Mar 17, 2021 | Constitution, Liberty Articles
By Harold Pease Ph.D.
On the heels of the Equality Act which opens the door for religious persecution and damages the right of assembly and speech, the Democrats with H.R.1, also misnamed, Bill For the People Act of 2021, seeks to cement corrupt election practices indefinitely. Also, like the Equality Act, it had already passed the House with a solid 220 Democrats over unanimous Republican opposition of 210, before most Americans were aware of it because of the party’s overwhelming control of the press and full-court press censorship practices of anything negative to Joe Biden.
Contrary to its title the nearly 800-page, “Bill For the People,” would remove authority over elections from the people. It constitutes a federal takeover of all elections. It incorporates and legalizes every objectionable practice in the election of 2020. It installs controlled elections.
Under the Constitution all elections, including federal, are governed at the state level under the philosophy never elevate to a higher level that which can be resolved at a lesser level. The Founding Fathers placed the responsibility for all elections with the body closest to the people, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senator and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the Legislature thereof” (Article 1, Section 4,). Corruption is isolated and the people themselves, most affected by it, are most likely to correct it.
It undermines the Elections Clause cited above which bestows principle authority to the states and the Electors Clause of Article II exclusive authority in presidential elections. “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress” (Article II, Section 2, Clause 3) Indeed, it could destroy the Electoral College.
The state legislature constitutionally creates all law governing elections and holds all jurisdiction concerning the same. Removing them would require an amendment to the Constitution mandating a 3/4th vote of the states rather than a mere bill of Congress passed by the majority of a single party. Thus they hold authority over all voting issues. The Democrats want that power.
Again, all election law is the prerogative of the state legislatures alone excepting what presently exists in the Constitution or that which has gone through the amending process, as outlined in Article V, and thus reassigned to the federal government. These include Amendments: 12—election of the president, 15—universal suffrage not race based, 17—direct election of senators, 19—women’s suffrage, 24—poll tax for voting prohibited, and 26—voting at age eighteen.
The “For the People Act of 2021” dumps state authority over elections, thus moving it further FROM THE PEOPLE, handing it over to the federal government instead. It would mandate the following: mail-in ballots, a 10 day delay in election results, eliminate voter ID election security, register millions of criminally present foreign citizen voters, explode opportunities for election fraud, prevent cleaning up voter rolls, unleash mobs on political donors, gerrymander districts in favor of Democrats, make vote hacking easier, allow former felons voting before they complete their sentences, help those aged 16 and 17 vote illegally, ban keeping the records necessary for an election audit or recount, mandate ballot drop boxes, and work to extend to U.S. territories extra Democrat seats in congress (“15 Insane Things in Democrats’ H.R. 1 Bill to Corrupt Elections Forever,” by Joy Pullmann, March 8, 2021).
Such also violates Amendment 14, Section 2, which gives states exclusive constitutional authority to decide when felons may vote again. Again, a mere statute cannot override an Amendment to the Constitution.
It unconstitutionally replaces state authority with unelected commissions. The present independence of state judges assessing election controversies now would be under the authority of a new unelected “Commission to Protect Democratic Institutions” from Washington D.C.
If passed this is the largest overhaul of U.S. election law in at least a generation, perhaps since women’s suffrage, totally unconstitutional without an amendment. With virtually no bipartisanship in Congress, Democrats are quite happy with how they “elected” Joe Biden in 2020. The vote in the Senate is predictably 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaker.
Still, Senate rules require a 60 vote margin of victory and that will not happen honestly. This they admit, “If Mitch McConnell is not willing to provide 10 Republicans to support this landmark reform, I think Democrats are going to step back and reevaluate the situation,” Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD), the author of HR 1, told Vox in a recent interview. “There’s all manner of ways you could redesign the filibuster so [the bill] would have a path forward” (“The bill still faces a steep climb in the US Senate,” Vox by Ella Nilsenella, March 3, 2021).
With the passage of H.R.1 everything previously illegal in an election is now made legal. Simply put, “The bill interferes with the ability of states and their citizens to determine qualifications for voters, to ensure the accuracy of voter registration rolls [and] to secure the integrity of elections” (The Facts About H.R. 1—the For the People Act of 2019, The Heritage Foundation February 1, 2019). Look to permanent one party rule and the end of free elections and the Constitution as we know it, if this bill, removing governance of elections further from the people, goes through.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, ple ase visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
Mar 10, 2021 | Constitution, Liberty Articles
By Harold Pease, Ph.D.
Vice President Mike Pence, the second most important Republican, was noticeably absent from the conservative confab CPAC a couple of weeks ago. Why? He has no place to go. Right now Pence is unlikely to ever serve elected office again. Normally the Vice President of a popular president follows the exiting president to the highest office in the land. Not now!
Pence served honorably as Trump’s Vice President and played a major role in the development of, what should be called, the Trump Vaccine. Unlike Senators Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, each more Democrat than Republican, he was totally conservative, loyal, and religious. But sadly he missed his moment in time and self destructed in minutes because of his ignorance of the Constitution he swore to uphold.
But he was not alone. The Constitution was betrayed by both political parties due to ignorance, defiance of the document, or fear. On January 6 two Constitutional processes remained, either would have easily solved the election question between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, one involving the President of the Senate, Mike Pence, the other involving the House of Representatives.
In the first the Constitution reads, “The President of the Senate [Vice President Pence] shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted” (Amendment 12). All Pence had to do when a state submitted two slates was to say. “Arizona (et al.) has submitted two slates one from its state legislature, the other forwarded by the state secretary of state signed by the governor. Since only the state legislature is recognized by the Constitution as the proper submitter, and I can not count both, I will count only it.” Since five of the six contested state legislatures were Republican the issue evaporates.
Or, he might have said instead. “Since I can only count one slate and two have been submitted, I will give Arizona (et al.) 48 hours to resubmit directly to me a new slate of the state legislature only signatures; the candidate with a majority of these signatures will be counted. If this is not received in the time allotted, I will not be able to count any electoral college votes for Arizona in the 2020 presidential election.”
Instead, Pence chose to follow a procedure not at all in the Constitution termed the objection process. This required a member of the Senate and a member of the House each objecting, then dismissing the two houses to their separate quarters for two hours of discussion rendering a decision before reuniting. A process fraught with potential problems.
The objection process was contrived in the Equity Act of 1887, ten years after the fraudulent presidential election between Samual Tilden and Arthur B. Hayes in 1877, but the law had never been tested in a serious election as a procedure to replace the Constitution nor added to it as an amendment to the Constitution requiring 3/4th of the approval of the states as had been required in adjusting election procedure in Amendment 12.
Sadly the second and last Constitutional procedure in resolving a presidential election was defied by both political parties and the media, so ignorant or contemptuous of the Constitution were they. If Pence was unable to follow his constitutional procedure as President of the Senate as outlined above, he should have simply stated his inability to count two vote slates from the same state and turn it over to the House of Representatives as constitutionally required.
The Constitution reads. “if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers …the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; … and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice” (Amendment 12, U.S. Constitution).
In the House each state has only one vote for president, regardless of its size, California and Wyoming each have but one vote. Republicans controlled 28 state delegations, two more than the majority needed to win. Republicans blew this advantage entirely, Pence in particular.
Worse yet, Pence and the constitutionally ignorant Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi essentially deleted this section of the Constitution by choosing instead a procedure not in the Constitution nor therein implied, termed the objection process. Why is this so dangerous? Past practice, once done, is the “go to” position, to maximize authority not actually in the Constitution and is the favored option for those wishing to destroy it.
Either of the two constitutional procedures remaining January 6, president of the senate or the House delegation, would have resulted in a Trump victory, hence Democrats had no interest in following the Constitution. Unfortunately Pence was too ignorant of the document or afraid to stand with it, instead he damaged the Constitution by legitimizing a procedure not in the Constitution over one, the House process, that was. One can understand why Democrats do not follow the Constitution, all gave Trump victory, but there is no excuse for the Republicans. All the Democrat’s had for a win was ballot manipulation and electronic vote switching from China.
So Pence has no place to go and could not feel good having failed the Constitution but his accomplice Mitch McConnell should not hold future elected office either. Biden holds office because of their constitutional ineptitude.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, ple ase visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
Mar 3, 2021 | Constitution, Liberty Articles, Take Action
Harold Pease, Ph. D.
No act of Congress would affect negatively more Americans than the House of Representative’s recently passed Equality Act, 224 D-206 R, now slated for the U.S. Senate, then the President for his signature. Billed to ban discrimination against “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” it, instead, enshrines it into the 1964 Civil Rights Act potentially protecting pedophilia and pederasty under “sexual orientation.” Nothing in it is constitutuonal.
This is the same bill passed by the Democrat controlled House 20 months ago but dropped because it would never pass the then Republican controlled Senate and had no chance of a signature by President Trump. All this has changed with controversial elections allowing a Democrat Senate and Biden, a strong supporter, in the White House. Sixty votes must be found in the Senate to bypass a filibuster. Democrats are expected to cheat by ignoring this requirement forcing the bill though with a simple majority.
The 13-paged ambiguous Equality Act “would give homosexuality, transgenderism, and other perversions of human sexuality and gender the same protections as race or sex in employment, housing, public accommodations, and more.” It specifically prohibits religious freedom as a defense. “The legislation applies to churches, religious schools, religious hospitals, religious employers, gathering places, sports, all government entities, and more. Christian adoption agencies will be shut down, too, if they refuse to place children with homosexuals or individuals confused about whether they are men or women. That has already happened in states with similar legislation.”
It could criminalize Christianity, Judaism and Islam as their holy writ condemns as sin the behaviors of the LGBTQ community. As federal law “churches, synagogues, and mosques will no longer be able to uphold marriage between men and women, or any moral standards on sexuality at all. Counselors of faith will be banned from helping people with unwanted same-sex attractions or gender confusion. And Christians, Muslims, and Jews will no longer be allowed to seek out counselors to help them deal with those issues. Indeed, under the measure, everyone will have to affirm the LGBTQ agenda, or face persecution and destruction at the hands of the federal government. Churches will lose their tax-exempt status if they do not submit. Schools will lose their accreditation…and this is just the start” (“Equality Act Would Unleash Federal Persecution of Christians,” By Alex Newman, New American, May 8, 2019).
The Equality Act is anti- women, The unchurched may say, “This is not my fight.” But it affects them too with respect to abortion, bathroom privacy, and women’s sports! “By amending the definition of ‘sex’ in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this legislation codifies a fundamental right to an abortion up until the moment of birth.” Seconds short of infanticide. By effectively eliminating Hyde protections, it ensures that American taxpayers foot the bill for abortions (“Democrats’ passage of ‘Equality Act’ is the first stage in their attempts to CRIMINALIZE Christianity,” by Randolph Jason, May 24, 2019).
It vastly undermines women’s privacy. “Men who claim they ‘identify’ as women will be allowed to use women’s restrooms, showers, changing areas, and even bunk with women on trips, including church trips,” any man “could simply walk into female facilities under this bill and claim to be a ‘transgender’ who identifies as female,” placing girls and women at risk. “It would even be forced on churches, domestic-abuse shelters, Christian schools, and much more” (“Equality Act”).
The Equality Act decimates high school female sports and the monumental gains in the sexual revolution of the seventies that equalized opportunity for women’s sports. Biological men with more weight, size and strength, claiming transgender status, can compete with women. Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) “introduced an amendment at the last minute to the Equality Act that would have preserved Title IX’s protections for female sports teams, but Democrats — the ‘party of women’ — rejected it soundly.” Women’s sports will never be the same. Ironically the Democratic Party, has abandoned 52% of the population (women) in favor of the “less than one half of one percent of the population claiming transgender status” (“Why do Democrats think they have the authority — and the RIGHT — to regulate gender on high school sports teams?” The National Sentinel, June 3, 2019). On bathroom privacy and sports Democrats are anti-women.
The real fear for critics of the bill is that it “provides the state with the power to persecute anyone who won’t celebrate any aspect of the LGBTQ agenda…it turns any recognition of the differences between the sexes or any preference for traditional sexual morality into actionable ‘hate,’ creating fertile grounds for lawsuits.” It puts the LGBTQ community in direct collision with God as defined by Christianity, Judaism and Islam. These world religions recoil from the behaviors of this group. Behaviors, they believe, places them at odds with God and salvation itself. This legislation is equivalent to “pouring legal acid on a marriage-and-family-based culture.” For them this is war between good and evil.
Instead of equality it gives legal power to opponents of religion who will, according to Prof. Robert Gagnon of Houston Baptist University, an expert in biblical sexual morality, “codify into law that you are a bigot, the moral equivalent of a racist, tantamount to being a member of the Klu Klux Klan, who must be shut out of society and, wherever possible, harassed and persecuted for your beliefs.” Thus, the Equality Act “is the most dangerous bill to freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion that has ever been proposed on a national level” (“A misnamed legal jackhammer strikes,” by Robert Knight, Washington Times, May 19, 2019). No wonder the vast majority of religious communities oppose it.
Ironically the best way to have the LGBTQ community treated fairly is housed in Christianity, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” But in today’s upside down world: right is wrong, slavery is freedom, evil is good, and now equality is inequality. Again, nothing in it is constitutuonal.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, ple ase visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
Feb 17, 2021 | Constitution
By Harold Pease, Ph.D.
Military intelligence knew that several foreign actor countries, notably China, intended to participate in America’s 2020 election. Thus they prepared for this and captured “terabytes of information” of all foreign electronic vote changes in all 2,995 counties. Through them we, today, can go to any county in the U.S. and see if its vote was changed by what foreign actor, precise time, precise place sent from and received, and precisely how many votes were changed. This is the most thorough, powerful, and convincing documentation I have ever viewed.
This is the information Fox News anchor Lou Dobbs wanted to share the evening he was fired. LibertyUnderFire opposes censorship and thus is sharing, from military intelligence, what the public was then forbidden to know by the censoring, globalist, establishment press. You decide! We believe Americans capable of deciding for themselves without censorship.
Mary Fanning, national intelligence researcher and author, is the voice summarizing “the election fraud, of foreign intrusion into our election… collected in real time… before, during and after the election.” She invites viewers to a screen shot of a chart with multiple columns and explains, “What you will see is documentation of foreign interference in the election. The first column…shows that on November 5, 2020, at 7:43 and 38 seconds we had a foreign intrusion, and it shows the IP address the Internet protocol address. That is the number of that protocol address of the hacker that entered into our election.”
“The second column is the owner or source of that IP address that shows that ChinaNet in Beijing Province entered the election. It shows an ID. That is a unique address of a computer that shows the exact computer using that IP source that entered into our election.
“The next is the target, that’s the IP target, that’s the Internet Protocol address of the target… Then the next is the target state. And in this case, it shows that it’s Michigan. Where in Michigan? That’s the next column, it shows that it is in Emmet County, Michigan. Then, the IP target, that is the unique address of another computer, in the United States that the hacker has gone into.
“And then, it shows the method of intrusion. Now, in some cases you’re going to see that they use credentials. That means that they have fake credentials because there were administrators that have been placed on the Secretary of State’s computers, false, administrators; in other cases it shows that they broke through the firewall. In some cases they did both. Now, in the next column it shows whether it was successful. You’ll see a Y, that shows that yes it was successful. Now oftentimes they’re not successful and they have to go back and try for another intrusion and then it shows whether that’s, in fact, successful as well.
“Then in the final column which you’re seeing are votes changed. Now, in this particular case, when they went into Emmet County, Michigan, the votes that were changed was, they stole 3,477 votes from Donald Trump. That’s what you’re looking at….Now as you go through this document, … all the multiple intrusions into our election, what, you’ll notice [is] that over 66% of the intrusions into our election came from China.
Fanning then explained, “There are thousands of pages of documented footprints, of foreign intrusion into our elections. We see this is coming from China. In many cases from Huawei, from Alibaba Cloud Service, from China Unicom, from YouCloud, from China Mobile T Tong. You know, this also came…from Iran as well. This is a foreign intrusion. This is the theft of our vote. But it also was documenting exactly the votes, the vote totals that were stolen from Donald Trump.”
This is “proof positive by cyber experts … the footprints of the foreign intrusion into our election.… This was an act of war to come in and steal the election from the American people and decide who our foreign adversaries were going to put in the White House to rule or to be the president of this country.”
Mary Fanning next provides a powerful video of an electronic map of the United States visually showing the lines of every single cyber attack as it happened in real time, mostly from China. “What you are watching is the surveillance system…that was built by people inside this country within the cybersecurity battle space…to keep this country safe…All those moving lines…represent the IP addresses of what I just showed you on the chart. So, so when you understand the hackers IP address, and the IP address of the target and the votes that were stolen, every one of those lines that you’re watching move across the chart and showing whether they were successful and how many votes they stole….The red lines are all China. So what you’re seeing are the actual files, being received and sent…documentation of the real time theft of our elections.… Now red has been the most severe attacks, those lines are all coming out of China. Those are the most severe attacks on our election system” (see video https://michaeljlindell.com/).
Fanning continues, “It’s important to understand that … they steal the vote, at the transfer points…[when] the vote is leaving the Secretary of State’s office, in these machines, that is the point at which the vote is stolen at the transfer points… proof positive” (Mary Fanning, ABSOLUTE PROOF, Mike Lindell Exposing Election Fraud, February 2021, 1:36:00-1:49:400).
Military intelligence shows no vote transferred from Biden to Trump, only millions going the other way. Even counting the dead, underaged, phantom, and illegal votes for Biden, documented by military intelligence and shared by LibertyUnderFire in early February, Biden votes did not exceed 68 million to Trump’s nearly 80 million. China elected a U.S. president.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
Feb 10, 2021 | Constitution, Liberty Articles
By Harold Pease, Ph.D.
On Friday February 5, Fox News fired three of its most conservative and publicly trusted anchors: Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. The day before, Smartmatic, an election technology company accused of fraudulent 2020 election practices, sued Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and his popular Fox News for $2.7 billion for“disinformation,” suggesting election fraud favoring Biden existed in the 2020 presidential election.
Critics view “the purge” as a stern threat to others, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and etc. still treating this issue. Fox appears to have joined the Democrat Party outlets in censorship, forcing viewers to move to freer outlets for news.
A free country does not censor. A free press, as required by the Constitution, allows differing views. The people are considered intelligent enough to discern for themselves. Dobbs was the catalyst for the firings as he had scheduled Mike Lindell, author of the new two-hour documentary, presenting evidence of such, called “Absolute Proof,” the evening of his firing. LibertyUnderFire opposes censorship and thus is printing below some of what you were forbidden to view from the documentary.
In Arizona. Biden’s margin of victory was only 10,000 votes; there were 296,589 contested votes. Of this larger number 36,400 illegal aliens (forbidden by state law to vote) voted, 3 1/2 times the number of votes Trump needed to win. There were 22,903 completed mail-in ballots received the day before ballots were actually mailed. There were 2,000 voters registered to a vacant lot. In Maricopa County there were 150,000 voters registered after the deadline. Also, in this county there were 103,000 electronic adjudicated ballots with no Republican observer present as required by law. In the state there were 50,000 votes loaded before polls even opened. If illegal votes had not been counted Trump would have easily won the state.
In Nevada, Biden’s margin of victory was 34,000 with 212,508 contested. Of this contested number Nevada allowed double voting of 42,284 voters. Other anomalies included: allowing, against state law, 4,000 illegal aliens to vote, accepting 15,000 mail-in or absentee ballots from voters who were known to have also voted in other states, 1,506 dead people who voted and 19,218 “non-Nevadans” who voted in Nevada. The most controversial category of the contested voters was with respect to mail-in ballot signature verification of only half the image quality suggested by the manufacturer of voting machines. More than half of the contested votes 130,000 did not meet this standard.
In Pennsylvania, Biden’s margin of victory was 68,000, with 866,284 contested, most of these 682,777 were counted without a Republican observer to verify the ballots, names, signatures, addresses and dates, as required by law. The contested ballots included 100,000 fake ballots, driven from New York to Pennsylvania, the vast majority for Biden. Other contested ballots included: 10,000 ballots accepted up to three days after the election and 4,500 ballots sorted out because of errors “poll workers then refilled out these ballots so that they could be read by tabulation machines, contrary to state law.” Between 80-100 self-proclaimed Black Lives Matter affiliated members, from other States, have admitted to having voted in Pennsylvania.
In Wisconsin, Biden’s margin of victory was 20,000 votes with 400,000 contested; 170,000 of these were “generated by illegally expanding the definition of Indefinite Confinement.” Other anomalies included 170,000 mail-in ballots processed under the guise of absentee ballots in clear violation of state law and another 100,000 United States Postal Service backdated ballots. Any serious review of these anomalies would have given the state to Trump.
In Georgia, Biden’s margin of victory was 10,000 votes with 1,567,146 contested. If Georgia had simply not counted the 10,315 dead people who had voted, presumably all for Biden, Trump would have claimed this state. The state had far more anomalies than sister states. These include: 66,247 underage children illegally voting, 96,600 mail-in ballots with no required return address, and 40,279 who failed to re-register to vote in their new county in time after moving from one county to another. Three types of voters fit one of three disqualifying categories: moved mailing addresses with no change of address card, where filed as moving out of state but are still registered in GA, and finally, living outside of GA and voted in GA. Another category had 600,000 ballots with no chain of custody. So corrupt was this state, felons, 2,560 of them, voted, as did 395 who voted in GA and also in another state, as did 15,700 who voted in Georgia but changed their address before the election. Out of a million and a half contestant votes certainly Trump would have gotten another 11,000 votes to beat the corruption and Biden.
None of these facts are disputed by the socialist left—they can’t be. NO court has reviewed any of this evidence. The left’s only answer is to refuse to review any evidence and to censor anyone who does as in the cases with Dobbs, Bartiromo and Pirro. Unfortunately we haven’t space enough to treat the Dominion and Smartmatic documentation or the vast election interference from China—much just coming out—but these can be viewed on Rumble, Mike Lindell, Absolute Proof “Election Fraud Exposed.” Feb. 5, 2021. For those who do not want their thinking controlled, it is a must view.
Trump only needed three of the above contested states to win—this evidence, absent fraud, shows he won them all.
[EDITORS: YOU ARE TRUSTED BY YOUR READERS. PLEASE DO NOT SUCCUMB TO CENSORSHIP!!!! STAND INSTEAD FOR FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. WHEN IT GOES, SO DOES LIBERTY]
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
![“You Can’t [legislate] by Executive Order Unless You’re a Dictator”](https://libertyunderfire.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Biden-signs-huge-stack-of-EOs.-exec-orders-rgb_98-31984_t800-1-800x675.jpg)
Feb 3, 2021 | Constitution, Liberty Articles
Harold Pease, Ph.D.
Just three weeks before the 2020 election presidential candidate Joe Biden said something very profound—even constitutional. “I have this strange notion, we are a democracy … if you can’t get the votes … you can’t [legislate] by executive order unless you’re a dictator. We’re a democracy. We need consensus.”
Joe Biden “signed more executive actions on day one than Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton combined”—17 (Amanda Shendruk, (Quartz, January 20, 2021). By the end of January, just 11 days, he had signed “25 executive orders, 10 presidential memos, and four proclamations”—39 total (Amanda Shendruk, “How Joe Biden’s executive orders compare with those of other presidents,” Quartz, January 31, 2021). Proclamations are mostly ceremonial and executive orders and memoranda, both legally binding, differ little.
None of these 39 actions went through Congress for the needed consensus Biden spoke of. By his own definition he has shown himself to be a dictator. He dismissed Congress as America’s ONLY lawmaking body—effectively appointing himself the legislature. He is no longer even attempting to get their votes before he decrees. Thus far in this new socialist government he rules by decree, precisely as does Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Xi Jinping (China), other socialist countries. He also came to power as they, by censoring opposing information and election fraud as witnessed by every American willing to review the data.
There is nothing more clear nor basic in the Constitution than the separation of federal power into three branches, one to legislate, another to execute legislated law, and a third to adjudicate possible violations, when contested, of that law—a division of power held “sacred” until the last few decades. The Constitution reads: “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives” (Article I, Sec. I).
The executive branch has NO authority to make law—any law!!!! Executive Orders are constitutional only when they cite a single, recently passed law of Congress, where that law needs a statement of implementation by the executive branch. Nor can a president cob together parts of ancient laws to create new authority never intended by the authors of previous law. Originally they were but interdepartmental directives and not intended to do anything more. No mention of them exists in the Constitution.
Democrats formerly recognized that executive orders making law weakens the sole power of Congress to make all law and places us on the road of government by decree or edict of one man. In March 28, 2011, President Barack Obama said, with respect to the idea of nullifying Congress on the deportation issue of illegals in the country. “The notion that I can just suspend deportations just through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed,” but this is one of Biden’s recently signed executive orders.
We must choose the Constitution over political party. How does a president’s defiance of Congress on deportation or climate change or anything, differ from what a king or dictator does? It doesn’t. The Constitution exists to protect all parties and all citizens from arbitrary and caprices rule.
Some defending a president’s executive order practice of making rules may suggest, naively, that such are not laws and thus okay. The Founders made no distinction between rules and laws. Regulations and laws have in common three things, they impose a restriction, administer a penalty, or prohibit an activity. Congress alone can make them and has no authority to give away its exclusive power to do so, whether called a regulation or a law, nor to allow the executive branch to do it for them. The people have the right to know that every restriction imposed upon their behavior was read and voted on by four elected, thus accountable, persons—their Congressman, their two U.S. Senators and their president.
The constitutional response to the theft of Congresses sole power to legislate, should be threefold: 1) renounce any president’s decree(s); and 2) the House should refuse all funding to implement decrees as per Article I, Section 7. If the first two fail to enlist the president’s obedience to the Constitution, Congress must activate against him his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,”(Article II, Sec. 1, Clause 8). His failure to honor his oath is “a high crime,” an impeachable offense. This action should receive the support of every member of Congress as they too took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. Unfortunately party loyalty for some is higher than constitutional loyalty.
This is especially so when a president initiates an executive order in direct conflict with existing law as when President Barack Obama June 16, 2012, failing to get a favorable vote from Congress stopping deportation of illegals, openly defied Congress, existing law, and his promise not to do so, by ordering it anyway by executive order. Thus the birth of DOCA.
Democrats should reign in their president. If they do not they, in effect, give permission for the next Republican president to defy Congress on something Democrats had previously established as law. He too could nullify that law by executive decree.
Except for the few laws of Congress requiring a statement of implementation by the president, all other types of executive orders are unconstitutional and must stop. If they do not, the inevitable will happen–Congress will nullify itself and dictatorial decrees will be the standard. With 39 executive actions the first 11 days, this appears to have already happened under Joe Biden.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
