Tip of the hat to The Daily Caller whose video I did not embed here due to their insistence upon the usage of autoplay, something I view as evil. Please click here, for their story, complete with a recorded phone conversation in which an apologetic banker gets to tell a business owner who had held an account at said bank for over a decade, that the government had forced his account to be frozen for no other reason than the fact that the government no longer appreciates his industry’s contribution to our economy.
Yes, Operation Choke Point is an evil perpetrated by Barack Obama and Eric Holder. The fault dear Brutus however does not lie in our stars that we are underlings, but in ourselves. There are many who would point to the 60’s as the beginning of the Progressive’s gaining their stranglehold on our nation. Some point to FDR and the, “New Deal,” as that beginning point. I’ve heard that our troubles with the progressive movement date back to Woodrow Wilson and his Presidency. However, I would like to point out that the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments did far greater damage, even before Wilson took his position as our Chief Executive. (I realize that the Seventeenth Amendment became part of our Constitution about a month after Wilson’s Inauguration, but it was ratified before Wilson actually took office.) Many experts in our nation’s history will state that Teddy Roosevelt was the first Progressive to affect our national agenda, and granted he gave us a big push in that disastrous direction, and redefined the Executive Branch, but he was not where it all began. This all started with the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. This was the first victory of the Progressive Movement, and it has grown into the behemoth that allows Barack Obama to act as a man elected to be our emperor, rather than our President.
For those who are not familiar with it, the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 established our very first Federal Agency. This agency was vested with the ability to create its own rules, its own authority to enforce those rules, and its own system to adjudicate the process for any who wished to push back against the decisions of the agency. Quite literally, we had managed to create an entity that had contained within its scope of operation, a body that was vested with all of the powers of governance, thus doing away with the separation of powers. Since that date in our history, any and all legislation has been written purposefully vague, only ever including a desired outcome, with the specific rules to be determined later by either an existing federal agency, or through the creation of a new federal agency. It is With this wonderful exercise of genius that the destruction of our Constitutional Protections began. Agency Law was created with the establishment of the ICC in 1887. It should also be noted here, that it took almost exactly five years for the agency purportedly designed to keep the railroad men from becoming too powerful for the liking of those who lobbied for this legislation, to be peopled entirely with those, “robber barons,” so feared and vilified that the agency was thought necessary. Funny how that works out.
Once that happened, what we see today, even though it has taken 128 years to get here, became inevitable. Give Barack Obama credit for this at least. He saw the potential to simply ignore the U.S. Constitution afforded to him by this set of circumstances, and has taken full advantage of it. All he needs to do is suggest or ask that one of the agencies situated under the federal umbrella, write some additional rules to add to the scope under which they operate, and he pretty much can enact unilaterally anything he wishes to codify as law. Yes, technically such efforts can be overturned by our Judicial Branch, and indeed many of these actions have been thus far. However, our Judicial Branch moves too slowly to monitor or even address every such indiscretion. Even if it were capable of keeping up, Agency Law itself has become so ingrained in our society, such Judicial oversight and pushback has itself become all too rare.
In our history, there have been two Presidents who’ve tried earnestly to do something to put an end to, or at least reign in this system run amok. The first was Richard Nixon, and I’m sure you all remember what happened to him for his efforts. The second was Ronald Reagan, who also failed, and in fact discussed that failure as being his lasting regret.
So far, 26 states throughout the fruited plains have formally adopted ballot initiatives in favor of an Article V Convention for the purpose of proposing and debating Constitutional Amendments. I am most definitely in favor of this. By the way, many of the Liberals in our nation are as well, since they’re convinced that they would be able to alter the First Amendment to, “correct,” the Citizens United Decision.
One amendment that I’d like to see come to fruition would be something to put an end to Agency Law. Consider for one moment what this system has allowed for a President with dictatorial ambitions to do in only the short amount of time from early November until now. Barack Obama has rewritten our Immigration law, repealed the Second Amendment, pledged to unilaterally raise our taxes, promised to confiscate our 401k’s, threatened to fire the entirety of the retail financial services industry, instituted cap and trade, inflicted net neutrality, signed some very questionable treaties without the requisite Senatorial Consent, changed existing law, and all of this done with the statement that he gave Congress the chance to do what he wanted before he did it alone.
Don’t blame the Bamster however. While his actions are bad enough, it was we the people who didn’t realize that gridlock was itself a perk, gifted to us by the founding fathers, rather than a problem as proclaimed by the low information voting crowd. Barack Obama is merely the messenger, who has alerted us to a huge problem, and one that hopefully we can figure out how to correct.
Ronald Reagan campaigned on a platform that included ending the Department of Education and the Department of Energy. If the single most popular President in the modern era could not rid us of the two most unpopular facets of the federal behemoth, as he’d promised to do while campaigning, then what chance would anyone have to actually do something about reducing the size and scope of government? We keep talking about the symptoms, meanwhile, the cancer grows free. Something must be done to reign this monster in, and unless Agency Law itself is addressed, nothing will be successful.
Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.
Tags: EPA, Regulations
