by
James D. Veltmeyer, MD
With Senile Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar “Build Back Better” socialist green energy scheme facing an uncertain fate in the U.S. Senate, Biden is now threatening to pull a Barack Obama and enact this radical economy-destroying plan without congressional support. Remember Obama’s famous “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” declaration that he could bypass Congress anytime he wanted and essentially rule by decree? It seems as if Obama is still pulling the strings at the Biden-occupied White House.
What Obama was referring to at the time was his willingness to abuse the so-called presidential Executive Order ( EO ) to enact by fiat what he could not get through the Congress. Yet, Article I of the U.S. Constitution clearly states that “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress…” The Constitution also clearly delineates three separate but equal branches of government and the powers assigned to each. There is no mention in that document of Executive Orders, Presidential Decision Directives ( PDDs ), presidential signing statements or any other method by which the Executive can defy the legislative powers of Congress and act, essentially, as a dictator.
Indeed, in Federalist #47, James Madison warned that “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Executive Orders themselves were relatively uncommon in the early days of the republic. George Washington issued just eight and Thomas Jefferson a paltry four in his eight years in office. The original purpose of the Executive Order was really administrative in nature only, directives to government agencies and bureaus regarding the proper implementation of laws passed by Congress. That purpose has been completely overridden in our modern times, where Presidents use the EO to enact laws themselves. In 1952, at the height of the Korean War, President Truman tried to seize the nation’s privately-owned steel mills, only to have his Executive Order struck down by the Supreme Court. Justice Hugo Black in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer stated that an EO “must stem either from an Act of Congress or from the Constitution itself,” and said such an order is on dubious ground if it’s “incompatible with the express or implied will of Congress.”
Of course, Truman was just following in the footsteps of his “progressive” Democrat predecessors Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt who, together, issued a whopping 5,300 Executive Orders during their presidencies. It got so bad during FDR’s tenure that humorist Will Rogers said “Congress doesn’t make laws anymore, they just wave at the bills as they go by.”
Barack Obama, most clearly of recent Presidents, pushed the envelope on what he tried to foist on the nation through Executive Orders. DACA, for example, which granted blanket immunity for a million illegal aliens and which he had sworn up and down for months prior that he had no power to issue unilaterally. He went ahead and did it anyway and that was struck down by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in July 2021. He also sought to enact “cap and trade” through an EO when Congress refused its consent, imposing crippling environmental regulations on the nation’s economy by using the Environmental Protection Agency to make its own rules through the Clean Air Act. Recently, the Supreme Court slapped down on this type of bureaucratic law-making hard, ruling unconstitutional the EPA’s efforts to enforce environmental rules without congressional legislation. Obama also signed other Executive Orders granting the federal government massive new powers over the economy and allowing the White House to seize control and even shut down any telecommunications station in the country.
These type of actions are not reflective of a “democracy,” but of a dictatorship and Braindead Biden is only too happy to scribble his name on any new Executive Order his Marxist courtiers place before him. In his first two weeks in office, he signed an unprecedented number of EOs – 47 – which is nearly as many as Presidents Trump and Obama did in the same period, combined. That number has now climbed to 84 Executive Orders and 64 presidential memoranda. Some of Biden’s America-destroying EOs include:
1. Funding abortions in foreign countries
2. Cancelling the congressionally-approved Keystone Pipeline
3. Shutting down oil drilling on all federal lands, including ANWAR in Alaska
4. Letting boys into girls’ locker rooms
5. Allowing violent terrorist immigrants into the United States
6. Reactivating the catastrophic Paris Climate Accords
7. Mandating COVID vaccinations for large businesses
8. Forcing mask mandates on airline travelers
9. Stopping the building of Trump’s border wall
10. Counting illegal aliens in the Census
11. Increasing federal meddling in elections to favor the Democrats
How many of these decrees would have made it through a Congress barely controlled by members of his own party? Very few, if any. So, what’s the difference, just enact them anyway and let things drag out in the courts for months or years, while the damage on the nation is already inflicted. The Democrats seem to have endless ways of forcing their Marxist ideology down the throats of the American people without the approval of the people’s representatives in Congress. For decades, they just used the federal courts stacked with activist judges appointed by far left Presidents like Obama. Now, that President Trump’s appointees have shifted the courts rightward, they just pull the Executive Order out of their bag of tricks and continue on their merry way.
The Democrat Party shouts “democracy” at every opportunity, but every action they take is profoundly and fundamentally anti-democratic. As a party, they distrust the people, they distrust the separation of powers, they distrust the Constitution, they distrust anyone and anything that limits them in their crazed lust for totalitarian control over our lives. The use of the Executive Order needs to be permanently restricted – by congressional legislation or constitutional amendment if needed—to deny the Democrats one of their most powerful tools for tyranny.
Dr. James Veltmeyer is a prominent La Jolla physician and author of “Physician on a Mission: Dr. Veltmeyer’s RX to Save America.”He was voted "Top Doctor" in San Diego County in 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019. Dr. Veltmeyer can be reached at dr.jamesveltmeyer@protonmail.com and by visiting his website at drveltmeyer.com
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