Emperor Nerobama is getting deserved
criticism (even from some fellow Democrats) over a potential executive order,
which would compel businesses that contract with the federal government to
disclose contributions to candidates and causes made both currently and over
the past two years (i.e., retroactive to our transformation into the Obama
Nation), and would prohibit such companies from exercising their
US-Supreme-Court-affirmed right to be politically active. Objections to
this particular proposal have been made on the grounds that its only possible
purpose would be to identify, and thereby intimidate, contractors who are also
detractors (that is, who make donations frowned upon by the present
presidential administration); this is certainly true, but there's a more
general reason to oppose executive orders of this sort (v.i.), which reason I
have not heard mentioned by anyone, unless it be the subject of the
Professional Services Council's imprecise reference to the order's
"dubious legality."
The
controversy started me wondering just what an "executive order" is
anyway. Research into the matter revealed that the term applied
originally to an order given by the US president in the course of administering
the executive branch of the US government, which branch he heads; they were
exercises of executive power rather than usurpations of legislative
power. Most executive orders have fit into the former category, and can
be likened to instructions that a mistress of a household might give her maid
on the frequency of changing bedsheets. Progressively, though, our chief executives,
especially serial abusers of authority such as Franklin Roosevelt, Clinton, and
Obama, have deformed something innocuous into a means of unconstitutionally
issuing de-facto laws. (In recognition of this, one left-wing organization, the
Soros-funded Institute for Policy Studies, put out a report that urged Obama to
bypass Congress and henceforward rule exclusively by executive order, viz., by
decree.) What's execrable about Obama's draught fiat (which may not even
be the most outrageous example in history) is not just its partisan quality but
also the very fact of its intrusion into the legislative sphere.
Even I, cynical though I've long been about the
(mal)functioning of the US government, was shocked to learn of the perversion
of executive orders, and, even more so, to realize that this deceitful practice
has won tacit acceptance. Our president is called the chief executive
because his true rôle is to execute laws enacted by Congress, rather than to
enact laws himself. I'm no Founder-worshipper, but, if we're going to
call this country a "democracy" anyway, we might as well try to
ensure that its governance according to the US Constitution is the fact as well
as the theory. Conversely, if we're to continue to run the USA in such a
way that the Revolutionaries wouldn't recognize it, we ought to perhaps change
the spelling of the second syllable in "democracy" to
"mock."
