By Dr. Ben Carson

 As a teenager, I began a new lifelong routine of starting and ending each day reading from the book of Proverbs, which, of course, was written by Solomon, a very wise man. Interestingly, my parents gave me the middle name of Solomon — not that I claim even a modicum of his wisdom.

After Solomon became the king of Israel, he gained great renown when two women came before him claiming to be the mother of the same infant. Solomon decreed that the baby should be divided and half given to each woman, at which time the real mother immediately relinquished her claim.

This made the judgment quite simple. I believe G0D has a sense of humor, not only because of my middle name and my affinity for Solomonic proverbs, but because I, too, gained great renown by dividing babies. In my case, it was complexly joined craniopagus twins.

One of the verses that seems pertinent to America today is Proverbs 22:7, which says, “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.” Most of us grew up hearing that debt is a bad thing. The advent and wide dissemination of credit cards diminished such teachings, and those in charge of our nation’s finances over the past few decades seem to revel in debt.

As a nation, we currently are carrying a national debt of $17.5 trillion. If we repaid it at a rate of $10 million per day, seven days a week, 365 days per year, it would take 4,700 years to repay. The only reason that we can sustain such a level of debt is our status as the international reserve currency for the world.

This is a position usually reserved for the most reliable and strongest economic nation, and this status allows us to print money. If Greece could print money, it would not be bankrupt, although it probably would continue to drive up its debt.

Additionally, we have unfunded liabilities of at least $100 trillion.

Why am I concerned about this? I have been talking about this issue since long before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent threat to abandon the U.S. dollar as Russia’s reserve currency. Unless he could attract many other nations to do the same, he likely would inflict more short-term damage on his own country than on the United States.

Nevertheless, the very mention of such an action should send shivers down our spine. He recognizes our vulnerable position, which is exacerbated by our insistence on incurring unsustainable levels of debt. I have no doubt that at a strategic moment, he will exploit our weakness.

A United Nations committee in 2010 recommended a change in world reserve currency policies, and others such as China have made similar suggestions. They are beginning to doubt the stability of America’s financial infrastructure.

Our continued fiscal irresponsibility not only threatens the financial well-being of the next generation of Americans, but it also increasingly jeopardizes U.S. security. Our international influence is weakened, as our borrower status makes us vulnerable to threats from Putin and others. Perhaps worst of all, if our status as the world’s reserve currency issuer changes, there could be a dramatic decline in our standard of living.

I have encountered a large number of elderly people who have told me that they have given up on the United States and are simply waiting to die. This is the reason that more eligible voters opted not to vote in the last presidential election than actually voted for either candidate. Many of these people are members of “the greatest generation.” They fought tangible and visible forces that threatened our freedom. The forces facing us now are less tangible, but are nevertheless at least as lethal to our way of life.

f this occurs, the Occupy Wall Street movement will seem like a walk in the park compared with the civil unrest that will result. It does not require a great imagination to envision some of the freedom-limiting responses that might then occur. Many say this is simply paranoia and fear-mongering, which is what the so-called elites traditionally say before a catastrophic collapse.

The good news is we can do better. However, we the people must first do our homework and make sure we know who our congressional representatives are and how they vote, not how they say they vote. If they are in favor of continued fiscal lunacy, as evidenced by their votes that keep raising our national debt, they need to be replaced by responsible candidates from any party who understand the implications of their actions.

We need people who understand that in order for businesses to grow and prosper the government must remove the heavy boot of regulation and interference from their necks. We need those who realize that taxation is supposed to provide the necessary revenues to operate a government that provides for the safety, infrastructure and freedom of the people.

The purpose of taxation is not to control behavior and certainly not to justify a government takeover of health care that initiated the most massive shift of power from the people to the government in our history. By declaring pertinent parts of the Affordable Care Act a tax, the Supreme Court facilitated the demise of freedom in America.

These should not be partisan issues, but rather the concerns of every freedom-loving American citizen who wishes to see prosperity return to our shores.

Fiscal responsibility, fair taxation, intelligent environmental and energy policies, strong international leadership, evidence-based educational policies, cost-effective health care that is readily available to everyone, and honesty can prevail, but some feathers of those who are currently comfortable may need to be ruffled.

We need to discuss all of these things openly, rather than giving ear to the constant demagoguery that now exists. We must then vote responsibly with full knowledge of records and remain vigilant to preserve freedom and justice for all. We still have the power to craft a better future, but urgency grows.

 

By Andrew Napolitano

Can the president legally bypass Congress and rule the government by decree?

The answer to the question above is: No. But you wouldn’t know that by listening to President Obama. In the past three weeks, the president has made it clear how he plans to run the executive branch of the federal government in the next three years: with a pen and a phone.

In a menacing statement at a cabinet meeting last month, as well as during his recent State of the Union address and in a pre-Superbowl interview with my Fox News colleague Bill O’Reilly, the president has referred to his pen and his phone as a way of suggesting that he will use his power to issue executive orders, promulgate regulations and use his influence with his appointees in the government’s administrative agencies to continue the march to transform fundamentally the relationship of the federal government and individuals to his egalitarian vision when he is unable to accomplish that with legislation from Congress.

He has carried out that threat already. In June 2012, facing a presidential election campaign that he feared he might lose and wishing to keep socially conservative Hispanics from voting for Mitt Romney, the president directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — the same folks who failed miserably at rolling out Obamacare — to establish standards of behavior for millions of illegal immigrants, which, if followed to the government’s satisfaction, would get them off of government deportation lists.

To be sure, deportation can be ruinous, particularly to a family with children who were brought here as infants and have become fully Americanized. But the conditions for deportation, and for avoiding deportation, can only be established by Congress, not by the president or his appointees. When he lays down a list of conditions that permit persons in America to avoid complying with federal law, he is not enforcing the law; he is rewriting it. Only Congress can lawfully establish the circumstances under which those who are candidates for deportation may legally avoid it.

As well, when the president creates the conditions for avoiding compliance with federal law, he can hardly be said to be enforcing it. Yet, enforcing federal law is the heart of the president’s job. The Framers were so concerned with the potential of presidents to decline to enforce laws with which they disagreed that they inserted the word “faithfully” in the presidential oath when describing his enforcement obligations, and then they inserted the oath itself into the Constitution. The inescapable conclusion from this is that the Framers intended American presidents to enforce all of the laws that Congress has written, even those they dislike, even those they condemn, even those that may frustrate their friends, even those that may harm their political interests.

On the other hand, American presidents have some discretion when it comes to enforcing laws and may set priorities that are not inconsistent with the laws themselves. Obama, like all of his predecessors, has issued dozens of executive orders and signed off on thousands of regulations that have been lawful and helpful. That’s because, as president, he is the chief executive officer of the executive branch of the federal government and is largely responsible for the professional behavior of the three million persons who work under him as they follow his lead in enforcing federal law.

Thus, executive orders that complement, supplement and further the laws that Congress has enacted, orders that guide officials in the executive branch as to the president’s wishes, priorities and goals, orders that clarify but do not contradict federal laws, can actually be helpful — and such orders are invariably lawful and constitutional.

But Obama seems to have had different kinds of orders in mind when he spoke of his pen and his phone — ones much more akin to the HHS regulations on avoiding deportation — and he has made no effort to hide his intentions. Two months ago, as the effective date of Obamacare was about to set in and after weeks of denying the obvious, the president acknowledged that the rollout of Obamacare was a disaster and that the cancellation of 6.2 million soon-to-be substandard health insurance policies was profoundly contrary to his assurances that that would never happen and was acutely harmful to those who lost their coverage.

To counter the effects of the rollout and the cancellations, the president told insurance companies to reinstate the substandard insurance policies for a year until the rollout could be corrected. Thus, on his own, he attempted to change the effective date of the onset of Obamacare from Jan. 1, 2014, which is the date in the law after which the substandard policies are unlawful, to Jan. 1, 2015, which is the date he now prefers.

The president has reminded us countless times that he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School and therefore understands the Constitution. He doesn’t act like he understands it. He surely knows that only Congress can change the effective date of a law, and that he is utterly without power to do so, no matter his purpose.

He revealed the corruptibility of power when three libertarian Republicans in Congress came to his assistance and he rebuffed them. Shortly after the president told insurance carriers to disregard the onset date of Obamacare, Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, offered legislation in Congress to delay the onset of Obamacare lawfully for one year and thus lawfully permit the return of the 6.2 million canceled policies for one year — and Obama threatened to veto that legislation should Congress pass it.

The same president who claims the unlawful power to rewrite federal law on his own would use his veto power to prevent Congress from doing so lawfully. His preferences surely constitute no less than a perversion of the roles assigned to the branches of government by the Constitution.

How dangerous is a president who wants to rule by pen and phone? Where will he strike next? How will this end? Will this deliver us to tyranny?

By Walter E. Williams

Let’s think about whether all acts of Congress deserve our respect and obedience. Suppose Congress enacted a law — and the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional — requiring American families to attend church services at least three times a month. Should we obey such a law? Suppose Congress, acting under the Constitution’s commerce clause, enacted a law requiring motorists to get eight hours of sleep before driving on interstate highways. Its justification might be that drowsy motorists risk highway accidents and accidents affect interstate commerce. Suppose you were a jury member during the 1850s and a free person were on trial for assisting a runaway slave, in clear violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. Would you vote to convict and punish?

A moral person would find each one of those laws either morally repugnant or to be a clear violation of our Constitution. You say, “Williams, you’re wrong this time. In 1859, in Ableman v. Booth, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 constitutional.” That court decision, as well as some others in our past, makes my case. Moral people can’t rely solely on the courts to establish what’s right or wrong. Slavery is immoral; therefore, any laws that support slavery are also immoral. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions (is) a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”

Soon, the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of Obamacare, euphemistically titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. There is absolutely no constitutional authority for Congress to force any American to enter into a contract to buy any good or service. But if the court rules that Obamacare is constitutional, what should we do?

State governors and legislators ought to summon up the courage of our Founding Fathers in response to the 5th Congress’ Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Led by Jefferson and James Madison, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 were drafted where legislatures took the position that the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional. They said, “Resolved, That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government … (and) whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” The 10th Amendment to our Constitution supports that vision: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

In a word, if the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is constitutional, citizens should press their state governors and legislatures to nullify the law. You say, “Williams, the last time states got into this nullification business, it led to a war that cost 600,000 lives.” Two things are different this time. First, most Americans are against Obamacare, and secondly, I don’t believe that you could find a U.S. soldier who would follow a presidential order to descend on a state to round up or shoot down fellow Americans because they refuse to follow a congressional order to buy health insurance.

Congress has already gone far beyond the powers delegated to it by the Constitution. In Federalist No. 45, Madison explained: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” That vision has been turned on its head; it’s the federal government whose powers are numerous and indefinite, and those of the state are now few and defined.

Former slave Frederick Douglass advised: “Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. … The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”