Under the Constitution, the president’s role is to faithfully enforce the laws, but not to make them. Sadly, the separation of powers has often been ignored by chief executives who are intent on making law. In his latest piece, historian Burt Folsom writes about FDR’s executive order decreeing that Japanese-Americans would be rounded up and imprisoned during World War II and the perhaps forthcoming Obama EO declaring what he wants to be the law on immigration.
America keeps moving away from the Constitution’s plan of limited government with a separation of powers and towards the kind of monarchial government that both Americans and Englishmen before them sought to escape — rule by royal prerogative.
