Editor’s Note: This morning’s outing with the famed Roman rhetorician attempts to come to grips with the implications of the Obama legacy. The essay mines a concept also articulated this morning by Angelo M. Codevilla, a naval officer, Foreign Service Officer and senior fellow at the Claremont institute. His essay “After the Republic” discusses where the the government of the United States is likely to go, regardless of the outcome of the election on November 8th. I intend to vote tomorrow before leaving the farm and get my contribution to the affray out of the way. Cordevilla’s thoughtful piece is at:

http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/after-the-republic/

Tacitus effectively works some of the same themes this morning. In any case and regardless of the results of the election, we should prepare for life after the Republic.

-Vic

Tacitus Speaks: Anticipating the PRI

Historian Victor Davis Hanson, writing for National Review, considers the risks attendant to the selection of our next President. I think he’s on the right general track. However he’s fallen into the rhetorical error of false equivalence. More on that later. Here’s his article with my comments:

There is reason to worry about both candidates abusing power as President, because Obama and the press normalized executive overreach.

Not just them. You really have to add in the legislature and the judiciary, both of which failed in their sworn duty to safeguard the Constitution from the aforementioned overreach. And I suppose as long as we’re apportioning blame I should throw in the American people, who opposed the overreach in 2010, endorsed it in 2012, and opposed it again in 2014. We’ve sent mixed signals. As to 2016…

Donald Trump’s supporters see a potential Hillary Clinton victory in November as the end of any conservative chance to restore small government, constitutional protections, fiscal sanity, and personal liberty.

Clinton’s progressives swear that a Trump victory would spell the implosion of America as they know it, alleging Trump parallels with every dictator from Josef Stalin to Adolf Hitler.

Hitler mostly – leftists prefer not to mention Stalin, for obvious reasons. At some point I’ll take an essay to explain why the Hitler parallel is mendacious, but not now.

Part of the frenzy over 2016 as a make-or-break election is because a closely divided Senate’s future may hinge on the coattails of the presidential winner. An aging Supreme Court may also translate into perhaps three to four court picks for the next president.

Yet such considerations only partly explain the current election frenzy. The model of the imperial [I would say royal] Obama presidency is the greater fear. Over the last eight years, Obama has transformed the powers of presidency in a way not seen in decades. Congress talks grandly of “comprehensive immigration reform,” but Obama, as he promised with his pen and phone, bypassed the House and Senate to virtually open the border with Mexico. He largely ceased deportations of undocumented immigrants. He issued executive-order amnesties. And he allowed entire cities to be exempt from federal immigration law. The press said nothing about this extraordinary overreach of presidential power, mainly because these largely illegal means were used to achieve the progressive ends favored by many journalists.

The Senate used to ratify treaties. In the past, a president could not unilaterally approve the Treaty of Versailles, enroll the United States in the League of Nations, fight in Vietnam or Iraq without congressional authorization, change existing laws by non-enforcement, or rewrite bankruptcy laws. Not now. Obama set a precedent that he did not need Senate ratification to make a landmark treaty with Iran on nuclear enrichment. He picked and chose which elements of the Affordable Care Act would be enforced – predicated on his 2012 reelection efforts. Rebuffed by Congress, Obama is now slowly shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention center by insidiously having inmates sent to other countries.

This is a very incomplete list of Mr Obama’s unconstitutional actions.

Respective opponents of both Trump and Clinton should be worried. Either winner could follow the precedent of allowing any sanctuary city or state in the United States to be immune from any federal law found displeasing – from the leftist Endangered Species Act and federal gun-registration laws to conservative abortion restrictions.

Could anyone complain if Trump’s Secretary of State were investigated by Trump’s Attorney General for lying about a private email server – in the way Clinton was investigated by Loretta Lynch? Would anyone object should a President Trump agree to a treaty with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the same way Obama overrode Congress with the Iran deal? If a President Clinton decides to strike North Korea, would she really need congressional authorization, considering Obama’s [really Mrs Clinton’s] unauthorized Libyan bombing mission? What would Americans say if President Trump’s IRS – mirror-imaging Lois Lerner – hounded the progressive nonprofit organizations of George Soros?

The precedents are certainly in place for things like these to happen.

Partisans are shocked that the press does not go after Trump’s various inconsistencies and fibs about his supposed initial opposition to the Iraq War, or press him on the details of Trump University. Conservatives counter that Clinton has never had to come clean about the likely illegal pay-for-play influence peddling of the Clinton Foundation or her serial lies about her private email server.

Here is the false equivalence. The media is highly partisan and 80% leftist. They’ve done everything possible to demonize Donald Trump, even if he has occasionally outmaneuvered them.

But why, if elected, should either worry much about media scrutiny? Obama established the precedent that a President should be given a pass on lying to the American people. Did Americans, as Obama repeatedly promised, really get to keep their doctors and health plans while enjoying lower premiums and deductibles, as the country saved billions through his Affordable Care Act? More recently, did Obama mean to tell a lie when he swore that he sent cash to the Iranians only because he could not wire them the money – when in truth the Administration had wired money to Iran in the past? Was cash to Iran really not a ransom for American hostages, as the president asserted? Did Obama really, as he insisted, never email Clinton at her private unsecured server? [He did, using a pseudonym.] Can the next President, like Obama, double the national debt and claim to be a deficit hawk?

Remember the media’s new mantra: It’s unfair to be fair in covering Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Only Democrats get a pass.

Congress has proven woefully inept at asserting its constitutional right to check and balance Obama’s executive overreach. The courts have often abdicated their own oversight.

But the press is the most blameworthy. White House press conferences now resemble those in the Kremlin, with journalists tossing Putin softball questions about his latest fishing or hunting trip.

Not just White House press conferences. Have you seen questions the media pool poses to candidate Clinton? They are pathetic sycophants.

One reason Americans are scared about the next President is that they should be. In 2017, a President Trump or a President Clinton will be able to do almost anything he or she wishes without much oversight – thanks to the precedent of Obama’s overreach, abetted by a lapdog press that forgot that the ends never justify the means.

Well, almost never…

Back to this matter of false equivalence. I’ll remind you what I wrote in my 30 September essay ‘The PFD:’

Bear in mind that, unlike Democrat Presidents, a President Trump will face significant limiters. The “you can’t say that, you can’t do that” crowd will be out patrolling every day. More significantly, checks and balances will return to government. The principle of separation of powers will return to the fore. People right, left, and center will insist on scrupulous adherence to every word and clause in the US Constitution. Trump will be bound by all that. Even if he wanted to rule as a royalist (which I don’t think he does) he won’t be granted that dispensation.

If anything I understate the limiters. But yes, there will still be those precedents and the temptation to follow them. The Donald can be baited into intemperate words so the potential for intemperate action is there. It’s a risk.

Post-first debate – a two-on-one event, with Trump given an intentionally maladjusted microphone – the Real Clear Politics average of polls now has Mrs Clinton at +3.1 (a hair outside the margin of error) so I think we should focus more on the risks of a Clinton presidency. Her motto will be “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” In this case “mine” will be all the bad precedents set by the Obama presidency and the Clinton scandals. “Yours” refers to our system of government and our rights as codified in the Constitution. She will be a status quo President. What does that mean? A continuation of the trends already extant – toward royalism, toward the suppression of dissent, toward the progressive (irony intended) narrowing of personal freedom, and toward overall decline.

She’ll have limiters too, including ill health, more scandals, and the fallout from inevitably corrupt and incompetent governance. She’ll be protected by the media, by a supine Congress, a packed Supreme Court, and – above all- by an electorate permanently unbalanced by waves of welfare-hungry immigrants from the Third World. We’ll be looking at extended one-party rule.

In envisioning this prospect, the best model may well be another political party, the PRI. You see I have studied Mexican history, and not just the amazing, tragic drama of the 16th century collision between Spanish steel and neolithic Mexico. In the 20th century the socialist Institutional Revolutionary Party, or Partido Revolucionario Institucional (hence PRI), held power uninterruptedly for 71 years – from 1929 to 2000. That period was characterized by a steady slide into institutionalized (irony intended) government corruption and incompetence. In the late 19th century crime hardly existed in Mexico. By the late 20th century it was all-pervasive. Criminality fed on a partnership at the local level between PRI politicians and drug lords. The malign trifecta of bad governance, bad crime, and economic malaise (a byproduct of the first two factors) led to the departure of the best and brightest – or at least the most motivated – for points north. Mexican citizens had ever-lower expectations for their government. Even when they tried to vote out the PRI they were persistently stymied by election fraud. This is hardly something to look forward to, comrades.

But, as they like to say, vote your conscience.

Tacitus

Copyright Tactus 2016
http://www.vicsocotra.com