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The modern institution of the presidency is the
primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes.
It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign
peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on
our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews
the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used
to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone
can go to Hell. It's not an inspiration; it's a threat.
The presidency – by which I mean the executive
State – is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of
government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere
adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete devotion and humble submission
to its dictates, even while it steals the products of our labor and drives us
into economic ruin. It centralizes all power unto itself, and crowds out all
competing centers of power in society, including the church, the family,
business, charity, and the community. I'll go further. The US presidency is
the world's leading evil. It is the chief mischief-maker in every part of the
globe, the leading wrecker of nations, the usurer behind Third-World debt,
the bailer-out of corrupt governments, the hand in many dictatorial gloves,
the sponsor and sustainer of the New World Order, of wars, interstate and
civil, of famine and disease. To see the evils caused by the presidency, look
no further than Iraq or Serbia, where the lives of innocents were snuffed out
in pointless wars, where bombing was designed to destroy civilian infrastructure
and cause disease, and where women, children, and the aged have been denied
essential food and medicine because of a cruel embargo. Look at the human
toll taken by the presidency, from Dresden and Hiroshima to Waco and Ruby
Ridge, and you see a prime practitioner of murder by government.
Today, the president is called the leader of the
world's only superpower, the "world's indispensable nation," which
is reason enough to have him deposed. A world with any superpower at all is a
world where no freedoms are safe. But by invoking this title, the presidency
attempts to keep our attention focused on foreign affairs. It is a
diversionary tactic designed to keep us from noticing the oppressive rule it
imposes right here in the United States.
As the presidency assumes ever more power unto
itself, it becomes less and less accountable and more and more tyrannical.
These days, when we say the federal government, what we really mean is the
presidency. When we say, national priorities, we really mean what the
presidency wants. When we say national culture, we mean what the presidency
funds and imposes.
The presidency is presumed to be the embodiment of
Rousseau's general will, with far more power than any monarch or head of
state in pre-modern societies. The US presidency is the apex of the world's
biggest and most powerful government and of the most expansive empire in
world history. As such, the presidency represents the opposite of freedom. It
is what stands between us and our goal of restoring our ancient rights.
And let me be clear: I'm not talking about any
particular inhabitant of the White House. I'm talking about the institution
itself, and the millions of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who are its
acolytes. Look through the US government manual, which breaks down the
federal establishment into its three branches. What you actually see is the
presidential trunk, its Supreme Court stick, and its Congressional twig.
Practically everything we think of as federal – save the Library of
Congress – operates under the aegis of the executive.
This is why the governing elites – and
especially the foreign policy elites – are so intent on maintaining
public respect for the office, and why they seek to give it the aura of
holiness. For example, after Watergate, they briefly panicked and worried
that they had gone too far. They might have discredited the democratic
autocracy. And to some extent they did. But the elites were not stupid; they
were careful to insist that the Watergate controversy was not about the presidency
as such, but only about Nixon the man. That's why it became necessary to
separate the two. How? By keeping the focus on Nixon, making a devil out of
him, and reveling in the details of his personal life, his difficulties with
his mother, his supposed pathologies, etc.
Of course, this didn't entirely work. Americans took
from Watergate the lesson that presidents will lie to you. This should be the
first lesson of any civics course, of course, and the first rule of thumb in
understanding the affairs of government. But notice that after Nixon died, he
too was elevated to godlike status. None other than Bill Clinton served as
high priest of the cult of president-worship on that occasion. He did
everything but sacrifice a white bull at the temple of the White House.
The presidency recovered most of its sacramental
character during the Reagan years. How wonderful, for the sake of our
liberties, that Clinton has revived the great American tradition of scorning tyrants.
In some ways, he is the best president a freedom lover can hope for. Of
course, someday, Clinton too will ascend to the clouds, and enter the
pantheon of the great leaders of the free world.
The libraries are filled with shelf after shelf of
treatises on the American presidency. Save yourself some time, and don't
bother with them. Virtually all tell the same hagiographic story. Whether
written by liberals or conservatives, they serve up the identical Whiggish pap: the history of the presidency is the story
of a great and glorious institution. It was opposed early on, and viciously
so, by the anti-federalists, and later, even more viciously, by Southern
Confederates. But it has been heroically championed by every respectable
person since the beginning of the republic.
The office of the presidency, the conventional
wisdom continues, has changed not at all in substance, but has grown in
stature, responsibility, and importance, to fulfill its unique mission on
earth. As the duties of the office have grown, so has the greatness of the
men who inhabit it. Each stands on the shoulders of his forerunners, and,
inspired by their vision and decisiveness, goes on to make his own
contribution to the ever-expanding magisterium of presidential laws,
executive orders, and national security findings.
When there is a low ebb in
the accumulation of power, it is seen as the fault of the individual and not
the office. Thus the so-called postage-stamp presidents between Lincoln and
Wilson are to be faulted for not following the glorious example set by Abe.
They had a vast reservoir of power, but were mysteriously reluctant to use
it. Fortunately that situation was resolved, by Wilson especially, and we
moved onward and upward into the light of the present day. And every one of
these books ends with the same conclusion: the US presidency has served us
well.
The hagiographers do admit one failing of the
American presidency. It is almost too big an office for one man, and too much
a burden to bear. The American people have come to expect too much from the
president. We are unrealistic to think that one man can do it all. But that's
all the more reason to respect and worship the man who agrees to take it on,
and why all enlightened people must cut him some slack.
The analogy that comes to mind is the official
history of the popes. In its infancy, the papacy was less formal, but its
power and position were never in question. As the years went on and doctrine
developed, so too did the burdens of office. Each pope inherited the wisdom
of his forbears, and led the Church into fulfilling its mission more
effectively.
But let's be clear about this. The church has never
claimed that the papacy was the product of human effort; its spiritual
character is a consequence of a divine, not human, act. And even the official
history admits the struggles with anti-popes and Borgia popes. Catholics
believe the institution was founded by Christ, and is guided by the Holy
Spirit, but the pope can only invoke that guidance in the most narrow and rare
circumstances. Otherwise, he is all too fallible. And that is why, although
allegedly an absolute monarch, he is actually bound by the rule of law.
The presidency is seemingly bound by law, but in
practice it can do just about anything it pleases. It can order up troops
anywhere in the world, just as Clinton bragged in his acceptance speech at
the Democratic convention. It can plow up a religious community in Texas and
bury its members because they got on somebody's nerves at the Justice
Department. It can tap our phones, read our mail, watch our bank accounts,
and tell us what we can and cannot eat, drink, and smoke.
The presidency can break up businesses, shut down
airlines, void drilling leases, bribe foreign heads of state or arrest them
and try them in kangaroo courts, nationalize land, engage in germ warfare,
firebomb crops in Colombia, overthrow any government anywhere, erect tariffs,
round up and discredit any public or private assembly it chooses, grab our
guns, tax our incomes and our inheritances, steal our land, centrally plan
the national and world economy, and impose embargoes on anything anytime. No
prince or pope ever had this ability.
But leave all that aside and consider this
nightmare. The presidency has the power to bring about a nuclear holocaust
with the push of a button. On his own initiative, the president can destroy
the human race. One man can wipe out life on earth. Talk about playing God.
This is a grotesque evil. And the White House claims it is not a tyranny? If
the power to destroy the entire world isn't tyrannical, I don't know what is.
Why do we put up with this? Why do we allow it? Why isn't this power
immediately stripped from him?
What prevents fundamental
challenge to this monstrous power is precisely the quasi-religious trappings
of the presidency, which we again had to suffer through last January. One man
who saw the religious significance of the presidency, and denounced it in
1973, was – surprisingly enough – Michael Novak. His study, Choosing Our King: Powerful
Symbols in Presidential Politics, is one of the few dissenting books on the subject. It was reissued
last year as – not surprisingly – Choosing Our Presidents:
Symbols of Political Leadership, with a new introduction repudiating the
best parts of the book.
Of course, none of the conventional bilge accords
with reality. The US president is the worst outgrowth of a badly flawed
Constitution, imposed in a sort of coup against the Articles of
Confederation. Even from the beginning, the presidency was accorded too much
power. Indeed, an honest history would have to admit that the presidency has
always been an instrument of oppression, from the Whisky Rebellion to the War
on Tobacco.
The presidency has systematically stolen the liberty
won through the secession from Britain. From Jackson and Lincoln to McKinley
and Roosevelt Junior, from Wilson and FDR to Truman and Kennedy, from Nixon
and Reagan to Bush and Clinton, it has been the means by which our rights to
liberty, property, and self-government have been suppressed.
I can count on one hand the actions of presidents
that actually favored the true American cause, meaning liberty. The
overwhelming history of the presidency is a tale of overthrown rights and
liberties, and the erection of despotism in their stead.
Each president has tended to be worse than the last,
especially in this century. Lately, in terms of the powers they assumed and
the dictates they imposed, Kennedy was worse than Eisenhower, Johnson was
worse than Kennedy, Nixon was worse than Johnson, Carter was worse than
Nixon, and Reagan – who doubled the national budget and permanently
entrenched the warfare State – was worse than Carter. The same is true
of Bush and Clinton. Every budget is bigger and the powers exercised more
egregious. Each new brutal action breaks another taboo and establishes a new
precedent that gives the next occupant of the White House more leeway.
Looking back through American history, we can see the
few exceptions to this rule. Washington wrote an eloquent farewell address,
laying out the proper American trade and foreign policy. Jefferson's
revolution of 1800 was a great thing. But was it really a freer country after
his term than before? That's a tough case to make. Andrew Jackson abolished
the central bank, but his real legacy was democratic centralism and weakened
states' rights.
Andrew Johnson loosened the military dictatorship fastened
on the South after it was conquered. But it is not hard to make the country
freer when it had become totalitarian under the previous president's rule. Of
course, Lincoln's bloody autocracy survives as the model of presidential
leadership.
James Buchanan made a great statement on behalf of
the right of revolution. Grant restored the gold standard. Harding denounced
US imperialism in Haiti. But overall, my favorite president is William Henry
Harrison. He keeled over shortly after his inauguration.
There have been four huge surveys taken of
historians' views on the presidents: in 1948, in 1962, in 1970, and in 1983.
Historians were asked to rank presidents as Great, Near Great, Average, Below
Average, and Failure. In every case, number one is Lincoln, the mass murderer
and military dictator who is the real father of the present nation. His term
was a model of every despot's dream: spending money without Congressional
approval, declaring martial law, arbitrarily arresting thousands and holding
them without trial, suppressing free speech and the free press, handing out
lucrative war contracts to his cronies, raising taxes, inflating the
currency, and killing hundreds of thousands for the crime of desiring
self-government. These are just the sort of actions historians love.
The number-two winner in these competitions is FDR.
Moreover, Wilson and Jackson are always in the top five. The bottom two in every case are Grant and Harding. None
bothered to rate William Henry Harrison.
What does greatness in the presidency mean? It means
waging war, crushing liberties, imposing socialism,
issuing dictates, browbeating and ignoring Congress, appointing despotic
judges, expanding the domestic and global empire, and generally trying his
best to be an all-round enemy of freedom. It means saying with Lincoln,
"I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the
enemy."
The key to winning the respect of historians is to
do these things. All aspirants to this vile office know this. It's what they
seek. They long for crisis and power, to be bullies in the pulpit, to be the
dictators they are in their hearts. They want, at all costs, to avoid the
fate of being another "postage-stamp president." Madison said no
man with power deserves to be trusted. Neither should we trust any man who
seeks the power that the presidency offers.
Accordingly, it is all well and good that
conservatives have worked to discredit the current occupant of the White
House. Call him a cheat and a double-dealer if you want. Call him a tyrant
too. But we must go further. The answer to restoring republican freedom has
nothing to do with replacing Clinton with Lott or Kemp or Forbes or Buchanan.
The structure of the presidency, and the religious aura that surrounds it,
must be destroyed. The man is merely a passing occupant of the Holy Chair of
St. Abraham. It is the chair itself that must be reduced to kindling.
It was never the intention of the majority of
framers to create the mess we have, of course. After the war for
independence, the Articles of Confederation had no chief executive. Its
decisions were made by a five-member Confederation. The Confederation had no
power to tax. All its decisions required the agreement of 9 of the 13 states.
That is the way it should be.
Most of the delegates to the unfortunate
Philadelphia convention hated executive power. They had severely restricted
the governors of their states after their bitter experience with the colonial
governors. The new governors had no veto, and no
power over the legislatures. Forrest McDonald reports that one-quarter of the
delegates to the convention wanted a plural executive, based loosely on the
Articles model. But those who planned the convention – including
Morris, Washington, and Hamilton – wanted a single, strong executive,
and they out-maneuvered the various strains of anti-federalists.
But listen to how they did it. The people of the
several states and their representatives were suspicious that Hamilton wanted
to create a monarchy. Now, there's much mythology surrounding this point.
It's not that the anti-federalists and the popular will opposed some guy
strutting around in a crown. It was not monarchy as such they opposed, but
the power the king exercised.
When they said they didn't want a monarch, they
meant they didn't want a King George, they didn't
want a tyrant, a despot, an autocrat, an executive. It was the despotic end
they feared, and not the royal means.
Indeed, formally, the Constitution gives few powers
to the president, and few duties, most of them subject to approval by the
legislature. The most important provision regarding the presidency is that
the holder of the office can be impeached. It was to be a threat constantly
hanging over his head. It was, most framers thought, to be threatened often
and used against any president who dared gather more power unto himself than
the Constitution prescribed.
In one famous outburst, Hamilton was forced to
defend himself against the charge that the new office of the presidency was a
monarchy in disguise. He explained the difference between a monarch and a
president. But as you listen to this, think about the present executive. Ask
yourself whether he resembles the thing Hamilton claimed to have created in
the office of the presidency, or whether we have the tyrant he claimed to be
repudiating.
Among other points, Hamilton said in
"Federalist 69":
The President of the United States would be liable
to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction . . . removed from office; and
would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary
course of law. The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and
inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no
punishment to which he can be subjected. . . .
The President will have only the occasional command of
such part of the militia of the nation as by legislative provision may be
called into the actual service of the Union. . . .
[The power] of the British king extends to the
declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies
– all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain
to the legislature. . . .
The President is to have power, with the advice and
consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the senators
present concur. The king of Great Britain is the sole and absolute
representative of the nation in all foreign transactions. He can of his own
accord make treaties of peace, commerce, alliance, and of every other
description. . . .
The President is to nominate and, with the advice
and consent of the Senate, to appoint ambassadors and other public ministers.
. . . The king of Great Britain is emphatically and truly styled the fountain
of honor. He not only appoints to all offices, but can create offices. He can
confer titles of nobility at pleasure . . . and . . . [even] make denizens of
aliens. . . .
[The President] can prescribe no rules concerning
the commerce or currency of the nation; [the king] is in several respects the
arbiter of commerce, and in this capacity can establish markets and fairs,
can regulate weights and measures, can lay embargoes for a limited time, can
coin money. . . .
What answer shall we give to those who would
persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other?
Well, we can debate all day whether Hamilton was
naïve about the imperial office he was in fact creating, or whether he
was a despicable liar. But the fact remains that in his writings, despite his
reputation as a backer of the exalted presidency, he is by today's standards
a Congressional supremacist.
For that matter, and in comparison with today's
presidency, so was the British king.
Most historians agree that there would have been no
presidency apart from George Washington, who was trusted by the people as a
true gentleman, and was presumed to understand what the American revolution
was all about. But he got off track by attempting to suppress the Whisky
Rebellion, although he at least acknowledged that his actions went beyond the
strict letter of the Constitution. But though the presidency quickly spun out
of control, at its antebellum worst it had nothing in common with today's
executive State.
In those days, you could live your life and never
even notice that the presidency existed. You had no contact with it. Most
people couldn't vote anyway, thank goodness, and you didn't have to, but
certain rights and freedoms were guaranteed regardless of whoever took hold
of this – by today's standards – largely ceremonial position. The
presidency couldn't tax you, draft you, or regulate your trade. It couldn't
inflate your money, steal your kids, or impose itself on your community. From
the standpoint of the average American, the presidency was almost invisible.
Listen to what de Tocqueville observed in 1831:
The President is . . . the executor of the laws; but
he does not really cooperate in making them, since the refusal of his assent
does not prevent their passage. He is not, therefore, a part of the sovereign
power, but only its agent. . . . The president is placed beside the
legislature like an inferior and dependent power. . . .
The office of president of the United States is
temporary, limited, and subordinate. . . . [W]hen he is at the head of
government, he has but little power, little wealth, and little glory to share
among his friends; and his influence in the state is too small for the
success or the ruin of a faction to depend upon his elevation to power. . . .
The influence which the President exercises on public business is no doubt
feeble and indirect.
Thirty years later, all this would be destroyed by
Lincoln, who fundamentally changed the nature of the government, as even his
apologists admit. He became a Caesar, in complete contradiction to most of
the framers' intentions. As Acton said, he abolished the primary contribution
that America had made to the world, the principle of federalism. But that is
an old story.
Less well known is how Wilson revived Lincoln's
dictatorial predilections, and added to them an even more millennial cast.
Moreover, this was his intention before he was elected. In 1908, while still
president of Princeton, he wrote a small book entitled the President of the United States. It was a paean to the imperial presidency, and
might as well have been the bible of every president who followed him. He went
beyond Lincoln, who praised the exercise of power. Wilson longed for a
Presidential Messiah to deliver the human race.
There can
be no successful government, without leadership or without the intimate,
almost instinctive, coordination of the organs of life and action. . . . We
have grown more and more from generation to generation to look to the
President as the unifying force in our complex system. . . . To do so is not
inconsistent with the actual provisions of the Constitution; it is only
inconsistent with a very mechanical theory of its meaning and intention.
The
president must be a man who understands his own day and the needs of the
country, and who has the personality and the initiative to enforce his views
both upon the people and upon Congress.
. . . He
is not so much part of its organization as its vital link of connection with
the thinking nation . . . he is also the political leader of the nation. . .
. The nation as a whole has chosen him. . . . Let him once win the admiration
and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him,
no combination of forces will easily overpower him. His position takes the
imagination of the country. He is the representative of no constituency, but
of the whole people . . . the country never feels the zest of action so much
as when its President is of such insight and
caliber. Its instinct is for unified action, and it craves a single leader. .
. .
The
President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he
can. His capacity will set the limit . . . he is the only spokesman of the
whole people. [Finally, Presidents should regard] themselves as less and less
executive officers and more and more directors of affairs and leaders of the
nation – men of counsel and of the sort of action that makes for
enlightenment.
This is not a theory of the presidency. It is the
hope for a new messiah. That indeed is what the presidency has come to. But
any man who accepts this view is not a free man. He is not a man who
understands what constitutes civilized life. The man who accepts what Wilson
calls for is an apostle of the total State and a defender of collectivism and
despotism.
Conservatives used to understand this. In the last
century, all the great political philosophers – men like John Randolph
and John Taylor and John C. Calhoun – did. In this century, the right
was born in reaction to the imperial presidency. Men like Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, and Felix Morley called the
FDR presidency what it was: a US version of the dictatorships that arose in
Russia and Germany, and a profound evil draining away the very life of the
nation. They understood that FDR had brought both the Congress and the
Supreme Court under his control, for purposes of power, national socialism,
and war. He shredded what was left of the Constitution, and set the stage for
all the consolidation that followed. Later presidents were free to
nationalize the public schools, administer the economy according to the
dictates of crackpot Keynesian economists, tell us who we must and who we
must not associate with, nationalize the police function, and run an
egalitarian regime that extols nondiscrimination as the sole moral tenet,
when it is clearly not a moral tenet at all. Later conservatives like James
Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, and Robert Nisbet, understood this point too.
Yet who do modern conservatives extol? Lincoln,
Wilson, and FDR. Reagan spoke of them as gods and models, and so did Bush and
Gingrich. In the 1980s, we were told that Congress was the imperial branch of
government because Tip O'Neill had a few questions about Reagan's
tax-and-spend military buildup, and his strategy for fostering global warfare
while managing world affairs through the CIA. All this was bolstered by books
by Harvey Mansfield, Terry Eastland, and dozens of other neoconservatives who
pretended to provide some justification for presidential supremacy and its
exercise of global rule. More recently even Pat Buchanan repeated the
"Ask not . . . " admonition of John F. Kennedy,
that we should live to serve the central government and its organizing
principle, the presidency.
What the neocon logic comes down to is this: The US
has a moral responsibility to run the world. But the citizens are too stupid
to understand this. That's why we can't use democratic institutions like
Congress in this ambition. We must use the executive power of the presidency.
It must have total control over foreign affairs, and never bow to
Congressional carping. Once this point is conceded, the game is over. The
demands of a centralized and all-powerful presidency and its interventionist
foreign policy are ideologically reinforcing. One needs the other. If the
presidency is supreme in global affairs, it will be supreme in domestic
affairs. If it is supreme at home, there will be no states' rights, no
absolute property rights, no true liberty from
government oppression. The continued centralization of government in the
presidency represents the end of America and its civilization.
A key part of the theory of presidential supremacy
in foreign affairs is the idea that politics stops at the water's edge. If
you believe that, you have given up everything. It means that foreign affairs
will continue to be the last refuge of an omnipotent scoundrel. If a president
can count on the fact that he won't be criticized so long as he is running a
war, he will run more of them. So long as he is running wars, government at
home cannot be cut. As Felix Morley said, "Politics can stop at the
water's edge only when policies stop at the water's edge."
Sadly, the Congress for the most part cares nothing
about foreign policy. In that, it reflects the attitude of the American
voter. The exception is the handful of Congressmen who do speak about foreign
issues, usually at the behest of the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon,
and the increasingly global FBI. Such men are mere adjuncts of presidential
power.
In fact, it is the obligation of every patriot not
only to denounce a president's actions at home, but to question, harass, and
seek to rein in the presidency when it has sent troops abroad. That is when
the watchful eye of the citizenry is most important. If we hold our tongues
under some mistaken notion of patriotism, we surrender what remains of our
freedoms. Yet during the Gulf War, even those who had courageously opposed
this intervention in advance mouthed the old clichés about politics
and the water's edge and "supporting the troops" when the
presidency started massacring Iraqis. Will the same happen when the troops
are sent to China, a country without a single aircraft carrier, in
retaliation for some trumped-up incident in the tradition of the Maine,
the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin?
If there is ever a time to get behind a president, it
is when he withdraws from the world, stops wars, and brings the troops home.
If there is ever a time to trip him up, question his leadership, and denounce
his usurpations, it is when he does the opposite. A bipartisan foreign policy
is a Napoleonic foreign policy, and the opposite of that prescribed by
Washington in his farewell address.
In the midst of America's war against Britain in
1812, John Randolph wrote an open letter to his Virginia constituents,
pleading with them not to support the war, and promising them he would not,
for he knew where war led: to presidential dictatorship: "If you and
your posterity are to become hewers of wood and drawers of water to the
modern Pharaoh, it shall not be for the want of my best exertions to rescue
you from cruel and abject bondage."
Sixty years ago all conservatives would have agreed
with him. But the neoconservative onslaught has purged conservatives of their
instinctive suspicions of presidential power.
By the time 1994 had come around, conservatives had
been thoroughly indoctrinated in the theory that Congress was out of control,
and that the executive branch needed more power. The leadership of the 104th
Congress – dominated to a man by neocons and presidential supremacists
– bamboozled the freshmen into pushing for three executive-enhancing
measures.
In one of the Congress's first actions, it made
itself subject to the oppressive civil rights and labor laws that the
Executive enforced against the rest of the nation. This was incredibly
stupid. The Congress was exempted from these for a reason. It prevented the
Executive from using its own regulatory agencies to lord it over Congress. By
making itself subject to these laws, Congress willingly submitted itself to
implicit and explicit domination by the Department of Labor, the Department
of Justice, and the EEOC. It imposed quotas and political correctness on
itself, while any dissenters from the presidential line suddenly faced the
threat of investigation and prosecution by those they were attempting to rein
in. The imposition of these laws against Congress is a clear violation of the
separation of powers. But it would not be the last time that this Congress
made this mistake. It also passed the line-item veto, another violation of
the separation of powers. The theory was that the president would strike out
pork, pork being defined as property taken by taxation and redistributed to
special interests. But since pork is the entirety of the federal government's
$1.7 trillion budget, this has given the president wide latitude over
Congress. It takes away from Congress the right to control the purse strings.
Also part of the Contract with America was term
limits for Congress. This would represent a severe diminution of
Congressional power with respect to the presidency. After all, it would not
mean term limits for the permanent bureaucracy or for federal judges, but
only for the one branch the people can actually control. Thank goodness the
self-interest of the politicians themselves prevented it from coming into
being. After that initial burst of energy, this Congress surrendered
everything to the Clinton White House: control of the budget, control of
foreign affairs, and control of the Federal Reserve, and the FBI. The Justice
Department operates practically without oversight, as does the Treasury, HUD,
Transportation, Commerce, EPA, the SEC, the FTC, and the FDA.
Congress has given in on point after point,
eventually even granting the presidency most of what it demanded in
health-care reform, including mandated equal coverage of the mentally ill.
Chalk it up to long-term planning. They came into office pledging to curb
government, but are as infatuated with the presidency as Clinton himself.
After all, they hope their party will regain the office.
Then the Republicans had the audacity to ask in
bewilderment: why did the president beat Dole? What did we do wrong? The real
question is what have they done right? James Burnham said that the
legislature is useless unless it is curbing the presidency. By that measure,
this Congress has been worthless. It deserves to lose its majority. And its
party deserves to lose the presidency, whose powers they are so anxious to
grab for themselves.
The best moments in the 104th Congress were when a
few freshmen talked quietly of impeachment. Indeed it is their responsibility
to talk loudly, openly, and constantly of impeachment. Today's presidency is
by definition in violation of the Constitution. Talk of impeachment ought to
become routine. So should ridicule and humiliation. For if we care about
liberty, the plebiscitary dictatorship must be reined in or tossed out.
John Randolph had only been a Senator for a few days
when he gave an extraordinary speech denouncing John Quincy Adams. "It
is my duty," said Randolph, "to leave nothing undone that I may
lawfully do, to pull down this administration. . . . They who, from
indifference, or with their eyes open, persist in hugging the traitor to
their bosom, deserve to be insulted . . . deserve to be slaves, with no other
music to soothe them but the clank of the chains which they have put on
themselves and given to their offspring." John Randolph said this in
1826. This was a time, writes de Tocqueville, when the presidency was almost
invisible. If we cannot say this and more today, when the presidency is
dictator to the world, we are not authentic conservatives and libertarians. Indeed,
we are not free men.
This speech was delivered near the imperial capital
on October 6, 1996, at the John Randolph Club.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr
LewRockwell.com
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