[From article]
One virtue possessed by all bad presidents, whether they’re evil, venal, lazy, or incompetent, is that they always reveal the weakness of the political system at the time of their tenure. In this, Obama is no different than any other bozo that has inhabited the White House.
Separation of powers is the one element that distinguishes the United States from previous democratic systems. (And before people hurt themselves in their rush to point out that “the U.S. is a republic and not a democracy” -- a “republic” is any governmental system that’s not a monarchy. Nazi Germany and the USSR were “republics.” The U.S. is a republic utilizing a system of representative democracy.)
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Montesquieu’s understand of history informed him that concentration of power leads inevitably to despotism -- no matter how solidly a democratic system was founded, eventually an Augustus or a Lorenzo would show up, concentrate all power in his own person and eventually undermine senate or council. From that point on, whatever it might call itself, the state was a simple autocracy. There was never a way back, and the usual sequel was degeneration and collapse.
Montesquieu’s solution was separation of powers:
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Though often criticized -- largely by progressives who knew what had to be done and wanted what amounted to a temporary dictatorship to do it -- separation of powers has been a great success. At no point, even during the Civil War, has the United States ever been in danger of the deterioration into autocracy that plagued previous republics. But as the Obama administration has clearly revealed, separation of powers has been crippled for the better part of a century through the metastasis of the executive branch.
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The explosion of agencies under the New Deal, each of which was touted as necessary for the salvation of the country and most of which accomplished absolutely nothing, introduced a factor unforeseen by the Founders: concentration of power in the executive through organizational hyperdevelopment. All those agencies are under direct presidential control, and subject to his orders with no effective oversight from the other branches.
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To keep a neverending story short, this is how, eighty years later, we’ve attained our current state of a government overburdened with agencies that solve nothing while constantly spinning off sub-organizations.
This has badly skewed the balance of powers toward the executive, something that Obama has been quick to seize on in his effort at permanent transformation of the American system.
No president has more abused the power of the executive. Obama was raised in Indonesia during key formative years, a nation that in the 1960s was run as a strict military autocracy. At the time that Obama was attending school there, the state’s founder Achmed Sukarno had just been overthrown by Gen. Mohammed Suharto. Accompanying this transfer of power had been a nationwide purge that murdered at least 100,000.
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In the privacy of his head, Obama is not a president at all -- he’s a pemimpin, the Indonesian term for führer. (This can also be seen in his constant vacations, golf rounds, etc.
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One of the major techniques he learned is rule by decree -- to give orders without any effort at gaining consensus. How does he get away with it? In large part because he controls the agencies. Obama has discovered that the bloated hypertrophy of the bureaucracy has effectively put him beyond the reach of our system’s constitutional safeguards.
His decrees range from the idiotic to the grotesque -- his order to the EPA to shut down the coal industry, the repurposing of NASA as a Muslim PR effort, the post-legislative changes to ObamaCare
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It’s long been understood that agencies such as the EPA, the Department of Education, and the Department of Energy are useless. It’s now clear that they are a threat to the commonwealth.
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The Democrats [. . .] create these structures, these methods of short-circuiting the political process, and are shocked -- shocked -- when somebody else takes advantage of them.
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The real problem here is that the progressives -- and possibly a much larger segment of the country -- have simply forgotten how the American system is supposed to work. And that may well be the most lethal aspect of all.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/obama_versus_the_separation_of_powers.html
December 7, 2015
Obama Versus the Separation of Powers
By J.R. Dunn
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