COLUMN: All hail our new legislating executive
All Hail the new U.S. President – our great Supreme Legislator! After describing his party’s performance in the November elections as “a shellacking,” some of us feared our great president would back off from his mandate to change our nation into a new and improved version. But we needn’t fear – when the president said he was “humbled,” we can now see that he realized he had not been doing enough. We all know what a great legislator he was as a senator – at least for the half-term for which he had a chance to show his greatness – let us rejoice that he is bringing his lawmaking prowess to the White House.
I hear my critics starting to rumble: It is true, the new Obama is not wholly new. Indeed, presidents have been influencing lawmaking for some time. Their insistence on making lawmaking an essential part of their campaigns has made it difficult for the true transformers to present themselves as such. Furthermore, the Obama administration first started to uphold its mandate to rule above the law last year. In April, it placed a moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Though it was necessary for the president to convince the Republicans – and, okay, even Democrats – that it was acceptable policy by arguing that it would be for a brief time while the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was assessed, Obama did not let his crisis go to waste. The moratorium is still in effect. It has not been easy to support this policy. But our fearless leader is never one to give in to public pressure.
The gulf economy, slammed by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, must now also deal with the effects of losing its drilling economy, on which it is highly dependent. A former EPA chief has declared that the moratorium is doing significant damage to the gulf economy. It is not easy to support the drilling moratorium, but we must thank our leader for protecting our waters from the unsightly mess of those drills.
To make matters worse, the courts have opposed Obama’s moratoriums. In June, the first was shot down by a judge who declared it was overly broad. Obama stood by his guns and made a new moratorium that stopped the exact same drilling. When these disrespectful courts declared that this one was also too broad, our leader had his response in hand: he would simply not let his administration issue drilling permits. Voila! Why keep making policies that the courts are going to disrespect? We can’t let naysayers push us around.
Let us take a moment to thank our media for supporting our glorious president in such times. Just imagine if the general populace was aware the president was being held in contempt of court!
So maybe the November elections did little to affect Obama’s policies. Perhaps instead he simply saw how effective simply enacting his will could be. Maybe he had formerly suffered under the disillusion that the constitutional authority of the president was limited to executing laws and not making them. Though I hate to suggest such, maybe it was Ms. Pelosi’s open contempt for the constitution that inspired our leader. We all know no one really cares about the old yellowing document anyway. Though, as Obama in a former life was a professor of constitutional law, he might have had delusions about its applications to 21st century American government.
However it happened, we can sleep at night knowing that Obama will stop at nothing to ensure his great changes are enforced. Today we are only seeing his negation of the law. Though 26 states won a court case charging that ObamaCare was unconstitutional, his administration has assured us it would not respect such an outrageous claim. Just last week, we saw him declare the his administration would not enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, that declares marriage on a federal level to be between a man and a woman. Our nation with all its petty rivalries and contention has been stuck too long in the past. I have great hope that tomorrow will see more active legislation from the White House. Finally we have been given a leader who will show us into the present – and guide us into the future.
Internationally, our old alliances are not needed. This is a new world and we must leave our euro-centrism, with those staunch allies we have had for so long. Obama is paving the way, selling our most loyal ally, the United Kingdom, to gain a foothold with Russia. An essential part of Britain’s strategy is not to let the world know just how many nuclear arms it has. To finalize the New START treaty, which aims to limit nuclear arms levels between the United States and Russia, the Obama administration gave Russia the serial number of every Trident Missile we supply to Britain. After all, what use is an ally such as Britain today? They only have the third largest military expenditures in the world – Russia is fifth – and have been a loyal ally for more than 100 years.
All Hail the New Presidency. But let us hope that Obama knows what he has done – he must now ensure that the other side never gains executive power again. Just imagine if a President Palin took the sort of power our great leader has. Why, the federal government could stop enforcing Roe v. Wade, start enforcing abstinence-only education and creationism – maybe even replacing evolution education – and start marauding our troops all over the world without any congressional input. Let us then, once again, have hope that Obama will not hold back on change and that he will ensure we never have a president who will push us back into the 20th century.
Charles Major is a graduate student studying business. He can be reached at charlesrmajor@gmail.com