For example, despite the fact that Article I, Section I clearly vests legislative power in Congress, the Obama administration has repeatedly altered provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, including offering employer contributions to members of Congress and their staffs when they purchase insurance on the exchanges created by Obamacare; delaying the deadline for the individual mandate; delaying the deadline for the employer mandate; exempting union reinsurance fees from the law’s coverage; creating federal exchanges where states have chosen not to create exchanges; expanding funding of insurer bailouts; and so on.25
The Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been extremely aggressive in implementing economically crushing regulations, for the most part without congressional authority. It has replaced provisions of the Clean Air Act to claim regulatory control over greenhouse gases and, in turn, vast segments of the American economy.26 Even Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe found that “[t]he Proposed rule rests on a fatally flawed interpretation of Section 111. According to EPA . . . Congress effectively created two different versions of Section 111, and the agency should be allowed to pick and choose which version it wishes to enforce.” “According to EPA, since 1990 the U.S. Code has reflected the wrong version of Section 111, and EPA has discovered a mistake [made by Congress]. According to EPA, both the D.C. Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court have previously misinterpreted Section 111. According to EPA, the two different versions of Section 111 have created ‘ambiguity’ triggering deference to the agency’s [interpretation]. Every part of this narrative is flawed.”27 Later, Tribe wrote: “[t]he EPA, like every administrative agency, is constitutionally forbidden to exercise powers Congress never delegated to it in the first place. The brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid. It does not.”28
The EPA has done much more. Again without statutory authority, the EPA has also unilaterally replaced provisions of the Clean Water Act to claim regulatory authority over vast areas of land.29
In immigration-related matters, Obama has nullified core parts of existing law and substituted for them his own political preferences through unchecked “executive action.”30 After instituting a string of executive directives altering existing immigration law, and insisting that if Congress did not act to adopt his immigration agenda he would act on his own, on November 20, 2014, just days after the 2014 midterm elections in which the Democratic Party lost the Senate, Obama took his most far-reaching immigration-related executive action. Among other things, he ordered the deferral of deportation (“deferred action”) of several million illegal aliens, assigning them temporary legal status, and instituted scores of additional immigration policy changes. The temporary legal status results in formerly illegal immigrants receiving extensive taxpayer-subsidized benefits from such programs as Social Security, Medicare, earned income tax credits, and so on. Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, estimates the lifetime costs of these benefits to the United States Treasury at $1.3 trillion.31
In a rare judicial rebuke of presidential overreach, and at the behest of more than two dozen states, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen issued a temporary injunction, writing, in part, that Obama’s executive actions created “a massive change in immigration practice” affecting “the nation’s entire immigration scheme.” Moreover, the executive actions did not comply with the executive branch’s own procedures for issuing regulations.32 There will be more litigation, with the case likely reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.
Despite Judge Hanen’s ruling, for the most part the courts have upheld executive lawmaking, to the extent they consider it at all. Even with the judiciary’s modern inclination for activism and its own penchant for legislating (perhaps because of them), since the New Deal the courts have essentially given their imprimatur to the unconstitutional expansion of presidential powers and, conversely, the abridgement of congressional legislating authority, to the great detriment of separation of powers and, therefore, constitutional government, by rejecting most challenges to executive branch lawmaking. Meanwhile, Obama has proclaimed that he will continue to advance his agenda “by hook or by crook” as he rightly sees few remaining constitutional impediments to his heavy-handed rule.33
Liberty is not an abstraction. It requires private and public virtue, a just rule of law, and established norms and institutions—the opposite of fundamental transformation. The form of government in which these indispensable qualities are best exhibited is a constitutional republic. The pseudointellectual urgency for action to produce the promised munificence of an idyllic society, while appealing on the surface, exacts a steep price—the disembowelment of the constitutional republic, a result that not so coincidentally serves the interests of those for whom power is intoxicating, despots and democrats alike. The rising generation has much to fear from these circumstances. Yet there is a painful irony, shared by many younger people, the reasons for which are various and complicated, in that some view themselves as rebels, of sorts, challenging authority and “the system” when, in fact, by their votes and activism, too many habitually contribute to their own demise and tyranny’s rise. Tyranny is not inevitable, despite the daunting obstacles to republican restoration; however, if the rising generation does not awaken to challenge these events and stand in its own defense, it will not live in true freedom. It will continue to be exploited under the rule of a progressively coercive and oppressive group of statists for as long as they acquiesce to, if not actively embrace, the design of those who plunder and deceive them. And they will commit future generations to an even more miserable plight.
As his second and last presidential term was winding down, President George Washington thought it fitting to deliver a farewell address to his fellow citizens. The man who was so consequential to the independence and founding of the United States, and the establishment of the American republic, published his final official address on September 19, 1796. He wrote, in part: “It is important . . . that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes.
“To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield.”34
EPILOGUE
* * *
A NEW CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
AS I ENDED THE previous chapter with President George Washington’s Farewell Address of September 19, 1796, I begin this chapter with President Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Speech on January 11, 1989. President Reagan encouraged the rising generation to “let ’em know and nail ’em on it”—that is, to push back against teachers, professors, journalists, politicians, and others in the governing generation who man
ipulate and deceive them:
An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.
But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs [protection].
So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.
And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ’em know and nail ’em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.1
The consolidation of power, a mortal threat to the individual and liberty, is now the primary object of government. Yet too many are indifferent to the principle of liberty. However, the current societal predicament described in previous chapters, collectively pushing the nation to the brink of catastrophe, is the making not of the rising generation, for it is late to the scene—although it clearly contributes to it—but of the governing generation and its twentieth-century forebears. Somehow the notion that government dispenses freedom and rights, rather than erodes and threatens them when unbounded by constitutional limits, has become an article of faith. Perhaps true liberty is appreciated only by the few. If not, it is time that younger people acquire the knowledge and muster the courage to defend themselves and future generations from big government’s reckless and unconscionable designs on the civil society.
This book is, against heavy odds, an appeal to reason and audacity. It is intended for all Americans but particularly the rising generation, which is the primary, albeit not singular, target and casualty of the federal Leviathan’s improprieties. It is an appeal to younger people to find the personal strength and will to break through the cycle of statist propaganda and manipulation, unrelenting emotional overtures, and the pressure of groupthink, which are humbling, dispiriting, and absorbing them; to stand up as individuals and collectively against the strong hand of centralized government, which if left unabated will assuredly condemn them to economic and societal calamity.
The challenge is formidable and the outcome uncertain, as is the case with most momentous causes. But there is no alternative short of surrendering to a bleak and miserable fate. There is solace in knowing that throughout history others have stepped forward and successfully led peaceful movements against mighty forces and their injustices. And make no mistake, pillaging America’s youth and generations yet unborn is a colossal and disgraceful injustice.
What is required is a New Civil Rights movement—not of the sort that exists today, which has been co-opted by statists, is often led by hucksters, and serves as a surrogate and advocate for centralized government and its pervasive agenda. But a truly new civil rights movement organized around fostering liberty and prosperity for younger people and future generations and against their continued exploitation. Indeed, the well-being of America’s younger people through the restoration and then preservation of the nation’s founding principles should be the primary objective of public-policy decisions.
For example, the emphasis in education must be on the best interests of the students, not the contractual and bargaining demands of tenured teachers and professors, the virtual monopoly control of education through government schools and public sector unions, the politicization of school curricula for the purpose of indoctrination and social experimentation, and the massive student loan debt young people incur to attend college for a few years, most of which subsidizes out-of-control university spending. This may serve the statists’ ends, but it certainly does not improve the education of America’s youth.
Immigration policy must no longer focus almost exclusively on the perceived or real interests of the alien, including alien children, while ignoring the economic, cultural, and societal consequences for America’s youth and future generations from uninterrupted waves of unassimilated illegal and legal immigration mostly from Third World countries. Ethnic pandering may improve the political lot of statist politicians looking for electoral advantage, it may serve the interests of self-appointed leaders of ethnic groups promoting balkanization and demographic advantage, and it may help incompetent foreign governments that prefer exporting their next generation to the United States rather than reforming their regimes and economic systems, but it certainly is not pursued in the best interests of America’s children and future generations, whose well-being is rarely considered in the making of these decisions.
Social Security and Medicare were sold to the public as insurance programs. They are not. As such, they now rely mostly on the “contributions” of younger workers and massive federal borrowing to subsidize them. Despite repeated and dire warnings about their unsustainable fiscal condition from the trustees appointed to oversee them, younger workers are compelled to continue to pay into these programs, from which they are unlikely to benefit upon their retirement and for which future generations will bear the brunt of their eventual collapse. Even so, the statist resists all relatively painless reforms that might slow the growth of these programs and enable younger people to gradually drop out of them. Of course, future generations do not vote in present-day elections. Burdening them with unimaginable debt has no contemporary political downside. These programs are actually worse than a Ponzi scheme, as the rising generation and its progeny are legally compelled to serve as a cash cow for as long as they can be milked.
The minimum wage is declared a humane way to increase the standard of living for low- or unskilled workers. But most individuals who work in these jobs are younger people, many of whom are working in their first jobs, often part-time jobs, learning skills and gaining experience that will help them improve their future employment prospects or start their own small businesses. When the minimum wage is increased, younger people often face layoffs because employers, including franchisees and retailers, are working on thin profit margins or can find less costly alternatives. Moreover, younger people with limited skills who are looking for work are less likely to be hired. Wage increases only matter if, in the first place, you have a job. The statist increases the minimum wage despite its adverse effects on youth employment opportunities.
The politicization and radicalization of the enviro
nmental movement into a primitive, degrowth, anticapitalism movement built on a foundation of junk science and emotionalism, and its commandeering of such federal departments as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department from which it turns countless debilitating and regressive regulations against the private sector, productivity, and innovation, directly threatens two centuries of human progress and the unparalleled American lifestyle. Its campaign to undo the Industrial Revolution and blunt the modern technological revolution will result in economic contraction while further empowering the federal government’s grip on daily human activity. The so-called Green Movement is, in fact, an antiliberty and antiopportunity movement aimed at changing the nation in ways that will deprive younger people and future generations of their full potential.
Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future Page 14