Obama’s executive order on Ukraine begins with
“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) (NEA), section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (8 U.S.C. 1182(f)), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,”
The Constitution of the U.S. doesn’t include provisions for emergency. It doesn’t have that term in it. The idea of emergency powers goes back to the unconstitutional declarations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I quote a law review article:
“Two propositions implicitly follow from President Roosevelt’s declaring that the Great Depression was a national emergency; first, the Executive Office was no longer confined to its duty to merely ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ and second, the federal government as a whole was no longer confined to the powers provided to it by a strict interpretation of the Constitution with regard to federalism concerns and civil liberties. The Constitution, however, does not provide support for these propositions. In fact, the only constitutional provisions that can be read to imply such an expansion of federal powers are the Constitution’s rather ambiguous provisions of empowerment during times of war.”
This country has been governed outside its Constitution for a very long time.
When we drill down into these laws that Obama’s order depends upon, we will find that they are a laughing stock, a tissue of fabrications that lie outside the Constitution. They depend on the illegal concept of a “national emergency”.
In most important respects, America is governed by a series of outlaw regimes that have usurped powers not granted to them by the Constitution. They have succeeded insofar as Americans have not acted to alter this situation of lawlessness.
Obama’s latest executive order is one more in a very long train of events.
8:45 am on March 15, 2014
