president, not king

When the Revolutionary War had ended, and America had gained her freedom, the people of this land were so grateful to George Washington that they wished to make him King For Life. Cognizant of the corrupting effects of power and knowing the dangers inherent to autocratic rule, Mr. Washington turned down the offer, pushing for and succeeding in establishing a presidency limited in its power, an office that once balanced, and that was once balanced by, our other pillars of government, the legislature and the judiciary. And the system worked for a few hundred years, until the 20th Century, most notably during World War Two, during which conflict the president of this Union of American States began to issue great numbers of executive orders, thereby circumventing the balances designed into our system of government, changing our society in vast and lasting ways and effectively ruling the people by whim.

The American system of government is set forth in our founding documents, those being the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Nowhere therein is made mention of the executive order, and neither document grants the president any right to issue or to rule by executive order. All presidents since the Great Patriotic War have used the executive order, including George Walker Bush and Barack Hussein Obama; all presidents since the Allies beat the Axis have brushed aside legally crafted procedures carefully and specifically designed to keep too much power out of the hands of just one person, fundamentally changing the way our government works and destroying the efforts of our founding persons to protect us from tyrannical and despotic rule. Democracy in America is long dead, steamrolled into nothingness by the Patriot Act, which did away with protections contained in the U.S. Constitution; Liberty lies crushed under the smothering mass of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which made it illegal to consume any drug other than drugs sold by pharmaceutical corporations, beer distributors, and cigarette retailers. With a few, simple pen-strokes, our president could do away with these injustices, which are heaped upon the people daily, just as the president could issue an executive order to cancel all subsequent executive orders, declaring them null and void.

I fear, however, that things have not changed much, here, and that the American people still wish for, pine for, and long to wallow under kingly rule. (Fuck the British queen, by the way, and fuck her jubilee.) Why else do we continue to allow the president to rule as his or her whim and fancy should dictate? Perhaps we let this mockery continue because we deserve not freedom nor Liberty nor a balanced and democratic system of government, only the carbon-copy lives of wage-slaves yolked to materialism and convinced of the inevitability of constant and conspicuous consumption. As long as the blood is warm in our veins, though, it is our duty to fight for Liberty, to reinstate her, and to share her comforting effect with the sovereign peoples of the world. To prove to mankind, however, that our systems are worth emulating, we must reign in presidential power, re-balancing it to the other branches of government, and outlaw such undemocratic and unconstitutional means as the executive order. So stand up, speak out, & fight injustice. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit