Federal Decree

Oct 20, 2006

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Thomas Jefferson

Flights of paranoia, far-out analogies, conspiracy theories, and wild charges devoid of evidence are the stock in trade of the Loony Left… and the Loony Right for that matter. Actually, “loonyism” has become a normal component of the American political scene, with wild theories and equally wild accusations going clear back into the 1800s. Some of the things Abe Lincoln was accused of came right out of fantasy land. Then to, don’t we all know that Herbert Hoover deliberately started the Great Depression, and that FDR caused the Pearl Harbor attack so he could help his buddy Stalin? During his presidential campaign, Ross Perot seemed to be quite upset with… somebody or other who was out to get him, while “Billary” Clinton was nearly frothing at the mouth over a supposed “vast right wing conspiracy”. Normally such ideas are ridiculed or ignored by those in the political mainstream. But nowdays it seems the Loony fantasies are increasingly embraced and nearly always tolerated by whatever political party is currently out of power. You won't find many of the wild ideas in the party platform, nor are they routinely voiced by party leaders. But they have been treated with tolerance, rather than active disapproval. So far at least, this phenomenon has cost Democrats nothing politically, certainly they haven't been tarred in the way Republicans were in the 1990s when a few of them flirted with lunatic notions about President Clinton.

One factor that fuels the loony movement is what appears to many as the administration's willingness to use 9/11 and the War on Terror as an excuse to strengthen presidential power and erode fundamental American civil liberties. Particularly troublesome is the National Security Agency's illegal wiretapping of phones in the United States without a warrant, and also the abandoning of our treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions, by engaging in "alternative interrogation techniques" of terrorists, either real or imagined, at the CIA's secret prisons.

Michael Moore, whose anti-Bush movie Fahrenheit 9/11 has made him a favorite of the far left, has explicitly argued that President Bush is moving the nation toward a Hitler-like dictatorship. "The Patriot Act is as un-American as Mein Kampf," he wrote in his book Dude, Where's My Country? Later on CNN, he said, "The Patriot Act is the first step. . . . If people don't speak up against this, you end up with something like they had in Germany." The most serious charge of all in my mind is that Bush is rolling back democracy as we know it. This charge isn't unprecedented, Republicans made it against President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930’s. Now Democrats, Independents, and even a good many Republicans also citing the Patriot Act as proof that we’re becoming a totalitarian state, a point I’ll agree with, and I’m most definitely not a fan of Mr. Moore or his political philosophy.

Regular readers of this column well know my opinion of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, and domestic spying. But bear in mind that I don’t specifically blame President Bush for all of it either. The slow and steady erosion of our freedoms has been going on for a very long time, and the Patriot Act is nothing more than the latest chapter in “The Fall of the United States of America”. For all practical purposes it began at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865, when the concept of States Rights were finally laid to rest by the Union Army, and government power became centralized in Washington DC.

I’d think that it’s well past time for this country to repeal an awful lot of laws and federal regulations, return to the original intent of our Constitution, and explain to the bureaucracy in no uncertain terms that they are public servants not petty dictators. I’d also go so far as to say that no federal law, rule, or regulation of any type should go into effect until after it’s been subject to public debate, careful study by Congress, scrutinized by the Supreme Court, and finally passed into law by Congress and signed by the President. Such a long and convoluted process would make it rather difficult to get anything passed into law, which sounds like a good idea to me. If we did something like this, I’d have a lot higher hopes for the continuation of this nation as a republic, rather than the rather bleak future promised by our ongoing experiment with rule by federal decree. There’d also be a lot less rules and regulations to bother people with, and hopefully a lot fewer bureaucrats swelling the federal payroll.

Consider the intent of the framers of the Constitution when they established our federal government. Nearly all government employees were intended to be nothing more than an assortment of clerks and recorders, while the duties of the person sitting in the Oval Office were little more than those of a glorified office manager!