American Thinker pieces by Michael Filozof
("The
United States Cannot Survive as Presently Constituted"), Ed
Straker ("Trump
should disregard clearly unconstitutional court orders"), Selwyn
Duke ("Trump
could just ignore court's order halting travel ban") could be
packaged together as a commentary by a freshly living Publius. They're
seamlessly reasoned. Indeed, as a whole, they convincingly illustrate why
the executive, in ignoring arrogations of power by the court, actually restores
the Constitution to its original and much healthier balance of power between
the Judicial and Executive branches rather than placing the nation, as the
liberals insist it must, in crisis.
But the observation should also be made
that Donald Trump does not yet see it.
Indeed, his lawyers out there in front of
that joke panel of the joke Ninth Circuit are justifying his reasoning rather
than his legitimate authority.
In exactly the fashion of a parent seeking
to avoid having to exert his natural authority, the lawyers are admitting a
child into their council. But the point is that a parent is placed by
Providence in a position of natural authority in order to exert it for the
protection of the child and parent, exactly as the executive is placed in his
position of constitutional authority for the protection of the nation.
And just as a parent, allowing a child to
decide on his bedtime, or indeed whether he should have a bedtime at all,
converts a family into a free-for-all, so a president, in chasing consensus
where he is not required to do so by the Constitution, only invites what
Shakespeare would call the leading of apes in hell.
Chaos.
This is why Lincoln was exactly right in
ignoring Chief Justice Roger Taney's order to release the
Confederate-sympathizing governor of Maryland from military arrest.
Because if the Federal Court was indulged and Maryland allowed to join
the Confederacy, Washington would have fallen and with it, in all likelihood,
the Union. And as Selwyn Duke notes, Thomas Jefferson reminded us that
the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
So wake up, President Trump. Do not
share your legitimate constitutional authority with those who are not by that
Constitution entitled to it. The presidents before you who have done so
were wrong.
And they've taken us to the edge of the
precipice in doing so.
Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD. See
it here. He lives and writes in the
colonial-era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York; blogs here; and can also be reached
at miniterhome@gmail.com.
