Yes, Gentle Reader, the time has come for full disclosures. (No, not by me; I have nothing interesting to disclose, except that I was once a crazed Albanian dwarf with a harelip and a hump, but was rescued from a life of squalor by master surgeons in the employ of a Communist conspiracy that now uses me to corrupt the wives and sweethearts of powerful men. Anyway, that’s a tale for another time.) And the Usurpers have fully disclosed, sure as sunrise:
Does anyone else remember Biden’s mentor, Barack Hussein Obama, after he lost control of both Houses of Congress, saying “I’ve got a pen and a phone” — ? Well, Clueless Joe has decided to one-up his old boss by arrogating an authority that the Constitution does not allow him.
The Usurpers are openly ignoring the Constitution. They have resolved to rule by presidential decree. Every now and then one of them mutters “executive orders,” but always sotto voce. The only persons actually bound by an executive order are the executive’s own employees. Even they cannot violate the law simply because the president has ordered it.
The United States’ political design is as a Constitutional federated republic. Under that design, no one has the absolute and unbounded power that Joe Biden is attempting to wield. But his handlers probably told him “It will be all right, Joe, just read the words on the nice teleprompter”…and then rewarded him with an ice-cream cone laced with Valium.
This cannot be allowed to continue…but it will.
The following is a snippet of a wholly fictitious interview of a wholly fictitious presidential candidate by a wholly fictitious television talk-show hostess:
“Why are you so…fixated on the Constitution, Mr. Sumner? Isn’t it a little bit naive to think a document two centuries old contains all the answers to the problems of a complex modern society?”
“Have you read it, Miss Weatherly?” Sumner’s voice remained mild.
“Not lately, no.”
“Then you might have forgotten that it’s the supreme law of the land. All other law and all government action must conform to it. If it needs to be revised or expanded, it contains provisions for that.”
“A lot of people would say,” Weatherly cooed, “that we’ve done that, only informally.”
Sumner pursed his lips and glanced down at his shoes. For a moment, Weatherly thought she might finally have scored against his infuriating self-assurance.
“Miss Weatherly,” he said with a note of regret, “I’m a lawyer. I was raised by a lawyer. He taught me to think of the law as our most precious possession. One of the questions he repeatedly insisted that I ponder was ‘What is the law?’ Not ‘What would I like the law to be,’ but ‘What is it really, and how do I know that’s what it is?’
“My profession, sadly, has made a practice of twisting the law to its own ends. There aren’t many lawyers left who really care what the law is, as long as they can get the results they want, when they want them. So they play the angles, and collaborate with judges who think they’re black-robed gods, and generally do whatever they can get away with to get what they want, without a moment’s regard for what it does to the knowability of the law.
“I care. I want to know what the law is, what it permits, requires, and forbids. I want my clients to know. And the only way to reach that result is to insist that the words of the law have exact meanings, not arbitrary, impermanent interpretations that can be changed by some supercilious cretin who thinks he can prescribe and proscribe for the rest of us.
“The Constitution is the supreme law, the foundation for all other law. If it doesn’t mean exactly what its text says—the public meanings of the words as ordinary people understand them—then no one can possibly know what it means. But if no one can know what the Constitution means, then no one can know whether any other law conforms to it. At that point, all that matters is the will of whoever’s in power. And that’s an exact definition of tyranny.
“Washington was against it. Jefferson was against it. Jackson was against it. All of these men rose to the office of president. I am against it, and I seek the same office. The rest is for the voters to decide.”
As I said above, wholly fictitious …and don’t you wish it were wholly real?
The aim of the High is to remain where they are. – George Orwell.
Masks aren’t just dropping on the Left.
A few years ago there was a lot of talk about “conservative pessimism.” It was triggered in part by John Derbyshire’s provocatively titled book We Are Doomed. In essence, the thesis was founded on the attitude of surrender inherent in William F. Buckley’s old formulation that conservatism consists of standing athwart the gates of history while crying out “Stop!” Conservatives who merely strive to arrest change, it was said, would be forced to give ground, slowly and grudgingly to be sure, but inevitably, and therefore were fated to lose to the dynamism of the Left. Many of the “professional Right” embraced the notion, as if it gave them some comfort to concede that theirs was a righteous but losing cause.
The idea has much substance. To “be against” is inherently a negative position, and negatives have scant power to mobilize allegiants. One must be for something to have dynamic potential. The conservatism that emerged from the disastrous Thirties and Forties, being entirely an “against” sort of creed, lacked that something. It took the emergence first of Goldwater and then of Reagan to correct things. They revitalized conservative thought around the central political value that had infused the Founding Fathers: individual freedom. Without that value, conservatism would have remained a static sort of affair that could not hold its ground indefinitely.
But dynamism of that sort is anathema to Establishments everywhere and everywhen. The American Establishment mobilized all its forces to blunt Reagan, and to destroy Donald Trump. They will only tolerate a conservatism that agrees, like Harvard, to “fight fiercely, and lose.” It is the clerisy of that sort of conservatism that has captured nearly all the Right-leaning media.
And from them we can expect nothing but mouths filled with feeble protests while their hands are out, palms up, for our support. Yet another dropped mask for an era of widespread chagrin verging on despair.
