Progressives’ Disrespect for the US Constitution

Ever since President Woodrow Wilson, progressives in the United States have expressed varying degrees of disrespect for the U.S. Constitution, and have chafed over its limitations on the implementation of their policies. 

In a 1912 speech while campaigning for his first term as President, then governor of New Jersey Woodrow Wilson stated his desires for a revolutionary change in American governance. Much like Democrats today expressing their outrage at Republicans always saying “No!” to their proposals, Wilson proclaimed opposition to the “stand-patters” in government who stood in the way of progressive change. In his image of America, his view of reality, both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence had out-lived their usefulness. He declared there needed to be a change in the way we viewed those two documents. Instead of the old view of the Constitution limiting the powers of government with a separation of powers between the branches of government, he wanted Americans to take the Constitution as a “living”, evolving document. Instead of a Constitution guaranteeing ironclad rights for individuals, Wilson wanted a Constitution constantly evolving the relationship between government and its citizens. Evolving human nature renders unnecessary the protection of individual rights. Instead of a separation of powers between government’s branches, Wilson believed society’s needs required cooperation between the branches.

Ever since Wilson, progressives (once erroneously called “liberals”) have enthusiastically embraced this vision of a “living, evolving constitution”. In this point of view, the Constitution possesses all sorts of implied “penumbras” and “emanations” to be  discovered by judicial interpretation. This perspective on the Constitution has the advantage for the progressives that it is much easier for a Democratic President to appoint progressive justices  to the Supreme Court and judges to the federal judiciary than to go through the mechanics of actually amending the Constitution. Franklin D. Roosevelt went so far as to attempt by authorization of Congress to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court. Then, he felt, he would get enough justices on his side to uphold his policies. This attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court with justices having opinions more to Roosevelt’s liking was rebuffed when Roosevelt lost the congressional votes to pass the enabling legislation.

However, it is not just the federal courts who have occasionally stood in the way of progressive designs. As is the case today, the legislative branch has also from time to time been a roadblock to “progress”. President Obama’s reaction to being stymied by a Republican Congress has been to pass his programs, not through Congress, but by Presidential edicts called “executive orders”. Infamously, he has issued an edict of this nature to allow large numbers of illegal aliens to remain in the country, and to ignore the enforcement of long established immigration law. Currently, that executive order has been declared unconstitutional by some federal courts, and the case will undoubtedly end up before the Supreme Court. Reportedly, he is also planning to issue an executive order to implement U.N. climate plans, rather than to submit the Paris international agreement to the Senate as a treaty. He has done the same with the nuclear deal with Iran. In addition, not able to get more gun control legislation passed, Obama appears to be readying an executive order on federal gun control that would expand background checks on gun purchases. The exact scope of this executive order is unclear, as the White House has refused to elaborate on exactly what they plan. Reportedly, Obama is considering a number of such gun control executive orders, but they are being drafted secretly with no Congressional input.

The apologists for these disputed executive orders have pointed to other presidents having issued more executive orders than Obama. However they miss the point. It is not a matter of how many executive orders Obama has issued, but whether or not his orders have been authorized by some statute or the Constitution itself. For example, the Constitution gives the President power as commander-in-chief to issue executive orders on the use of the armed services, except for the declaration of war itself. The controversy about Obama’s executive orders arises because so many of them seem to have no justification in law at all. Obama’s bad example seems to be infecting Hillary Clinton: She is pledging to freely use executive orders to get her policies implemented if the Congress does not enact enabling legislation.

These are not the only exertions of constitutionally abusive executive authority. A list of additional abuses can be found in the posts 25 Violations of Law By President Obama and His Administration,  This Obama Executive Order Dismantles the Bill of Rights, BREAKING: Five Governors Announce They Will Reject Obama’s Executive Order!, Obama making record use of presidential memos to carry out policy, Unconstitutional!!! Obama’s Latest Executive Overreach: Raises Minimum Wage for Federal Workers,  and Obama’s NLRB Recess Appointments Deemed Unconstitutional: 100 Decisions Impacted. These cited posts are just a small sample of a huge number to be found through an internet search.

I am fundamentally convinced most of the progressives behind these excesses are essentially decent people. Nevertheless, their basic beliefs about the nature of reality lead them to a very different and basically autocratic approach to government. I discuss this authoritarian predilection in the posts Progressives’ Basic Assumptions, The Complexity of Reality, and The Proper Functions of Government.

This sense of entitlement progressives have while holding government office to put any policy in place they deem worthy seems to have few if any constraints. While many of the examples of Democratic Party corruption I noted in the post The Corruption of the Democratic Party were due to simple greed, many – especially the ones attributed to the Obama administration itself – were because of this sense of entitlement to do whatever necessary to solve society’s problems. These are the really scary examples of corruption, undertaken because the perpetrators thought they were doing good for the ordinary citizen. It seems that to lie and cheat and to subvert the law are all acceptable if done in the service of their fellow man. Checks and balances are not for them.

One quotation I came across while researching for this post should be taken as a warning for all of us.

“The accumulation of all power, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
–James Madison, Federalist 46

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