Nero, Palpatine, Obama?

WORLD has long favored immigration reform. WORLD, while criticizing many White House policies over the past six years, has steered clear of hate-Obama rhetoric. One of our mottos: “Sensational facts, understated prose.”

Yet if predictions are accurate, it’s not right to underplay the significance of the unilateral action the president apparently is taking. Tonight he will probably toss out words to distance a blatant overreach from what he himself warned against many times. But those who have received either a classical education or a Star Wars variant may hear echoes of Emperors Nero and Palpatine.

America’s Founders, because they understood man’s tendencies to lord it over others, created a system of checks and balances. They did not like monarchy because it could lead to tyranny. They did not like aristocracy because it could result in feudalism. They also didn’t want democracy by itself, because it could lead to “mobocracy,” rule by crowd psychology and the passions of the moment.

They created a mixed government featuring a separation of powers. They made the president like a constitutional monarch. They created a Senate they thought would be an aristocracy. They created the House of Representatives as the voice of democracy.

They foresaw a time when the executive and the legislative branches might join forces to preserve their own power, at the expense of liberty, so they created a Supreme Court that would prevent or at least curtail such grabbing. If the Supreme Court did not do its job, they thought state legislators would stand up in their capitals and say, “No.”

And what if, by some remote stretch of the imagination, the Supreme Court disregarded big chunks of the Constitution and allowed a president to gain an extraordinary amount of power and money? What if the central government succeeded in bossing around the states by threatening to withhold funds if the states would not bow to its will? Journalists form the last line of defense. That’s why we have freedom of the press.

We’ll now see who fills their constitutionally mandated roles. Impeachment is not a prudent political move, but Congress has many other tools at its disposal. So do courts and state legislators, yet nothing will come without boldness and pain. The press has a particular responsibility to tell the truth, and I pray that we will.