This American monarchy

American voters are furious at how ineffectual and self-serving their government has become. Politicians campaign one way but govern another. They campaign for smaller government but it gets bigger with their support. They promise financial restraint but spend like fools with a stolen credit card. They confirm Supreme Court nominees who will ignore the Constitution. Congressional committees rage about abuses at the Internal Revenue Service and VA hospitals, despotic decrees from the Environmental Protection Agency, disregard for the law by the attorney general, and complete fabrication of socially revolutionary principles by the Supreme Court, and yet no one is impeached.

Much voter anger is over the failure of the Republicans to check the Democrats and of the Republican-led Congress to check the president. Checks and balances are essential to a modern republican government, setting one branch of government against another to prevent anyone from threatening liberty by overstepping his legal limits. Equally vital to liberty, however, is federalism, the separation of sovereign power between state and national levels of government.

But the letter that President Barack Obama’s Department of Education circulated to the nation’s school districts last week concerning transgender students extended rule by executive decree throughout our political system.

Ostensibly, the letter was merely to clarify for local schools precisely what the 1972 Title IX law prohibiting sex discrimination in education means for transgender students, those suffering from gender dysphoria:

“When a school provides sex-segregated activities and facilities, transgender students must be allowed to participate in such activities and access such facilities consistent with their gender identity.”

So it applies to restrooms, changing rooms, sports teams, overnight trips, and so on. Who exactly is transgender depends on the self-perception of the student in question, not a medical professional and not even necessarily the student’s parents. Uncooperative schools—including colleges and universities—will face lawsuits and the denial of federal funds.

Of course, Title IX, the law to which the people gave their consent through their elected representatives, makes no mention of transgendered anything. Yet with this directive, the current administration in Washington has decreed that gender is distinct from sex and that whether one is a boy/man, girl/woman, or something else entirely is simply a matter of personal affirmation, not a scientifically ascertainable biological fact.

This is a radical change in American life. But there was no attempt to persuade the people or secure their consent. It was never debated in Congress. A bureaucracy—not even a court!—just imposed on us that our girls will share locker rooms with boys who think they are girls, and men are now free to enter women’s restrooms.

People are in the mood for revolt. But government overspending is not the fundamental issue. Instead it is liberty, government by consent through elected representatives, not faceless bureaucrats. If no one effectively opposes this—states, Congress, private citizens through the courts—then we no longer have a constitutional republic. We have a democratic dictatorship, a kind of elective monarchy. Will we allow this to continue? This is the question for those seeking our votes.