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GOP: Refusing to do What We Want You to Do is a Violation of the Constitution

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Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 01:46 am

Republican Senator Rand Paul’s son was arrested at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport on January 5 for assaulting a female flight attendant while on a flight from Kentucky to North Carolina, and now has been charged. Meanwhile, Daddy is, rather than addressing the Republican men’s major malfunction with women, was calling President Obama a king and tyrant.

Paul says if the President enacts any executive orders relating to gun control, he is guilty of acting like a king, and he doesn’t want a king, Paul assured the blinkered masses from Jerusalem via the Christian Broadcasting Network:

I’m against having a king. I think having a monarch is what we fought the American Revolution over and someone who wants to bypass the Constitution, bypass Congress – that’s someone who wants to act like a king or a monarch.

That’s a shame, because we just had a king in George W. Bush, and all the Republican anti-monarchists seem to have slept through those eight years. None of them so much as noticed. I won’t hesitate to suggest that that was because Bush was a Republican, not that I don’t think even Bush would get a free pass today, thanks to the extremist state of Republican purity laws.

But Paul barely refers to Congress’ extreme wussiness and wimptitude during the Bush years: “I’ve been opposed to executive orders, even with Republican presidents,” he said. “But one that wants to infringe on the Second Amendment, we will fight tooth and nail.”

Oh, so not the First Amendment, or the Nineteenth or any in between unless they be numbered Two and I think it’s safe to say, Ten.

“And I promise you,” he continued. “There’ll be no rock left unturned as far as trying to stop him from usurping the Constitution, running roughshod over Congress. And you will see one heck of a debate if he decides to try to do this.”

In other words, we’re gonna impeach the hell out of this icky black guy and take back the White Man’s White House.

What Paul ignores as he sits in front of an Israeli flag is that there are many things Obama can do that do not impinge the rights of Congress – nineteen of them in fact – according to Joe Biden.

And it’s not like Obama is ignoring Congress. Rather, the opposite is true. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was very clear about the limits on the President’s powers when he said that “there are limits on what can be done within existing law” and that some things could not be done without Congress “because the power to do that is reserved by Congress and to Congress.” This is exactly what Obama himself previously said: “Members of Congress, I think, are going to have to have a debate and examine their own conscience.” Congress must act, he said.

Obama, unlike the Republican House, understands exactly how the Constitution works.

Where is the tyranny to be found then, if not in Congress itself?

And then there is all the crazy Glenn Beck talk (okay, I realize that’s redundant) about “Obama’s Civil War.” It is important to observe here that it is not Democrats talking about Civil War. It’s Republicans. It’s not Democrats building fortified settlements in the American Redoubt, but Republicans. It is not Democrats talking about secession, it is Republicans. If there is another Civil War, it will be all on the Republicans, who are crazy enough to think they win even when they lose national elections.

In good measure, Beck himself bares blame for this state of affairs. He has willfully and repeatedly incited the ignoramuses who listen to him that anything liberal is evil and must be expunged. He has been aided in this by clowns like Ann Coulter and Fox News.

What has happened is that the Republicans have gotten it into their heads that if the president deviates even a little from what Congress wants him to do, he is a dictator, willfully trampling our rights. As a result, hardly a day goes by without calls for Obama’s impeachment over even the smallest of perceived signs of independence.

Of course, the Constitution does not establish a country where the President is only a figurehead for Congress’ will. We call them three branches of government for a reason, a carefully constructed balance of powers.

The Republicans need to re-examine the table of organization. Bad enough that they think they won the election in both 2008 and in 2012, but to think Congress tells the president what decisions to make as the head of the executive branch is troubling.

The Founding Fathers, to whom the Republicans repeatedly and fallaciously appeal, recognized that an elected legislature was as big a threat to our right as a king. In many ways, the Founding Fathers anticipated the spirit of the Tea Party if not the Tea Party itself, and that spirit is not patriotism but tyranny of the majority.

That tyranny can be enacted not only through action but inaction and in this, as in so many other things, the Republican Party is refusing to act to do what circumstances – and the responsibilities of their office – require. President Obama, as has so often happened over the past four years, is the only adult in the room; the only person willing to stand up and do what needs to be done to uphold his oath to the Constitution.

The Republican mantra, “You have to do what we say, or else,” is not in the Constitution.

Sorry, Republicans. Failing to listen to you, to refuse to do what you demand, is not a violation of the Constitution. Not only is it in obedience to the United States Constitution, but it is simply good sense.

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Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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