We have ceded far too much of what is ours to an imperial presidency.
By
Charles C. W. Cooke
One
thing I’m proud of,” cultural icon Barack Obama boasted to MSNBC’s
crack team of sycophants in 2006, “is that very rarely will you hear me
simplify the issues.” On this, he has certainly been true to his word.
Brevity and candor, shall we say, are not among our smartest president’s
strengths nor, outside the abstract, is he much of a salesman.
If you’re thinking that it is little short of breathtaking that a
man who is content to talk at length to the press about a gay basketball
player could have the temerity to characterize a question about the
constitutional order of the United States as an intrusion, you’re
absolutely right. What the president should have said is: “This is
straightforward. If Congress refuses to authorize me to order action, I
will not order any action.” This would not only have comported admirably
with his own on-the-record profession that it remains illegal for the
executive branch to order “military action” sans the blessing of the
legislative branch, but it would also have been the only possible answer
that tallies with his having asked for permission in the first place.
It
will no doubt prove easy for the keener apologists of the fast-waning
Obamacult to convince themselves that their much-assailed hero is merely
being magnanimous. Indeed, we have already heard such spin: The
president is admitting to Congress an “unprecedented” “consulting” role;
or he is “democratically” recruiting a skeptical public to take part in
his difficult decision; or — most amusingly, perhaps — he is trying finally
to reverse the long and checkered history of executive military
usurpation . . . which includes his unilateral decision to bomb Libya in
2011.
Nevertheless,
as gauche as it might sound to those who make a living being
inscrutable, sometimes in politics questions really do have simple
answers. Yesterday, speaking to journalists at the G20 summit in Russia,
Obama was asked again and again what he planned to do if Congress
refused to authorize action in Syria. The president brushed away the
question as if it were an irrelevance. “You’re not getting a direct
response,” he told journalists. When they pushed him anyway, he termed
the matter a “parlor game.”
One almost has to admire the man’s consistency. In St.
Petersburg, Obama went so far as to apply his favored test to the
United Nations Security Council, peremptorily waving away the authority
of an institution, which he has historically recognized as estimable,
with the now familiar explanation that it is “paralyzed, frozen, and
doesn’t act” — and, we are therefore to accept, moot. Students of
history will note the delicious irony of this statement’s being
delivered a few miles from the city’s Tauride Palace, in which the
short-lived imperial State Duma briefly set up shop at the turn of the
20th century. Then, Czar Nicholas II was so angry at what he regarded to
be the impositions on his prerogative — the product of concessions
forced by the 1905 revolution — that, before business had even started,
he issued some “fundamental laws” according himself the title of
“supreme autocrat,” conferring on himself the right to veto any
parliamentary decision that was unpalatable to him, and allowing himself
to dismiss the body on a whim. Now, almost a century after the Duma was
dismissed so that the Great War might be more efficiently prosecuted,
Obama stood outside a Russian palace and delivered his own imperial
assessment: I can do what I want.
From the rest of us, though, this ploy should elicit a
healthy “Oh, come off it!” The Obama administration has long presumed
that constitutional rules bind the executive only if and when it judges
those rules to be sensible, friendly, or apolitical. Immigration,
welfare, Obamacare, the debt ceiling — Syria is just the latest issue on
which it is asserting exemption from the law. How often have we heard
the president tell adoring crowds that if Congress will not act he “will
do it anyway”? Or, as he put it to Colorado Springs’ KOAA-TV in 2011,
“It would be nice if we could get a little bit of help from Capitol
Hill,” but, if it isn’t forthcoming, “we’re going to go ahead and do it
ourselves.”
Don’t get me wrong: I’m always
up for listening to an American president bash the United Nations. But
it helps if he does so for the right reason. The United Nations is
useless not because the incumbent president considers it to be
temporarily dysfunctional or unsupportive of his aims but because it is
an inherently corrupt, flawed, and feckless operation that — unlike
Congress — has no binding influence on the United States. If one is to
submit to the U.N., which this president has generally argued America
should, then one must stand by its decisions when one doesn’t like them.
It should be clear to all but the most partisan and obtuse that if an
institution can’t say no — for whatever legal reason — then it
is not an institution at all. Instead, it is an advice column, detached
from the body politic and unworthy of the attentions of the head of
state.
This is all to say that this president’s reflexive view of
executive power needs smashing — and smashing hard. The constitutional
order of the world’s greatest republic is not to be subjected to a veto
if it yields messy results, nor does it set a good example to pretend to
respect international bodies but to bolt when they no longer suit. The
rule of law and the integrity of public institutions are the very root
of any successful society, just as their dissolution is the overture to
collapse. While human nature and the apparently inexorable tendency of
government to metastasize dictates that this is almost certainly not
going to happen, it is fast becoming my view that the primary role of
the next president will be very publicly to explain his legal
limitations, and then to stick by them — perhaps even deliberately
losing a couple of issues to make a point. In the name of both security
and indifference, we have rendered far too much of what is ours to
Caesar. Cincinnatus, where art thou?
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