Is the President a Dictator?

Earlier this week, a federal appeals court in New Orleans upheld an injunction issued by a federal district court in Texas against the federal government, thereby preventing it from implementing President Barack Obama’s executive orders on immigration. Critics had argued and two federal courts have now agreed that the orders effectively circumvented federal law and were essentially unconstitutional.

Though the injunction on its face restrains officials in the Department of Homeland Security, it is really a restraint on the president himself. Here is the back story.

President Obama has long wished to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws to make it easier for people who are here illegally to remain here and to make it easier for them eventually to acquire the attributes of citizenship. He may have a bighearted moral motivation, or he may have a partisan political motivation. I don’t know which it is, but his motivation has driven him to use extraconstitutional means to achieve his ends.those laws. But those executive orders cannot write new laws or revise old laws or ignore existing laws that the Congress clearly expects to be enforced. That is just what a federal district court judge ruled earlier this year and just what a federal appellate court ruled in affirming the district court earlier this week.

All people who embrace the rule of law — whether they are for open borders or for an impenetrable border wall — should embrace these rulings because they keep the president within the confines of the Constitution, which he has sworn to uphold.

Under our constitutional system of supposedly limited government, all legislative power is vested in Congress. The president enforces the laws; he doesn’t write them. His oath of office commits him to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and it further commits him to enforce the federal laws “faithfully” — meaning whether he personally agrees with them or not.

The clash between the president and the courts is as old as our republic itself. Courts are traditionally loath to interfere with the business of Congress or the president. Yet when the behavior of another branch of government defies core constitutional norms, it is the duty of the courts in a case properly before them to say what the Constitution means and to order compliance with it.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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