Law Prof Obama: Law Be Damned

Classics scholar and historian, California farmer and philosopher Victor Davis Hanson:

All this is eerie; it has a whiff of the climate of the late 1850s, when the federal government was in perpetual conflict with the states, which in turn were in conflict with one another, and which often appealed to foreign nations for support. [snip]

The first sign of a debauched society is that it does not honor contracts, but reinterprets them according to perceived political advantage.

Now there is talk of an executive decree from the Environmental Protection Agency to implement provisions of cap-and-trade legislation that Congress will not pass. Republican senators are already worried that the administration will likewise simply begin to grant amnesty to illegal aliens en masse, without introducing such a proposal to Congress, which alone has the right and responsibility to make our laws. And the recent executive order to ban all offshore drilling in the Gulf clearly circumvented the legal process.

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Our President Barack Obama, before the election. It was all there, folks. We the Big Government:

“And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and [the] Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [it] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.

We the people. We the people. We must prevail in November. We must. For the sake of the America we cherish, for the sake of the children we bear and owe a better world, for the sake of liberty itself.