Ben Shapiro notes how topsy turvy the federal government has become and how we are going to lose our democracy if we don't wake up and defend it:
Welcome to the most transparent administration in American history, where the Federal Communications Commission can regulate the Internet and keep those regulations secret before a vote, where top government officials can deliberately hide their emails from the public, but where your health records, income and emails are all government business.
The public and private spheres have now been completely reversed.
The federal government can punish its own employees for enforcing federal immigration law; if you oppose this, you are a racist, but if you hire an illegal immigrant, you will be fined or imprisoned. The feds can monitor your electronic metadata, but they can hide their own correspondence from records requests. After all, they are our betters, and we must kneel before Zod.
What possible violations of the Constitutional system will Americans actually fight? The list of possibilities grows short. Reports emerged this week suggesting that President Obama will consider banning bullets by executive order, effectively castrating the Second Amendment by fiat. Shrug. The Obama White House announced this week that Obama was "very interested" in unilaterally raising taxes. Shrug.
Democracies die not with a whimper or a bang but with a shrug.
Columnist Phil Kerpen voices similar concerns:
The rule of law is in grave danger, as federal regulators use ever thinner legal pretexts to enable vast public policy changes without votes by our elected representatives. In a span of just seven days, the FCC declared the Internet a public utility, Congress acceded to DHS implementing executive amnesty, the president used a veto threat to protect the NLRB's ambush elections rule, and the Supreme Court's four liberals showed they are not just willing but enthusiastic to allow the IRS to ignore the plain language of Obamacare. A great week for regulators, but a terrible week for everyone else.
[ . . . ]
The shifting of ever more power into the presidency and his regulatory apparatus is a long running problem, but it has accelerated dramatically in the current administration. President Obama is now even reportedly exploring the possibly of usurping Congress's most fundamental power by directly ordering tax hikes.
We are, if the American people don't wake up and demand better, on the brink of losing our constitutional form of government forever in favor of a soft tyranny of federal regulators constrained only by elite opinion and quadrennial presidential elections.
