George Leef’s latest Forbes column explores President Obama’s record in achieving a transformation of America.
Barack Obama said he wanted to transform America and in many ways he has succeeded.
The problem is that his transformation has done enormous and perhaps irreparable damage to the nation by demolishing the people’s confidence that our laws will be impartially enforced. Instead of, as the Constitution requires of the president, taking care that the laws be faithfully executed, Obama and his minions have operated under a completely different concept – that the laws will be enforced (or not) with the objective of maintaining the incumbent party in power.
If you doubt that, I recommend reading Liberty’s Nemesis, published earlier this year by Encounter Books.
Editors Dean Reuter and John Yoo have collected there twenty-six excellent essays to make the big point that the Constitution’s carefully wrought system of divided power and checks and balances meant to protect against the dangerous concentration of governmental power has been so weakened that it now barely functions.
We face, as the book’s subtitle puts it, the unchecked expansion of the state. That unchecked power did not begin with Obama, but his administration has pushed us far into uncharted waters of uncontrolled executive power. As a result, the people’s liberty has taken a beating and the old concept of the rule of law has become a bad joke.
