The Imperial Presidency and the Coming Dictatorship

When the Founding Fathers had met in Philadelphia in 1787, one issue they had to address was the issue of executive powers. While Alexander Hamilton was openly in favor of a permanent American executive (an American King of sorts), a majority of the Founders feared and opposed expansive and iron-fist executive powers. They crafted the Constitution that created a limited executive whose role was to enact those laws that are in pursuance of the Constitution. The Presidency was not to make laws out of thin air (as with most executive orders) or to issue edicts by which the entire country would be dictated by. The Presidency was to have very few functions, and even then, most of those functions can be carried out only with the advice and consent of the Senate. But even the Founders recognized that executive power over time will expand and grow to the point where they could become imperious.

There should be no doubt in the minds of most Americans that the modern Presidency has concentrated too much power into it's hands. The powers that most Presidents have exercised in the last century to the present day is unconstitutional. We indeed are living under an Imperial Presidency. But despite the near dictatorial powers that the Presidency wields, many Americans continue to revere the institution and the vast and expansive powers the Presidency exercises over our liberty and natural rights.

The current administration of President Barack Obama is yet another example of continual disregard for the Constitution and the limits it places on the power of the Presidency specifically and the Federal Government generally. This is not to say that his predecessors were not bad Presidents or did not act imperially. Indeed, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt and many other Presidents have acted imperially. But by which standard do we measure whether or not a President is acting imperial? As Lew Rockwell has examined, there are three ways in which a President can be imperial: international belligerence, domestic belligerence, and running roughshod over another branch of government. In many cases, imperial Presidents have been involved in all three activities. All three of these activities violate the constitutional liberties and natural rights of every individual American, and in some ways, the natural rights of non-Americans.

President Obama has been interventionist in both domestic and foreign affairs. Despite the rhetoric of “bringing our troops home”, the American empire of military bases and political dominance still exists with 800-1000 military bases in over 135 countries, the war in Afghanistan continues, Iraq will continue to hosts thousands of private contractors hired from the U.S. government, the President has been threating war in Syria and Iran while getting the U.S. into unconstitutional wars in Yemen, Libya and Mali. Despite the doom and gloom picture painted by warmongering neoconservatives and humanitarian progressives, President Obama is not ending the wars or the empire. Domestically, the President is not shy about promoting Keynesian policies of increasing government spending, artificially lowering interest rates, raising taxes, expanding the money supply and generally gaining more and more control over the private economy. But as the last 4 years have demonstrated, Keynesian and socialist/fascist economics do not work and have failed to alleviate the majority of Americans from the economic slump that came about from the Great Recession. 

 While domestically, the problems of higher taxes, increasing government spending and crippling national debt all prey on the liberties and natural rights of Americans, the policy of empire overseas and targeted assassination of American citizens is just as equally harmful to our freedom.

For some time, there was speculation about the Obama administration’s policy of targeted assassinations and whether or not the administration can legally assassinate American citizens. After such speculation and stonewalling federal judges and ordinary citizens, the Obama administration has recently sent the Justice Department’s legal memos to NBC that claim the legal justification for a policy of targeted assassination of persons overseas, including American citizens. Judge Andrew Napolitano recently commented on the Justice Department’s memos, saying that the logic of the document “is flawed, its premises are bereft of any appreciation for the values of the Declaration of Independence and the supremacy of the Constitution, and its rationale could be used to justify any breaking of any law by any ‘informed, high-level official of the U.S. government.’” He continues:

The quoted phrase is extracted from the memo, which claims that the law reposes into the hands of any unnamed “high-level official,” not necessarily the president, the lawful power to decide when to suspend constitutional protections guaranteed to all persons and kill them without any due process whatsoever. This is the power claimed by kings and tyrants. It is the power most repugnant to American values. It is the power we have arguably fought countless wars to prevent from arriving here. Now, under Obama, it is here.

The whole question of targeted assassinations of persons including American citizens became more exposed when President Obama dispatched drones from the CIA to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen born in New Mexico with affiliations to Al-Qaeda. After assassinating him while he was riding a car in a desert in Yemen, Obama administration dispatched a follow-up drone strike that killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son and his American friend. Awlaki’s father sued the Obama administration in court to prevent the killings in advance, but to no avail.

The administration has attempted to justify this policy of targeted assassination by claiming that even if someone wishes to trigger the use of force thousands of miles away from our shores-thus making it “difficult” to arrest such a person-the government through the President has the right to kill such individual with impunity. No mention or consideration is even put towards the fact that assassinations and non-judicial killings are illegal and unconstitutional under U.S. law. There was no declaration of war against Yemen (the location of the assassination and Awlaki), and there is no article in the Constitution that gives the President or the Federal government the power to assassinate people in non-judicial killings.

It is difficult to argue that a guy in a car in a desert far, far away from our shores can be a serious threat to our security to warrant sending drones to kill him on the spot. Even an argument for declaring war on the country harboring him is more difficult to make (does Afghanistan ring a bell?) due to the costs in terms of lives, fiscal responsibility and liberty necessary to find one man. It would have been better to have arrest the man and put him on a trial by jury. Extradition would have been necessary. The Attorney General has argued that the President’ careful consideration of each target is a fine constitutional substitute of due process. This flies in the face of everything the founding of the United States stood against and the Constitution.

Many liberals who feel that the policy of targeted assassinations may be too harsh suggest that the remedy can be found in a court modeled after the FISA Court. The FISA court was established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which was passed by Congress after the 1978 Church Committee exposed the massive abuses by the FBI who spied on and harassed Americans in the United State. The FISA court is not a real court; rather it is an executive panel with secret proceedings, housed right in the Justice Department, with the power to issue special warrants for spying on international communications with the enemy.

Faith in a FISA model court as a response to the policy of assassination is misplaced. As Anthony Gregory put is simply:

Between 1978 and September 11, 2001, there were about 13,000 FISA applications. Guess how many were rejected? Zero. That’s right, zero. This included a warrant issued to spy on a man in Phoenix accused of organizing a crime ring to steal and sell baby food.

Simply put, such a model will be nothing more than a rubber stamp for the President to kill anyone he wishes.

Make no mistake; such power grabs will not be used for the benefit of the American people or our liberties. Typically when an executive (whether that be a king, dictator or president, etc.) gains new powers, they typically exercise such power in the worse ways possible. This also applies to government generally.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that Obama is attempting to exercise such dictatorial power. He has made implications that he would use executive action to get around Congress in order to get anti-gun measures and budget measures passed. Congress has of course acquiesced to the power grabs by Presidents. As Chris Rossini has observed, the mainstream media seems to be preparing the American people for dictatorship. Let us hope that Americans will stand up to the federal government and resist iron-fisted executive power and undo the Imperial Presidency that has been foisted upon our country for some decades now.