The road from Republic to Dictatorship is paved with "good" intentions, like Obama's Obamacare delays...

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a watershed piece of legislation in American history. Based on the 15th Amendment, it outlawed discrimination based on racial, ethnic, religious and gender criteria.

You probably don’t realize it, but it’s likely that you encounter aspects of the Civil Rights Act on a regular basis. When you apply for a job, a mortgage, join a club, stay in a hotel room, or buy something online you are often presented with a page of text with a bunch of legalese that you probably don’t read. That text usually says something about non-discrimination, terms and conditions and various other policies. All of that appears because non-discrimination is the law of the land. That means that if a business or group discriminates based on one of those factors, they could be prosecuted by the government. That text you don’t read basically acknowledges as much.

Although Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, it does not enforce it. That is the President’s job. If someone breaks the rules, the Justice Department or the US Civil Rights Commission will most likely be the one that sues them, not some House or Senate committee. It’s the president’s job to execute the laws. That’s because Article II Section 3 states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”.

But what if he didn’t want to do it? Let’s say a president was elected and decided that 50 years was enough and that we didn’t need to focus on discrimination anymore. There would be howls from virtually every quarter of the country. “That’s unconstitutional!”

And of course those howling would be right. Today however, to very few howls, we have the exact same thing, only instead of the Civil Rights Act it’s The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.

President Obama has unilaterally decided that large swaths of his signature legislation will simply not be implemented as the law requires. “But he has good reason though…” one might say. Or “He has to, it’s not quite ready”. One could come up with any one of a dozen good reasons for the president to delay the employer mandate or the out-of-pockets caps. It is, after all, the single worst piece of legislation ever to be signed into law in the United States.

The problem however, is that the legislation does not give the President that option. The law doesn’t say the employer mandate, which requires all businesses with over 50 employees to provide health insurance to their staffs or face fines up to $3,000 per employee, can be implemented when the market is ready. It says they will begin in 2014. The law doesn’t say that the cost caps, which limit annual deductibles to $2,000 per individual and $4,000 per family, can go into place when the President is ready to implement them. It says they go into effect in 2014.

But that has not stopped President Obama from delaying both and other aspects of that highly dysfunctional Obamacare, including exempting Congress and its staff from the law… something else the President does not have the power to do.

“So what!” one might say. “The president is saving us from having to operate under a system that is unworkable for another year until he can fix it.” As reasonable as that might sound at first blush, that is a recipe for tyranny. How? Simple. The United Sates is a nation of laws. Congress passes bills (ostensibly) based on its power afforded under the Constitution and the president either signs them into law or vetoes them. Once they are laws, the president has the responsibility to enforce them.

He does not have the right to enforce only those he likes. His role is not to decide what laws – or what aspects of laws – he is willing to enforce. His job is to enforce the laws as they are written. If he does not like pending legislation he has the option of seeking to influence is writing in Congress before it reaches his desk. Once signed, or for a law signed by a predecessor, a president has the option of seeking to change the law via congressional action which will result in a new law replacing or amending the current law.

What he does not have the right to do is unilaterally change the law. If he did, what would stop a president from simply stopping to enforce Civil Rights Act against employers who only discriminate against blacks? What would stop a president from delaying Social Security checks because the IRS hasn’t collected enough in taxes this year? What would stop the president from enforcing the FDA’s testing regime on drug manufacturers? What would stop the president from giving a $1 million tax break to anyone who bundled $500,000 or more to his campaign? The answer to all of these is the same: Nothing.

If the president can pick and choose the laws he will enforce, then the Constitution is simply dead. If he can ignore the responsibilities it demands of him then so too can he ignore the limitations it puts on him. Habeas Corpus? Gone. Term limits? Gone. Freedom of Speech? Gone. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures? Gone. Unrestrained absolute power? Hello!

Obamacare is by any measure, bad legislation. Many people were saying that from the start, long before Nancy Pelosi famously said: "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it." Nonetheless the monstrosity that is Obamacare passed into law and the Supreme Court contorted common sense to declare it Constitutional. Nonetheless, in order to protect those responsible for this abomination from voter’s wrath the President has chosen to unlawfully delay some of the most onerous parts of the law. From a political perspective that makes perfect sense. The problem is, it’s simply unlawful. If Barack Obama gets away with this, the presidency is no longer simply first among equals in the Republic formed by our Constitution. It will have literally become a dictatorship. One man choosing what the laws are and to whom they apply. Now that is what I call “Fundamentally transforming the United States”… and not, I would suggest, in a good way.

The Police State of Obamaville...

When people think of a police state, they usually think of heavily armed, uniformed police kicking in doors and dragging out family members in the dark of the night. A police state doesn’t require police kicking down your door… at least not in the beginning, particularly when one is evolving from some other form of government, say for instance a constitutional republic. I’m not sure any police state ever came about as a result of some politician saying “When I get elected I’m going to use various elements of the government to take away your civil liberties, oppress my opponents and crush any opposition.” Typically dictators come to power promising to restore order amidst chaos or empowering the people against a tyrannical or corrupt regime. Putin was seen as bringing order to a crumbling Russia while Castro led a revolt against the corrupt Batista and Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew a hated monarch.

But this is the United States and by definition it could never become a police state.

But just for argument’s sake, let’s imagine someone had designs on becoming a dictator and wanted to turn the US into a police state, what kinds of things might be helpful? Obviously no dictator worth his salt wants to have opponents running around shining a light on his actions or stirring up the population against him or his policies. If only there was a way to keep opponents quiet. One way might be to choke off their funding by keeping them from raising much money and by intimidating their supporters. Check and check!

Of course, what good is being dictator if you can’t listen in to what subversive things people are saying about you… or anything else? Not much. As such it would be great to have a program where the government could listen in on every single phone conversation going on in the entire country… Not just when citizens are talking to known terrorists overseas, but simply when they are talking, period.. Check! But young people barely talk on the phone anymore… all they do is text, so you’d want to make sure you can see what’s going on there too. Check!

Unfortunately for you, every conversation in the country doesn’t occur on a phone as sometimes people still actually talk face to face. You might consider placing listening devices everywhere so you could listen in on those conversations too. Not likely however given the logistical nightmare it would be. If only there were a way to use their phones as listening devices, even when they’re turned off. Check! And maybe you could use the phone’s GPS data to track where everyone was at any point in time… and who they were with. Check!

As popular as talking on the phone is, people still spend a lot of time on computers at home. You’d probably want to have a program that allows you to monitor virtually everything anyone does online. Check!

Of course there is more to life than just what people say to one another.

It might also be helpful if you could make it so that a big portion of the population were dependent upon a check from the government (i.e. you), that way you could use that dependency as a tool with which to keep people in line and to whip up populist sentiment against anyone who was seeking to oppose your policies. Check!

As healthcare is pretty important to people, it might be very powerful tool to have if you could figure out a way to put the government in charge of everyone’s healthcare. Need that gall bladder operation or that cholesterol medicine? Let’s see what you’ve been up to first… Check.

Finally, as every good dictator knows, it’s important to disarm your enemies and potential enemies. Here you’d have to be very creative. A national background check before someone could buy a weapon would be a place to start. This would be particularly helpful if the agency operating such a system was allowed to define who it thought might be too dangerous to own a gun. A national registration where gun owner’s names and addresses were listed would be nice, and it would tell you exactly where to go to collect the guns whenever you’re ready. Not quite yet, but working on it.

But of course this is all hypothetical. As President Obama said: “If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

I think we have some problems here… Even if this unprecedented level of power were exercised by someone as honest and virtuous – not to be confused with perfect – as George Washington, a man who turned down absolute power twice in one lifetime, it would be a problem. Barack Obama is certainly no George Washington and in his hands all of this is a giant problem. This power in the hands as one as arrogant, perfidious and incompetent as Barack Obama is the equivalent of setting fire to the Constitution itself.

As a nation of laws and imperfect men operating in a world where millions of people seek new ways to harm us daily, there are certain things that government must do, many of which may seem unseemly in the light of day. Most Americans understand that. The America Barack Obama is creating is something all together different. If a government listens to conversations of its citizens in some limited, controlled circumstances, most Americans would accept that. If however that power is virtually unlimited, and more onerously, it is combined with a government that simultaneously seeks to control virtually every aspect of a citizen’s life, from what they can say and who they can support, to what healthcare they can get to their ability to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights to the economic opportunities available to them, then the Constitution becomes little more than a piece of framed artwork.

All that being said, we owe Barack Obama a great deal of gratitude for all of this. Before him Americans were seemingly happy to continue moving down the one way path of allowing government to take control of more and more of their lives as they deluded themselves into believing that only men of great character would control the levers of power. By demonstrating with crystal clarity exactly how fragile our liberty is in the wrong hands, perhaps Americans will come to, push back and begin reining government back into the box our Founding Fathers drew for it so that no one of any stripe can turn it into a police state. Barack Obama may well end up transforming America after all. Hopefully it won’t be in quite the way he intended.

Is a government any less despotic simply because it has not yet chosen to send stormtroopers to your door?

In the absence of government, anarchy sets in. In the presence of an all powerful government you have totalitarianism. In both cases a man’s attention must be focused on attending to the immediacies necessary for survival. In the former, dangers can be found around any corner as everyone fends for themselves. In the latter, dangers can be found around every corner as the government controls and sees all. When your entire existence is focused on surviving one day to the next, it’s difficult to focus on things like science, leisure or any of the myriad other things we take for granted in civilized society.

As such, the natural condition of human interaction demands governance of some sort in order to have more than simple survival. Government typically starts as a result of groups of individuals seeking to bring order out of chaos who form a governing body of limited power. As time goes by, governments tend to move from one side of the control spectrum to the other as they slowly begin to accumulate more and more power. Eventually a government will become sufficiently oppressive that its subjects revolt. How that revolt plays itself out can take many forms. In some cases it’s an even more brutal regime – think Iran – in some cases it can bring a return to anarchy – the French Revolution – or in others it brings about something in between – the signing of the Magna Carta.

It is from this cauldron of constantly morphing social and governmental forms the United States was born. After the misstep of the Articles of Confederation, the nation found its footing with the Constitution. The beauty of the Constitution was that it was written specifically to limit the power and reach of the government while giving that same government sufficient power to accomplish the tasks delegated to it. Unfortunately, over the last seventy five years the government has blasted through many of those fundamental limitations.

The result has been far too much regulation. When a statist like President Obama says as much in the Wall Street Journal, it must be obvious. Today there are more government regulations than at any point in our history. (Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama are not solely to blame for this however; after all, Richard Nixon gave us the EPA...) Indeed, before Obama FDR was the patron saint of regulation. Imagine, in 1934 alone the federal government generated over 10,000 pages of new law, four times what had been generated during the combined history of the country’s first 150 years of existence! Today laws with thousands of pages seem to be as common as the Sunday paper.

The problem with all of this? It’s the polar opposite of what our country was founded on in the first place. When it comes to the foundation of the United States, the Declaration of Independence is the why and the Constitution is the how. When government expands across the control spectrum to the point where it regulates (read: controls) everything its citizens do, then the ability of the citizens to pursue the original intent of the founders (Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness) is lost. And it’s not necessarily the laws themselves but their breadth and incomprehensibility. When one has a tax code that is 60,000 pages the sheer uncertainty of what is legal and the fear of penalty for making the wrong guess can be debilitating.

At what point does a government cross the threshold to be considered totalitarian? If it stops you from speaking? If it stops you from reading or writing books? If it stops you from practicing your religion? Most people would answer yes… obviously. What about if it decides it can tell you how and where you must spend your money? What if it seizes citizen’s property on a whim without providing you with just compensation? What if it suggests you might be a threat to national security simply because you once served in its military? What if it makes laws then exempts its friends from obeying them? If the government can do just about anything it wants, is it any less totalitarian just because its stormtroopers are not yet kicking down your door?

Americans have been bequeathed the greatest gift that any nation has ever been given. Our Constitution, albeit imperfect, provides an unparalleled framework for a nation to grow while almost perfectly sheltering its citizens from the chaos of anarchy or the choke-hold of totalitarianism. Over the last 75 years however, as Americans have been beguiled by the siren song of government protection from all manner of risk, the Constitution has been allowed to fade into a quaint anachronistic set of guidelines rather than a solid foundation for the rule of law. A constitution is merely words on a piece of paper. It can’t stop bullets, it can’t make you happy and it can’t feed your family. Our Constitution is only as strong as those who believe in its words and understand that it is a framework for letting citizens pursue happiness within the balance between anarchy and dictatorship.

Have we as nation become so enamored with government largesse and “protections” that we are unable to see that the distance between a government that recognizes no limits on its law making is not so far from a government that will use its police powers to enforce the resulting legislation? The Tea Party movement suggests that there remain some people who recognize the value of a strong constitution and a limited government. Let’s hope the energy from 2010 can be sustained through 2012 and beyond.