© 1999 Discerning the Times
Digest and NewsBytes
Here we go again. President Clinton continues to
circumvent Congress, trampling on Constitutional checks and balances. This
is no lame duck president. He can hear the clock winding down, and sensing
his imminent departure, he is spending his last months in office ensuring
his legacy through the use and abuse of the Executive Order (EO).
With the stroke of his executive pen, Bill Clinton’s
EO’s have affected everything from a war against Yugoslavia, to patients’
rights, to immunity from lawsuit for the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which spawned the Wildlands Project,
which seeks to protect half of the land in the U.S. from human use of any
kind.
The President’s Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt
wants to set aside two million acres in the West, establishing them as
National Monuments. Another 50 million acres could be set aside as
roadless areas. The restrictions on use that would ensue would effectively
implement the agenda of the Wildlands Project in the designated
areas, without the approval of Congress.
Secretary Babbitt knows that using Constitutional means
to achieve his goals is impossible with a Republican Congress. He has said
that if Congress does not cooperate with his agenda regarding these two
million acres, he will consider asking the President to exert his power to
get it done. In fact, apparently Secretary Babbitt has no intention of
waiting for Congress to achieve his goals. The June 14th edition of the Washington
Times quoted Babbitt saying, "We’ve switched the rules of
the game. We’re not trying to do anything legislatively."
The Antiquities Act passed in 1908 to protect the Grand
Canyon, outlines the criteria for national monument designation as being
reserved for lands having "scientific, historic or archaeological
significance." Clinton’s administration is hard pressed to
justify many of the designations it has made, and is attempting to make. A
critical review quickly establishes these efforts as nothing more than
elaborate land grabs by the federal government. Although future presidents
can overturn EOs, that is little comfort to citizens who depend on these
lands to make a living, or private property owners whose land and homes
are expropriated by heavy handed bureaucrats who make it impossible to
live on their own land.
Clinton’s abuses are getting deeper and are becoming
more and more sinister. Already under fire for political abuse of FBI and
IRS files, Clinton has quietly issued another EO that will afford him
access to even more sensitive documents. This Executive Order is an
amendment to EO 12958 signed in November, 1999 concerning classified
security information. The amendment establishes a new bureaucracy, the
Information Security Oversight Office within the National Archives and
Records Administration. The order has the potential to allow this newly
created office access to federal files, even classified files, on anyone
for any reason. This will catapult invasion of privacy to gargantuan
proportions.
The power grab never ends. Another priority of the
Clinton administration is gun control. The Washington Post reported
December 15, 1999 that the administration plans, "an all-out
offensive on guns in the coming year." White House domestic
policy chief Bruce D. Reed said, "the country is tired of waiting
for Congress to respond to the tragedy in Littleton. The administration is
going to do every thing in its power to make progress on guns." Research
shows that gun control legislation does very little to reduce crime rates.
(See this months commentary.)
Unfortunately, these moves by Clinton are only the tip
of the iceberg. It is obvious that he will use the remainder of the this
year to push through as much of his agenda as he possibly can without
going through Congress. Congress has passed so much loosely written laws
that the body of precedent to which the President can now turn to justify
his actions is incredibly broad. It has been built upon the skirting of
law rather than defensible redistribution of lawmaking power. The
legitimate body of law to which we are duty bound must be the United
States Constitution. The Constitution is effectively being ignored,
interpreted and reinterpreted into oblivion. Without strict adherence to
this proven document, tyranny is inevitable. V
ks
