Wormtongue may be the biggest liar we’ve ever had for a president. He’s certainly the most open, least inhibited, about it. But his notion that he’s a king who can rule by executive order is hardly new.
Indeed, it’s built into the system, according to conservative law professor F.H. Buckley. In a new book, he expands on what political scientist Juan Linz called The Perils of Presidentialism.
“While ‘an American is apt to think that his Constitution uniquely protects liberty,’ the truth ‘is almost exactly the reverse,’ says Buckley. “In a series of regressions using the Freedom House rankings, Buckley finds that ‘presidentialism is significantly and strongly correlated with less political freedom….Where parliamentary systems cleave off power from ceremony, presidential ones make the chief executive the living symbol of nationhood: the focal point of national hopes, dreams, fears—and occasionally fantasies.”
Starting with president-for-life FDR who vastly expanded the federal government, that’s how we got a Democrat bureaucracy which under Obamalot’s kingly direction has come to include an HHS that highhandedly created the birth control requirement Hobby Lobby sued over, and an IRS that punishes people who don’t toe the Democrat party’s line.
The master snoopers at NSA merely collect and archive our private emails in the name of fighting terrorism and will dispense them to who knows who for whatever reason. The IRS cracks the whip at our “elective monarch’s” whim.
Via Reason.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 