By Alan
Caruba
I’ve
read about this in history books. It’s what happened to the Weimar Republic in
Germany when its currency collapsed and anarchy followed. The result was Adolf
Hitler and the Nazi Party.
In the
wake of the Great Depression, the wheels began to come off the Weimar Republic,
a liberal democracy that had been in place since the end of World War One. In
1930 President Hindenburg assumed emergency powers. By 1933 three Chancellors
had preceded Hitler and when the Nazi government took over it simply ignored
Germany’s constitution.
A lot of
scholars who know much more about the U.S. Constitution than I are increasingly
speaking out about the same scenario occurring here. Radio personality Mark
Levin considers President Obama a despot in light of his refusal to negotiate
with the Republicans and the resulting shutdown of the government. Suffice to
say, his refusal, carried out by Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, worked.
For the ordinary citizen, Obama’s
actions during the shutdown have been instructive if they were paying attention.
He threatened not to pay Social Security retirees, Military
retirees, disability recipients, and federal retirees. The elderly and the
military were the prime targets for his threats and, despite the fact that more
than eighty percent of the government was still functioning, he directed that
national parks be closed; most dramatically in Washington, D.C. where veterans
of World War II and the Vietnam War were denied access to the memorials to their
service.
The President and the Democratic Party
want all the restrictions on their capacity to spend tax dollars lifted. They
want an end to the sequestration that curbs the natural inclination of
government departments and agencies to spend taxpayer dollars as fast as the
Federal Reserve can print them. The Reserve in turn has been purchasing $85
billion in the nation’s debt every month to maintain the fiction that the nation
can pay its bills despite the fact that it has more debt than the entire
national economy—the Gross Domestic Product—generates every year.
And who tripled that debt in just his
first term? Obama.
A new book by Clark M. Neilly III, “Terms
of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of
Limited Government” ($23.99, Encounter Books) says bluntly that “We are drowning
in a sea of unconstitutional regulations that compel obedience, stifle
innovation, and punish morally blameless conduct.”
“Heedless of the constitutional limits on
its own power,” says Neilly, “and indulged by a quiescent judiciary, the federal
government now spends 24 percent of our gross domestic product, the highest
proportion since World War II.”
Neilly is a senior attorney at the
Institute for Justice where he litigates constitutional cases involving economic
liberty, property rights, free speech, and school choice. He is the modern
version of the biblical Jeremiah raising his voice to warn of what is to come if
Congress and the courts do not begin to obey the limits the Constitution sets
forth so clearly that anyone can understand them.
“In 2013, a series of scandals involving
the Internal Revenue Service, the National Security Agency, the Department of
Justice, the Department of Agriculture, and other federal agencies reminded
Americans about the hazards of free-wheeling government”, says
Neilly.
“And in light of the Supreme Court’s
decision upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly
known as ‘Obamacare’, Congress can even tell people how to spend their money by
penalizing those who refuse to buy things it thinks they should have, like
government approved health insurance. Congress has no legitimate power to do
that, which is why the Supreme Court had to pretend the penalty was actually a
tax.”
Suffice to say that Neilly is extremely
critical of the failure of the judicial system to uphold the Constitution and
the current state of government in America today. “As far as the government is
concerned, it is your boss, setting policies and issuing edicts that you
will obey. Between that awesome power and you stands the
Constitution.”
Obamacare is despotism in action. As
Neilly says, if the government can order you to buy health insurance you may not
need or want and fine you if you refuse, you are no longer living in a republic
with a functioning Constitution.
And this is the reason the Tea Party
movement began and why a handful of Senators and Representatives, elected with
Tea Party support, have been holding out, seeking to defund, delay or repeal
Obamacare. If Obamacare succeeds, America will fail. It is already playing havoc
with the economy.
The government shutdown was a political
battle in a larger political war between the socialist Democratic Party and a
badly frayed conservative Republican one. Supported by votes that have been
purchased from the public treasury—the largess of welfare and a matrix of other
programs that redistribute wealth—and a measure of election fraud, the
Democratic Party has become a criminal enterprise.
As Ronald Reagan said in his first
inaugural address, “We are a nation that has a government—not the other way
around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government
has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and
reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the
consent of the governed.”
He said that in
1981.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
1 comment:
Unsurprisingly ,he never cut, or, threatened to cut welfare payments. In fact, they were never mentioned. Continuing his punishment and penalization of the working, earning, productive and responsible people.
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