According to most historians, a monarch is the sovereign head of state that officially outranks all other individuals in the realm, and exercises the most and highest authority in the kingdom. A monarch can become a nation’s supreme authority by conquest and reigns for life, often as autocrats wielding ultimate authority. Prior to January 2009, according to Republicans, there were no authoritarian monarchs in America until an African American man was elected to lead the Executive branch of government. Despite an exhaustive search, there is no definition, requirement, or reference to what it means to be a monarch based on being an African American.
Since his tenure in the White House, Republicans, teabaggers, and their conservative cohorts have claimed anything President Obama has done is tyranny, dictatorial, overreaching, and inherently unconstitutional. This is despite every single one of Obama’s predecessors doing exactly the same thing that means that Barack Obama’s only crime according to Republicans is leading the Executive branch while being Black. On Tuesday, de facto Speaker of the House and self-appointed incoming Senate Majority Leader Ted Cruz accused the President of being a monarch and has devised a plan to punish the President for doing what Republican presidents have done since 1952.
According to Cruz, “It appears the president is angry and defiant towards and declaring war on the voters,” as well as not “demonstrating fidelity to law and to the Constitution. The president is not a monarch. He does not get to decree my way or the highway, and if the Congress doesn’t give me everything I want, I will impose it by fiat. That’s not the way the Constitution works.” However, that is precisely the way the Constitution has worked for the past 62 years, including for white Republican presidents Eisenhower, Reagan, and both of the Bush presidents who, according to Texas Ted, were “angry and defiant towards the voters, declared war on the voters,” and said “my way or the highway if the Congress didn’t give them everything they wanted.”
Texas Ted Cruz has a plan to use the budget to “stand strong and united against the president unilaterally and illegally trying to extend amnesty to millions who came here illegally (like his father Raphael Cruz).” What Cruz and the rest of the Republican xenophobes are saying, in stark terms, is that Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George W. Bush (all Republican presidents) violated the U.S. Constitution and illegally took executive action on immigration. Or in Cruz’s terms, were acting like monarchs that was perfectly legal and constitutional because they were white.
In Cruz’s mind, the Republican wave in the midterm elections was solely a referendum on the President’s expected executive actions on immigration policy. Cruz is wrong, of course, because clearly 62% of all Americans support action on immigration including 4 out of 5 Republican voters.
Cruz has a powerful ally in “his” House of Representatives in Harold Rogers (R-KY) who, in concert with Cruz, intends on using the budget process in the new session of Congress to eliminate funding for the President’s soon-to-be-announced executive action on immigration after the fact. It is clearly, as Cruz accuses the President, a case of “Republicans’ way or the highway” and is why a significant number of Republicans threaten to shutdown the government if they cannot thwart the President on immigration enforcement. It is why Cruz is pushing hard to use the December 11 government funding measure as a short-term, stop-gap funding measure into early 2015 to allow Republicans to withhold funding for immigration. According to Cruz, any budget measure, such as a “long-term omnibus or continuing resolution” is senseless because it “hands over Congress’s authority to the President.”
According to Ted’s House Appropriations Chairman Rogers, it is very important to Republicans to bring about a “return to normalcy in Congress” to start governing the nation.” This after Republicans in the House under the stellar leadership of “official” Speaker of the House John Boehner, and de facto Speaker Ted Cruz, have obstructed governance since they took control of the House in 2011. Rogers wrote in an opinion piece that, “The day-to-day work of the appropriations process is essential to the basic functioning of our government. It is legislation that Congress can and should enact, but has been stymied by a Senate that refused to participate in the legislative process (see Senate immigration reform). We are months behind in completing these annual bills, and the current temporary measure keeping the lights on in our government will expire on Dec. 11.”
Besides being a rank racist, deluded about the midterms being an anti-immigrant referendum, he is a rank hypocrite; particularly about what he calls “illegal immigration.” By admission, his evangelical daddy emigrated to America illegally, ran off to Canada for 8 years and became a Canadian citizen, and did not apply or become a United State’s citizen until 48 years after leaving Cuba.
It is Cruz’s accusation that President Obama is acting like an authoritarian monarch because he is considering taking the same executive action as the last four Republican presidents that is absurd; and racist. In effect, good old Texas Ted, the uber-conservatives’ hero du jour, accused Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George W. Bush of acting like monarchs who were “defiant towards and declared war on the voters, and did not have fidelity to the Constitution” because they did precisely the same thing as Barack Obama is going to do.
Born in the South, raised in the Mid-West and California for a well-rounded view of America; it doesn't look good.
Former minister, lifelong musician, Mahayana Zen-Buddhist.
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