The president of the United States is not a king. Joe Biden seems to have forgotten that.
We used to teach our kids that the Constitution separates powers between Congress, which makes the laws, and the president, who carries them out.
The courts are there to resolve disputes over what the laws mean. The Founding Fathers designed this system, as John Adams wrote in the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, “to the end it may be a government of laws, and not of men.”
Presidents can give orders to the people who work for them in the executive branch, but they aren’t supposed to make laws. Our presidents have been forgetting this in recent years.
While the problem is bipartisan, the presidencies of Biden and Barack Obama have been the worst offenders in using presidential executive orders and administrative agency regulations to write new laws.
Just counting executive orders — Biden has issued 79 of them so far — doesn’t really capture the problem. There is nothing wrong with executive orders that explain presidential policies so the executive branch can follow them. And some of the worst mischief comes from orders issued by the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies and cabinet departments.
Student loan borrowers and advocates gather for the people’s rally to cancel student debt during the Supreme Court hearings on student debt relief on Feb. 28, 2023.Getty Images for People’s Rally to Cancel Student Debt
The real problem is when presidential administrations try to make sweeping new rules on issues of domestic politics that ought to be decided by the lawmakers.
So, when Congress wouldn’t pass Obama’s proposals to give legal status to illegal immigrants, he just ordered them himself. “I have a pen and a phone,” he said, as if this made him the whole government. He did the same with an ambitious plan to write new environmental emissions rules.
When Congress wouldn’t fund Donald Trump’s border wall, he declared a state of emergency and tried to bankroll it himself from money the executive branch had for other purposes.
Biden has put both of his predecessors to shame. In addition to his own barrage of environmental and social policy orders, Biden has used the COVID pandemic to claim “emergency” powers without precedent in American history.
The Supreme Court already blocked him from using workplace safety laws as an excuse to create a national vaccine mandate through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and — even more ridiculously — a nationwide tenant-eviction moratorium through the Centers for Disease Control.
Congress never made the CDC the nation’s landlord, and even Biden admitted he was just buying time until the Court could hear the case and stop him.
On Tuesday, the Court heard challenges to Biden’s attempt to spend half a trillion dollars cancelling the college and graduate school debts of 43 million people.
With whose money? The national debt, of course, because Congress didn’t appropriate funds for this or raise taxes or fees to pay for it.
Biden claims to be using the emergency powers of the HEROES Act passed after 9/11, the purpose of which was to let presidents suspend some student loan rules for soldiers serving abroad.
Even Nancy Pelosi and Biden’s own Department of Education warned him that he didn’t have the power to do this.
Advocates for student debt cancellation rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington, DC on Feb. 28, 2023. Alejandro Alvarez/Sipa USA
The Founders understood that the most dangerous power of all was when kings could rule without having to ask for money. The English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89 put an end to British kings trying to rule without calling Parliament to raise money.
James II was overthrown by men worried that he’d get the money elsewhere by selling out the country to foreign lenders — which at the time meant King Louis XIV of France.
The French kings ruled without their legislature until 1789; when they finally got so deep in debt that they needed to summon it, they ended up with the French Revolution.
Otto von Bismarck built the German Empire by proving that the Prussian king could go to war without raising funds through Prussia’s parliament; that set a precedent that left no limits on the Kaiser until he provoked a world war.
The Constitution is supposed to prevent that happening here, because it gives Congress the power of the purse. Biden is neither a king nor a Kaiser. If wants half a trillion dollars, he should ask Congress.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/02/28/biden-is-not-a-king-if-he-wants-to-pay-student-loans-he-needs-congress/