There are critical questions for the presidential candidates that have gone unanswered in the debates so far.
In fact, they have gone unasked.
Worse yet, I’m unaware of them being asked even between the debates.
While I can’t say I have fully reviewed all of the candidates’ platforms in detail, I must say I am unaware of any clear statements issued by any of them that address the specific questions I have in mind.
First, here’s the premise for the questions: For eight years, America has seen a president assume powers far beyond anything supported by the Constitution. Barack Obama has effectively created the power to rewrite health-care legislation passed by Congress to preserve it from imploding due to its own shortcomings. We’ve seen Obama abuse his office to effectively rewrite immigration law. Time and time again, Obama has stretched beyond the breaking point the constitutional limitations on executive branch powers.
With this in mind, here are the until-now unasked questions of all 2016 presidential contenders:
- “As the next president of the United States, what will be your general philosophy with regard to executive branch powers?”
- “Do you agree that Barack Obama has sometimes exceeded the constitutional limits on executive branch power?”
- “Will you use executive branch authority in similar fashion, or will you strictly abide by the Constitution’s definition of separation of powers?”
- “What specific actions will you take to ensure that the Constitution’s separation of powers remains the law of the land?”
- “What specific actions will you take to ensure that Obama’s actions are not used as precedents for future executive branch excesses?”
Some pundits and reporters are already speculating that Republican front-runner Donald Trump may be tempted, as an entrepreneur and successful business tycoon, to act as a kind of “dictator” if he should win the presidency. Surprisingly, most of these prognosticators have failed to recognize or report that Obama has constructed a kind of imperial presidency without regard to the powers delegated clearly to Congress and, even more importantly, left to the states.
It’s time for a national discussion on the legitimate powers of the presidency. They are actually few and far between.
It’s simply untrue that there are “three co-equal branches of the federal government,” as is so often stated as fact. Read the Constitution for yourself. Look where the power is. In Washington, most of it resides with Congress, but you wouldn’t know it from the way government has operated for the last seven years. Even more power is explicitly left to the sovereign states. But you might not realize that if your experience has been limited to recent history dating back through 1989.
The important lesson here is that America has moved closer to tyrannical dictatorship through the last seven years. I fully expect that to be even more true during Obama’s last year in office. In other words, there will be a lot of work to do beginning January 2017 to get our Constitution back.
Obama is hardly the only one to blame for the predicament in which our nation finds itself. Congress shares the blame for sitting on the sidelines as a paralyzed observer for the last seven years, despite being under the control or partial control of an opposition party since 2011.
There’s a lot of important work to do taking America back. But without a national dialogue on executive branch power, there’s little chance we’ll be successful.
This is the time for that great debate to commence.
It’s less than a year until the 2016 presidential election. Will we stumble through the next 11 or 12 months without asking the most important questions that need to be asked of the presidential candidates?
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