Home
In this issue
Nov. 23, 2009
JWisdom.com: Actually, it really is all about you with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff
Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Sept. 15, 2009 / 26 Elul 5769

‘Here, the people rule’

By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.


Printer Friendly Version

Email this article

Share and bookmark this article



http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | On the CBS "60 Minutes" Sunday night, President Obama tried to allay concerns that his headlong rush to get a health care bill enacted defies the time-tested axiom that haste-makes-waste: "I intend to be president for a while and once this bill passes, I own it."


The comment may have been intended as just a colloquial way of describing the responsibility that the chief executive will have for making the new health system work. Against the backdrop of myriad other aspects of this presidency, however, a more literal - and worrying - interpretation seems in order.


Mr. Obama's remark prompted a pointed response by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol on the magazine's website: "No, Mr. President. It's not about you. If legislation passes, you don't own it. We all own it. Any health care bill will become part of the U.S. Code, not simply an item on the Obama White House web site. We will all feel its effects. We are all responsible for the future of our country. Here the people rule."


With those four words - "Here the people rule" - Mr. Kristol has identified what's most grievously wrong with President Obama's agenda. In myriad ways, some great, some small, the new administration seems increasingly to be supplanting the nation's fundamental constitutional arrangements and the institutions built upon them. The trajectory is unmistakably in the direction of certain people ruling, specifically the President.


Reduced to their essence, the endangered order can be defined as a government of, by and for all the people, one rooted in the principle that power must be exercised, pursuant to the rule of law, in representative and accountable ways. Thanks to these constitutional arrangements and institutions, the people's rule here has been assured for over two hundred years.


In the place of such quintessentially American principles and practices, however, we increasingly confront power over our economy and society being concentrated in the hands of faceless federal bureaucracies and - worse yet - those of appointed and generally unvetted "czars." [The more we learn about some of the latter, like the erstwhile "Green Jobs" czar (or, more aptly, "commissar") Van Jones, the more unsettling such a concentration of power becomes.]


The checks and balances on the executive built by the framers into the co-equal legislative branch have withered, particularly when the same political party controls both the White House and both chambers on Capitol Hill. Legislation is now routinely adopted without careful deliberation, let alone real debate. With increasing frequency, votes are taken without an opportunity afforded to lawmakers even to read the massive bills they are asked to approve. The only way one of the most controversial proposals ever considered by any Congress, namely Mr. Obama's "reform" of health care, will be approved is if the Senate disregards its own traditions and rules designed to protect the rights of the minority.


Perhaps even more worrying is the embrace by Team Obama of a still-greater affront to American sovereignty and self-governance: transnationalism. The notion that laws, regulations and rulings promulgated by foreign bureaucracies, organizations and courts should be considered to have equal standing, if not more, than those produced pursuant to the U.S. Constitution and Code further undermines the latter. Mr. Obama has begun to populate the executive and judicial branches with transnationalists like Harold Koh, Eric Holder and Sonya Sotomayor, making it increasingly probable that those unrepresentative of and unaccountable to Americans will be exercising ever-greater influence over our lives and fortunes.


Mr. Obama's characterization that he will "own" the "reformed" health care system speaks to another, more intangible but increasingly vexing factor in his presidency: the practice known in totalitarian systems as the "cult of personality" whereby, as Wikipedia puts it, "a country's leader uses mass media to create an idealized and heroic public image, often through unquestioning flattery and praise."


To be sure, all American presidents are the subject of intense press attention and public interest. Still, the extent to which the incumbent has received, with few exceptions, decidedly and sustained favorable treatment from the mass media is unprecedented. The effect is compounded by, for example, the phenomenon of what amount to Obama shrines in every airport bookstore, magazine racks full of periodicals with covers featuring one or more members of the First Family and Pepsi ads imitating the president's campaign posters and themes.


Perhaps the most dramatic example of the upending of the traditional relationship between Americans and their government is captured in the video released earlier this year that featured dozens of Hollywood celebrities led by actors Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. The participants urge us to join them as they "pledge to be a servant to our President and to all mankind."


Now, this can be chalked up to nothing more than ditsy folks in Tinsel Town enthusing about the arrival of an administration that shares their politics and deserves their unalloyed support. Still, the notion that these prominent figures are popularizing - namely, that the relationship between the President and the public should be one of the ruler and his servants - is wholly incompatible with the American Constitution and system of government it prescribes.


Worse yet, it seems consistent with the aforementioned affronts to the principle that "Here the people rule." If this pattern persists, the thousands of our disaffected countrymen and women who descended on Washington last week will be but a small foretaste of a rising determination to restore government truly of, by and for the people.


Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy in the Reagan Administration, heads the Center for Security Policy. Comments by clicking here.

Archives


BUY FRANK'S LATEST
"War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World"  

America has been at war for years, but until now, it has not been clear with whom or precisely for what. And we have not been using the full resources we need to win.

With the publication of War Footing, lead-authored by Frank Gaffney, it not only becomes clear who the enemy is and how high the stakes are, but also exactly how we can prevail.

War Footing shows that we are engaged in nothing less than a War for the Free World. This is a fight to the death with Islamofascists, Muslim extremists driven by a totalitarian political ideology that, like Nazism or Communism before it, is determined to destroy freedom and the people who love it. Sales help fund JWR.

© 2006, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

Insight (Our Columnists)

 Arnold Ahlert
 Mitch Albom
 Michael Barone
  Dave Barry
 Tony Blankley
 Andy Borowitz
 David Broder
 Stratfor Briefing
 Mona Charen
 Linda Chavez
 Ann Coulter
 Greg Crosby
 Larry Elder
 Suzanne Fields
 John Fund
 Frank J. Gaffney
 Lloyd Garver
 Jonah Goldberg
 Julia Gorin
 Jonathan Gurwitz
 Paul Greenberg
 Lewis Grossberger
 Victor Davis Hanson
 Betsy Hart
 Nat Hentoff
 David Horowitz
 Laura Ingraham
 Cheri Jacobus
Jeff Jacoby
 Paul Johnson
 Jack Kelly
 Ed Koch
 Ch. Krauthammer
 Michael Ledeen
 John Leo
 David Limbaugh
 Kathryn Lopez
 Rich Lowry
 Michelle Malkin
 Jackie Mason
 Dick Morris
 Bill O'Reilly
 Jim Mullen
 Clarence Page
 Kathleen Parker
 Dennis Prager
 Wesley Pruden
 Tom Purcell
 Jonathan Rauch
 Celia Rivenbark
 Robert Robb
 Cokie & Steve Roberts
 Pat Sajak
 Debra J. Saunders
 Culture Shlock
 Roger Simon
 Michael Smerconish
 Thomas Sowell
 Mark Steyn
 John Stossel
 Cal Thomas
 Bob Tyrrell
 Diana West
 Dave Weinbaum
 George Will
 Walter Williams
 Byron York
 Mort Zuckerman

'Toons
 Robert Arial
 Chuck Asay
 Baloo
 Chip Bok
 Dry Bones
  Lisa Benson
 John Branch
 Gary Brookins
 John Cole
 J. D. Crowe
 John Deering
 Brian Duffy
 Everything's Relative
 Mallard Fillmore
 Jake Fuller
 Bob Gorrel
 Joe Heller
 David Hitch
 Jerry Holber
 Steve Kelley
 Jeff Koterba
 Dick Locher
 Chan Lowe
 Ranan R. Lurie
 Jimmy Margulies
 Rick McKee
 Michael Ramirez
 Kevin Siers
 Jeff Stahler
 Ed Stein
 Danna Summers
 John Trever
 Gary Varvel
 Kirk Walters

Lifestyles
 How 2
 Lori Borgman
 The Savvy Consumer
 Elder matters
 Fixit
 Dr. Peter Gott
 GET A JOB! by Marty Nemko
 Richard Lederer
 Tech Maven
 Every Monday Matters
 Nutrition Myths
 Bookmark These
 Bruce Williams
 How Stuff Works