No checks, no balances, no borders

[Note: This posting originally appeared last week in a slightly different form. It was written in haste and not very well. There also were (and continue to be) formatting problems that seem to result from the interaction between my computer and Blogger, which I'm trying to sort out. I pulled the posting until I had time to work on it some more.]

The "checks and balances" and “separation of powers” we learned about in school — set in place by the U.S. Constitution to see that different branches of government provided counterweights to one another's powers — have broken down.

The assumption behind the original balancing act was that if, for instance, the president wanted a law, Congress could refuse to pass it. Or the president could veto a law, which Congress would then have to re-pass by a larger majority. Eventually the Supreme Court got into the show by taking on the power to scupper a law by declaring it unconstitutional.

Until recently the system worked pretty well; not perfectly (for one thing, the federal courts have begun “legislating from the bench,” because in practice it’s very hard to overturn a court decision except by a higher court), but decently enough as human institutions go. But El Presidente has found a weak spot and exploited it unprecedentedly.

George W. Bush is perhaps not the worst president in living memory (Jimmy Carter has a lock on that one), but he is the most dangerous. He has figured out, either through shrewdness or just by stumbling into it, a way to game the system so that he doesn't have to worry about rival interests butting heads with him. His stratagem is simply to ignore laws he doesn't like.

Politics offers ways to oppose action, but nobody seems to have a clue how to oppose inaction. What do you do when a president won't allow the law of the land to function?

I'm talking foremost, of course, about our scandalous open-borders-by-default. Bush can't, so far, get a bill through legalizing "guest workers" and amnesty for illegals, but it scarcely matters: he acts as if such a bill has been passed. Huge numbers of real non-citizen migrants pass through a theoretical border. It's the appearance of enforcement, or meaningless intermittent and token enforcement, that enables the subterfuge.

AP reports:

Undercover investigators entered the United States using fake documents repeatedly this year — including some cases in which Homeland Security Department agents didn't ask for identification. At nine border crossings on the Mexico and Canadian borders, agents "never questioned the authenticity of the counterfeit documents," according to Government Accountability Office testimony to be released Wednesday.

This sounds like it should be an embarrassment to the president, but stories like these actually serve Bush’s purposes right down to the ground. The story frames the issue the way the public is meant to perceive it, to wit: the government is trying to crack down on illegal immigration, but some gormless border agents aren't checking IDs the way they should. Baloney. The border agents are there for role playing, like extras cast as cops in a movie. The word has long since come down through the Bush telegraph that they aren't supposed to stop border jumpers; they're paid for playing at law enforcement.

You can't overturn a nonexistent law or inaction. But precisely that is what’s bringing about the ethnic replacement of the U.S. population. Even the left-wing federal judiciary might declare a law merging the U.S. and Mexico unconstitutional, but it's impossible if there is no de jure merger, just a de facto one.

True, there is an obscure legal remedy called a writ of mandamus, by which a court can require an official to do his job. Have you ever heard of such a writ being served on anyone, let alone a U.S. president?

You will remember that the Roman Republic, which lasted (with occasional periods of dictatorship) for hundreds of years — longer than the United States — wasn't overthrown in a coup. All the old forms were carefully preserved: senators, consuls, the lot. The first emperor didn't call himself an emperor: Octavian simply styled himself Augustus. By the same token, George W. Bush, through extra-legal means, is turning the United States into a business oligopoly, with a vestigial middle class and a large infusion of Latin American menials to keep labor costs down and the clientele of the welfare bureaucracies swelling. We still have our Congress and laws and courts, but soon we will no longer have the country we had.

George W. Bush should be impeached and charged with treason.

Extreme? You’re damn straight. But what else is going to stop, not just Bush, but others from following in his footsteps? If he has figured out how to get around those tiresome checks and balances, he won't be the last, because others will study how he pulled it off. What's left of the old America with a "government of laws, not of men" (as we were taught in school) has to make it unambiguously clear to Bush and everyone who comes after that election as a president is not equivalent to election as an emperor who rules by his own preferences.

Bush notoriously does not listen to anyone telling him things he doesn't want to hear. Impeach him for treason, for subverting the country he is supposed to protect and defend. He’ll get the message, and just as important, so will his successors.

Lest I be thought hopelessly naive, let me add that there is no realistic hope of Bush's being impeached over his refusal to enforce our immigration laws. I said "should be." But keep in mind: while the country debates our mass-immigration debacle, what is happening now isn't nothing. The Invasion goes on, just as if the country had voted to become one of the world's failed states with a vast, uneducated, crime-ridden, unassimilable lower class.

I'm not forgetting, either, the terribly volatile situation in the Middle East that will determine whether the Muslim world's dream of death for Israel will succeed. Much as Bush's judgment is to be distrusted, it may be better for the moment that he not be distracted. But no matter how pressing the War for Israeli Survival becomes, we can't ignore what's going down right here.