Caesarism is the concentration of true power in the hands of the top man while retaining constitutional forms. Rule becomes personal, dependent on the character of the ruler. And one Caesar can take away what another has granted. Rule that rests on one man's whims (and how can an action that he has argued in the past is unconstitutional be anything but a whim?) is inherently unstable, capricious and ultimately violent.
That's what happens to Republics when the only thing that matters is who Caesar is. Caesar Obama has just made 5 million personal clients whose futures rest solely on his party remaining perpetually in power. People that have been raised in other Caesarist regimes and who have risked their lives to come here are much more likely to resort to violence to ensure that the "Right" Caesar remains in power. Something that a "Constitutional Scholar" must be aware of.
Still, it's surprising that the leader of a party that is so heavily reliant on complex, rube goldberg legal contraptions and coercion to implement its agenda would set a precedent that the executive doesn't have to enforce laws he doesn't like. Try this on for size:
President Rubio, confronted by a narrowly Democrat Senate demands that the 'green' laws that he says are strangling the economy be 'reformed', the Senate refuses. In retaliation Rubio refuses to enforce all green mandates so the entire ethanol industry collapses, green light bulb makers lose billions, all windmill and solar companies go out if business, innovation on electric and hybrid cars disappears and SUV sales soar.
Or how about refusing to enforce Obamacare mandates? Or rules limiting the use of Federal funds for school vouchers? In eight years a whole lot of the institutions that Democrats rely on to sustain their competitiveness could be severely weakened or even out of business. Republicans have a major advantage playing this game because their agenda is much less Federally activist. In this Obama and the Democrats are like a fighter with a glass jaw: if you can't take a punch you shouldn't throw one.
But I think the better analogy is child discipline: Barack Obama, having been spanked by the voters is in the basement sniveling and muttering "I'll show them" while playing with matches amid the old newspapers and oil soaked rags. Very foolish. Very childish.
Robert Tracinski points out that the president hasn't really dome anything except burnish his left wing legacy. He sure isn't doing the immigrants or Dees any favors:
What Obama is doing is creating a class of people—possibly millions of them—who are dependent solely on the favor of the emperor. As Eduardo Alvarez put it on Twitter: “A hostage class is born.” This is the real essence of Obama’s play for the Hispanic vote: they have to keep him or one of his gang in the White House, or cousin Felipe gets trundled back across the border.
This fits the broader pattern of Obama’s administration. By a combination of design and incompetence, he has built a system in which every part of his agenda has been accomplished primarily by executive order and can only be sustained based on the will of the executive.
Even with his signature legislative achievement, ObamaCare, consider how much of the actual law has been changed from how it was written, altered by executive waivers and fanciful reinterpretations. This is what the Halbig case is about. The law as written specifically banned subsidies outside the state exchanges, but ObamaCare needs those subsidies to mask how the law increases the cost of health insurance. So the president ordered the IRS to reinterpret the law to allow them. Without this kind of executive rewrite, ObamaCare collapses.
Aye, there’s the rub. As Stephen Miller asks: “What’s Obama’s historical legacy if everything he does can be undone via executive order?” Look at the bind he has put his party in. If their entire agenda is enacted by executive fiat, then everything depends on an unbroken string of victories in presidential campaigns.
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