DAYTONA BEACH SHORES -- Even as the Supreme Court sits to later declare unconstitutional Obama’s attempt to push socialized medicine down America’s throat, our president undertook a new and even greater effort to expand his power. Barack Obama re-issued an expanded version of an executive order entitled “National Defense Resources Preparedness” which would enable him to proclaim himself dictator at his own whim.
This EO permits Obama, acting through a small cabal of Cabinet Secretaries and other appointed officials, and with no reference to Congress other than an annual report, to take absolute control of the United States and everything and everyone in it. Under the guise of maintenance of a domestic national defense capacity and/or response to undefined emergencies, or even if there is no emergency, in war or in peacetime, the EO authorizes:
• The Secretary of Agriculture to control all food and livestock, veterinary resources, and the distribution of farm equipment and fertilizer. This includes all food produced for and consumed by the American people.
• The Secretary of Energy to control all forms of energy including the electricity and gas we use to light and heat our homes and businesses and the gasoline that fuels our cars and boats.
• The Secretary of Transportation to control all forms of transport including our personal automobiles, trucks, boats and airplanes – presumably including bicycles and horses.
• The Secretary of Defense to control all water resources, including the water which comes from the faucets in our homes and even the water from our own wells.
• The Secretary of Commerce to control all other materials, services (including labor – yours and mine) and facilities including factories, which can be forced to accept Obama cabal contracts on cabal terms or to accept installation of cabal equipment to produce cabal-desired items.
Under this EO the President’s cabal can make or guarantee loans to favored companies on whatever terms they deem appropriate. They can sell or otherwise transfer government owned equipment to the private sector on cabal-ordered terms (even for free to their good friends). They can also provide “appropriate incentives” to those who agree to produce what they want. The opportunities for favoritism and corruption contained within this power grab are so massive as to beggar the imagination. Can anyone say “Solyndra to the millionth power”?
Even Obama’s models and mentors in Chicago, justifiably renowned for its corruption, never conceived of anything on this scale. And yet there’s more. The EO permits the President’s cabal to renew the draft. And they can impress and retrain civilians (that’s you and me) to work as and where they see fit.
In short, under the authority proclaimed by this executive order, Obama’s cabal could create forced labor battalions. Nowhere is this authority requested of Congress. There is mention of a law conferring elements of this authority passed in 1950 but presidential authority on such a totalitarian scale was not dreamed of in those days. Under this EO the cabal can do what it wants and report on it to the Congress a year later, as if either the report or the Congress would matter by then. In fact the EO further usurps the constitutionally-delegated legislative authority of the Congress. More importantly it totally sets aside the Constitution itself.
In fairness, Bill Clinton adopted a similar if somewhat less thoroughgoing executive order and George Bush retained it. But neither of these presidents exhibited the raw drive for ever more authority or the deep-seated contempt for the Constitution that Obama has.
After all, it was Obama who:
• During his campaign denigrated the Constitution as a document of negative liberties which restricts the power of government. Surely it cannot have escaped his notice that such restriction was its among its primary original purposes? • Ignored the contractual legal rights of GM’s secured bond holders and gave their investments to the unions as a way of paying them off for their campaign contributions.
• Uses the EPA to evade the specific intent of Congress and impose “Cap and Trade” restrictions on energy, forcing up energy costs, to satisfy his envirochondriac supporters.
• Unconstitutionally requires Americans to purchase health insurance as part of a complex scheme to force socialized medicine on the country while seizing government control of one-sixth of our economy.
• Unconstitutionally forces religious institutions to pay for contraceptive materials in violation of their fundamental and strongly-held religious principles.
• Unconstitutionally continued authorization of FBI and NHS agents to write their own search warrants, search our homes or places of business on the basis of those illegal warrants and then jail us if we tell anyone about it.
This is only a partial listing of Obama’s outrages against the Constitution and the basic rights of all Americans. If Obama is re-elected we can only expect things to get worse. But Obama, Bush, Clinton or someone else, no president should have this degree of power and control.
Certainly war or grievous national emergency would require a president to have the authority to direct the nation and its resources until the condition requiring such authority has passed. But this authority and the circumstances under which it can be used must be set forth in law by the Congress. And Congress must conduct constant oversight of actions taken by any administration under such extraordinary authority.
Finally, it must be the Congress which determines when the conditions pursuant to the adoption of these powers are in place and when the conditions and the extra-legal powers no longer exist. Anything less is putting a vampire in charge of a blood bank.
We true Americans should urge our congressional representatives and senators to act to overturn and revise this outrageous power grab. And when Republicans are again in control of both Houses one of their first acts must be the repeal of most of Obama’s EO’s and the passage of laws which place rational restrictions on the President’s capacity to legislate via executive order, without reference to the only branch of government with the constitutional power and duty to legislate – the Congress of the United States.