Victor Davis Hanson:
Coupled with years of open borders, a failure to enforce immigration laws, hostility to integration and assimilation, and racial preferences in hiring and admissions, the Obama administration in just over seven years has nearly achieved its aims of racializing the American experience to such a degree that everyone must now belong to his particular tribe first, and begrudgingly remain an American a distant second.
An example of our future is found in Rome around the early 5th century AD onward, when parochialism and localism reasserted themselves, as Civis Romanus sum was rendered irrelevant. I fear that self-segregation is already institutionalized, as people migrate to live with like kind in red and blue states. And states such as California have divided into two antithetical societies, in which an interior Fresno is about as akin to coastal Newport or Palo Alto as Somalia is to Switzerland.
So, what do things look like down the road apiece?
The tensions of 2016 are mounting. The center is not holding, as the foundations of our society—education, social cohesion, defense, and finance—erode. Trump and Sanders are mere symptoms of the collective fear about what is being lost. Far, far worse is on the horizon.
As Franklin said, "A republic,
if you can keep it."
Helluva thing when all that stands between the President acting worse than King George III is a Supreme Court split 4-4 between constituionalists and fence sitters on one hand versus progressives on the other. An even split will leave the precedent that the President can rewrite laws whenever he wishes (or when "Congress fails to act" i.e., doesn't do what El Jefe wants).
ReplyDeleteJust think what a Republican President could do with such power. It's the stuff of Dem nightmares, but they never seem to look that far ahead. Perhaps they are convinced their voter fraud campaigns will never allow another Pac into the White House. Of course, most Republicans would oppose such power for the President, of either party, since most of us can look ahead to what a Jackass party El Jefe could do with the power.
Of course, El Jefe may take a leaf out of Andy Jackson's book if the SC votes against him: John Marshall has given an opinion. Now let us see him enforce it. That was from the Indian Removal Case, where the SC said Jackson's actions were unconstitutional. The President simply ignored the Court.
El Jefe knows he has acted unlawfully; he told Univision years ago he could not unilaterally change the immigration laws because he's not a king. I guess after the 2014 midterm elections he decided that he had been crowned. On the other hand, perhaps he felt Time's winged chariot drawing near with the end of his term, and he still had much destruction to accomplish. Using Presidential ukazes would help accomplish his goals.