The latest executive order
(EO) emanating from the White House October 9 now claims the power to
freeze all bank accounts and stop any related financial transactions
that a “sanctioned person” may own or try to perform — all in the name
of “Iran Sanctions.”
Titled an “Executive Order from the President regarding Authorizing
the Implementation of Certain Sanctions…” the order says that if an
individual is declared by the president, the secretary of state, or the
secretary of the treasury to be a “sanctioned person,” he (or she) will
be unable to obtain access to his accounts, will be unable to process
any loans (or make them), or move them to any other financial
institution inside or outside the United States. In other words, his
financial resources will have successfully been completely frozen. The
EO expands its authority by making him unable to use any third party
such as “a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation,
subgroup or other organization” that might wish to help him or allow him
to obtain access to his funds.
And if the individual so “sanctioned” decides that the ruling is
unfair, he isn't allowed to sue. In two words, the individual has
successfully been robbed blind.
But it’s all very legal. The EO says the president has his “vested
authority” to issue it, and then references endless previous EOs,
including one dating back to 1995 which declared a “state of emergency”
(which hasn’t been lifted):
Executive Order 12957.
EO 12957 was issued by President Bill Clinton on March 15, 1995, which was also obliquely related to the Iran “problem”:
I, William J. Clinton, President of the
United States of America, find that the actions and policies of the
Government of Iran to constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to
the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,
and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.
Clinton’s EO further delegated such powers as were necessary to
enforce the EO to the secretaries of the treasury and state “to employ
all powers … as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this
order. The Secretary of the Treasury may redelegate any of these
functions to other officers and agencies of the United States
Government.”
Such EOs are the perfect embodiment of what the Founders feared the
most: the combining of the legislative, executive, and judicial
functions into one body. Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution says:
“All legislative powers herein shall be vested in a Congress of the
United States.” As Thomas Eddlem,
writing for The New American, expressed it, “then it stands to reason [that] none is left for the president.”
But Joe Wolverton,
also in The New American, pointed
out the particular piece of language the Founders used to limit the
powers of the president which totalitarians have twisted to allow such
powers to expand: the “take care” clause, to wit: Article II, Section 3:
he [the president] shall take care that the laws be faithfully
executed…
With every EO, the president avoids the cumbersome constitutional
safeguards spelled out by the Constitution, and uses them to implement
policies he "knows" are right. Says Wolverton: "With every one of these …
executive orders, then, the president elevates his mind and will above
that of the people, Congress and the courts."
The current administration has had a lot of help in justifying and codifying the legitimacy of executive orders,
going all the way back to President George Washington who in 1793 issued his “
Neutrality Proclamation,” which
declared that the United States would remain neutral in the current
conflict between France and Great Britain, and would bring sanctions
against any American citizen who attempted to provide assistance to
either party. The language of Washington is eerily similar to that used
by President Obama in the present case:
I have therefore thought fit by these
presents to declare the disposition of the United States to observe the
conduct aforesaid toward those powers respectively, and to exhort and
warn the citizens of the United States carefully to avoid all acts and
proceedings whatsoever which may in any manner tend to contravene such
disposition…
I have given instructions to those
officers to whom it belongs to cause prosecutions to be instituted
against all persons who shall, within the cognizance of the courts of
the United States, violate the law of nations with respect to the powers
at war, or any of them.
When James Madison protested Washington’s usurpation of powers not
intended for the president, Congress acquiesced and passed,
retroactively,
the Neutrality Act of 1794, validating Washington’s usurpation.
President Lincoln engaged in similar usurpations, using presidential
“directives” to run the early months of the Civil War, presenting
Congress with,
as Todd Gaziano put it,
the decision either to adopt his [directives] as legislation or to cut off support for the Union army.
Within his first two months in office, on
April 15, 1861, Lincoln issued a proclamation activating troops to
defeat the Southern rebellion and for Congress to convene on July 4.
He also issued proclamations to procure
warships and to expand the size of the military; in both cases, the
proclamations provided for payment to be advanced from the Treasury
without congressional approval.
These latter actions were probably
unconstitutional, but Congress acquiesced in the face of wartime
contingencies, and the matters were never challenged in court.
President Franklin Roosevelt often overlooked the niceties of
constitutional restraints as well. As Gaziano expressed it, “FDR also
showed a tendency to abuse his executive order authority and [to] claim
powers that were not conferred on him in the Constitution or by
statute.”
As far as numbers of executive orders issued, Obama is a piker. At
the moment, although the list is growing, his administration has issued
138 executive orders.
President Theodore Roosevelt issued 1,006 while President Woodrow
Wilson issued 1,791. Even President Calvin Coolidge used the EO
“privilege” 1,253 times.
The granddaddy of them all, FDR, issued an astounding 3,728 executive orders, but of course he was in office longer than Obama.
President Bill Clinton issued only 364 executive orders, but he made
the most of them, using this extra-legal power to, among other things,
wage war in Yugoslavia without congressional approval. Cliff Kincaid collated the numerous EOs issued by Clinton in 1998 and 1999, and concluded:
Clinton waged his war on Yugoslavia
through executive order and presidential directive. Clinton used
executive orders to designate a "war zone," call up troops, proclaim a
"national emergency" with respect to Yugoslavia, and impose economic
sanctions on the Belgrade government.
Clinton claimed war-making presidential
authority through his "constitutional authority" to conduct "foreign
relations," as "Commander in Chief" and as "Chief Executive." Under this
self-designated authority, Clinton delegated command-and-control of
U.S. forces to NATO and its Secretary-General Javier Solana, who decided
when the air war would be discontinued…
The most outrageous executive order of all time was that issued by
President Roosevelt that allowed the enforced internment of 120,000
Japanese-Americans:
9066.
Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) called EOs patently unconstitutional.
When asked about them by Fox News’ Megan Kelly, Paul responded:
The Constitution says that only Congress
passes laws. The executive branch is not allowed to pass laws, nor
should the judicial system pass laws. So it is clearly unconstitutional
to issue these executive orders.
They’ve been done for a long time, both
parties have done it, but the Congress is careless. They allow and
encourage and do these deals … to get the president to circumvent the
Congress. If something’s unpopular and he can’t get it passed, well,
let’s just sign an executive order. So I think that is blatantly wrong. I
think this defies everything the founders intended. I think it’s a
shame that Congress does it, and I think it’s a shame that the American
people put up with it.
Correction: As originally written, this article placed the number
of executive orders issued by the Obama administration at 900, based on
an inaccurate source. We regret this misinformatiion. The figure cited
in the article has now been corrected.
