama and reclaim their authority; they just don’t seem to have the political will.

On this Constitution Day, that should change.