Conservative author Diana West is out with a new WorldNetDaily column in which she warns that President Obama is turning America into a North Korean-style dictatorship with “one-party rule” and must face impeachment:
A few days ago, [Lars] Hedegaard wrote me with a new assignment:
“Would you write something about a disturbing phenomenon: the fact that Obama rules by decree and neglects the Constitution. How can this go on? Nixon was a complete amateur compared to this would-be Kim Jong-un. It looks like a coup d’etat. Nobody talks about it in Europe.”
…
Barack Obama, the government’s chief executive, is seizing powers that belong to the legislative branch. He’s not the first president to do so; not by a long shot. That’s also part of the ambivalence problem. Obama fits an accepted historical mode of abuse exemplified, for example, by the even more dictatorial FDR. Meanwhile, as Obama’s defenders correctly note, Obama, having issued 168 “decrees,” ranks on the low end among modern presidents. What distinguishes Obama’s fiats in our time, however, as Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told CNSNews.com, is that Obama “has repeatedly made use of executive orders to change statute, to change law, to change legislation enacted by Congress.”
…
This is the formula for one-party rule. As such, it is outrageous, but it is just more static.
To be sure, some conservative Republicans – Sen. Mike Lee, as well as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, for example – are speaking out against what Cruz calls the “imperial presidency.” But will their impassioned voices become static, too?
…
But Obama’s systematic assaults on constitutional governance require more than defunding, and more than static. They require, first and most urgently, a full airing. Impeachment, which may begin with an impeachment inquiry, is the means the Constitution provided us. It offers the way “forward,” as the president might say, to re-establish that America is a nation of laws, not men.
Not to be outdone, Alan Keyes claims that the “would-be dictator” Obama is getting help from the “GOP’s quisling leaders” in his movement towards “tyranny.”
He called on voters to back candidates who have “pledged to impeach/remove Obama and his collaborators,” warning that “if things just go on as they are, liberty will fail for lack of a party of liberty willing to battle against the elitist faction’s budding tyrants.”
If the Executive fails to carry out laws made by Congress (like the DOMA for instance), or takes actions not authorized by law (as Obama has with immigration and Obamacare), the legislature has two ways of compelling him to act, or to cease from unlawful action:
1. the power of the purse – cutting off money to the Executive branch; and
2. The impeachment/removal power – removing the vice president and the president, so that the succession provided for by law brings someone to office who will enforce the laws and respect the Constitution.
Absent active congressional discipline, Executive power always inclines toward dictatorship. Vaulting ambition aside, the pressure of events may feed this tendency even when nothing else does. We’ve had activist presidents before – Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, to name a few. But only in the last generation or so has Congress consistently failed to use its constitutional power to curtail and rebuke unconstitutional Executive actions.
…
Even more culpably, since control of the U.S. House was restored to them by grass-roots voters in 2010, the GOP’s quisling leaders have collaborated with Obama’s radical socialist schemes, giving him mainly ineffectual, lip-service opposition. Thanks to this GOP collaboration, Obama has behaved in a more and more openly dictatorial fashion. Like other would-be dictators, at first he abuses power cautiously. When he is not called to account, his impunity leads others to fear him. Their fear encourages him to escalate his abuses. As those greater abuses also go unanswered, fear commences to predominate, until at last few if any are left courageous enough to stand against him.
Was Obama’s move against Dinesh D’Souza a kind of Rubicon, across which we must expect new and higher benchmarks of tyranny? However that may be, thanks to the quisling temperament of the GOP leadership, only a determined push from the grass roots will re-energize Congress’ constitutional power to thwart dictatorship. America needs a Congress willing and able to call Obama to account by way of the Constitution’s impeachment/removal provisions. Without that impetus, the political class will fall-in behind his bid to free the U.S. government’s power from all semblance of prior constraint (too many of them quite eagerly).
The political change needed to get this result must either overthrow the quisling leadership of the GOP, or else forge the basis for a national grass-roots voter mobilization poised to replace the now shiftless Republican Party. If things just go on as they are, liberty will fail for lack of a party of liberty willing to battle against the elitist faction’s budding tyrants.
…
To remedy this deficiency requires an appeal to the people. The upcoming general election offers the chance to make such an appeal, in order to elect a Congress capable of driving back the elitists bent on liberty’s demise. If people demand an impeachment/removal Congress; if they back up that demand with their votes; 2015 will bring on a Congress differently composed. Reformed by the presence of constitutional majorities pledged to impeach/remove Obama and his collaborators, Congress will have what it takes to defeat Obama’s offensive maneuvers against America’s constitutional liberty.
