Why Obama's Latest Executive Order is Scary
By Gina Miller
AmericanClarion.com
This past Friday afternoon brought a new executive order from the White House. It was titled, “National Defense Resources Preparedness.” This order sent the blogosphere and conservative news followers into a terrified frenzy. I even sent out an e-mail to many on my blast list with a link to the order on the White House website, because it is an alarming thing in light of the current communist administration in Washington.
Many people are convinced that this means Barack Obama (or whatever his name is) is setting up a situation to declare peacetime martial law in America. In fact, one of the first columns to appear in the wake of Obama’s signing of the order was on Canada Free Press. Its title was, “Obama Executive Order: Peacetime Martial Law!”
I read the executive order, and the term “martial law” was not included in it. However, the order was very disturbing, but we have to look back in our history to see that this executive order is not a new one. It has almost identical wording to an executive order signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, but Obama’s order revokes President Clinton’s order in its entirety.
As WND’s Drew Zahn reported, President Eisenhower created the first version of this kind of executive order in 1958, and the previous version after President Clinton’s was by President George W. Bush in 2003, but President Bush’s order was mainly concerned with replacing terminology and names of departments that had been revised and created, and delegating authority to the Department of Homeland Security, which had previously not existed.
Obama’s and President Clinton’s executive orders claim to derive their power from the Cold War era Defense Production Act of 1950. I tried to find an online copy of the text of the original Act as signed in 1950, but with my limited searching, I only found an incomplete one. The Act has been amended numerous times since 1950, no doubt increasing its power each time.
Obama’s order gives the executive branch of our government, with all its agencies and secretaries, powers to commandeer most major areas of the private sector for the nebulously defined purposes of “national defense,” even during peacetime. This includes power over all forms of energy, energy use, control and distribution; all water sources in the United States; all food sources, which includes production facilities, factories, farms and farm equipment; health resources, which includes all aspects of the health care industry from drugs to diagnostic equipment to medical facilities; and civil transportation, which includes control over all movement of people and forms of transportation in the United States, and all storage and repair facilities.
WND’s Drew Zahn, in his piece from Sunday, provided a balanced look at this executive order. He noted the fear of many who saw this as a massive power grab by the Obama administration, but he went on to show that this order is basically just a revision of President Clinton’s order from 1994 to update changes in government agency structure, and he quoted from an article by Ed Morrissey from HotAir.com.
At Hot Air, Mr. Morrissey concluded his piece by saying,
“Indeed — but all of that was equally true before Obama issued an update to a 73-year-old effort that changed nothing about his executive authority and power. To the extent that we’re all more aware of it, that’s good, but we shouldn’t act as though this was an Obama novelty, and we really shouldn’t jump to conspiracy-think conclusions without understanding the history of these EOs.”
That would be all well and good, if we were dealing with a run-of-the-mill Democrat or Republican in the White House, but we’re not. Here is the distinction: Barack Obama is the most lawless president in American history. There have been bad presidents, and most of them have acted extra-constitutionally when you consider the strict limits on the executive branch, and the federal government as a whole, and how most presidents have overreached those limits. But, we have never seen such blatant disregard for the limits on the authority of the executive branch as we have seen under this mystery man, Obama. We have never seen a president spit on the authority of the co-equal branches of the federal government as we have seen under Obama. We have never seen such disdain for the United States Constitution and the rights and freedoms of the American people as we have seen under Obama.
That is what makes this latest executive order incarnation more alarming to many Americans. Today we have situations we did not have under Presidents Clinton and Bush. One difference is that there was no violent, moronic Occupy movement during their terms. The Occupy movement represents Obama’s army of useful, street idiots. It is precisely those kinds of people rioting in the streets that can easily be imagined to “cause” a situation in which the federal government under Obama decides to take a martial law-type action against the American people.
While we must keep a level perspective on the fact that this type of executive order has existed at least since the 1990s, it is still unnerving to see it being given a dusting-off update under the communist regime in Washington at this particular time.
The fact is that the United States Constitution, for all intents and purposes, is dead, and it desperately needs to be resurrected and enforced. The federal government long ago broke loose from the very limited scope of its power and authority. Long ago, the federal government trampled into the realm of the authority of the several states and the people. The major source of authority in the United States was originally intended to be reserved for the people and the states, not the federal government, whose powers were meant to be few and limited.
Ms. Publius Huldah, a retired litigation attorney in Tennessee, wrote an excellent, must-read piece titled, “Model Nullification Resolutions for State Legislatures” in which she outlines a superb set of declarations for putting the federal government back in its proper place, if only the states would have the will to do so.
She opens the proposal,
“Resolved, That the States composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to the federal government; but that, with the Constitution for the United States, they established a federal government for limited purposes only. That they delegated to this federal government only limited and enumerated powers; and reserved, each State to itself, all remaining powers, along with the right to their own self-government.
That whenever the federal government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”
She notes that the State Constitution of Tennessee,
“… acknowledges the Principle that the doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”
Indeed, the very beginning of the United States of America was most certainly one of extreme resistance to the arbitrary power and oppression by King George III of England, and our forefathers with a fierce and bloody revolution threw off those shackles. Now, less than 240 years later, we have abandoned the precious founding documents that our forefathers fought so hard to bring to life.
Beginning in earnest in the early part of the 20th century, it has been a long, gradual and steady chipping away of the rights of the states and the people by the federal government that has led us to the point where we now see an administration poised to seize absolute power over the states and the people of America. It has become clear that the Congress and the Courts have no will to stand up to the tyrant Obama and his henchmen in the various agencies and czarships of the executive branch. That leaves the last bastions against the current federally tyranny being the states themselves and then the people.
One major problem with the states standing against the federal government, is that in too many cases, the federal government holds money strings over the states. Countless millions and billions of federal taxpayer dollars are given to the states for various purposes, and with that money, the federal government has leverage over the states. If you do not cooperate with the will of the federal government, you have the threat of federal funding being denied. Basically, if you take their money, they own you.
We also see that almost every time a state has undertaken to enforce laws that, for instance, protect the integrity of elections, curb the illegal alien invasion, or protect its citizens from the unconstitutional Obamacare legislation, the federal government, through the lawless Obama Justice Department, brings lawsuits against the states, and somehow, the Justice Department manages to find willing accomplices in the federal courts to impose the Obama regime’s will on the states. We are fast approaching a point at which the states will have to either take a firm stand against, or fully give in to, the tyranny of the federal government under Barack Obama.
I also have dreadful thoughts about the upcoming presidential election that I have shared with you before on this broadcast. I can see potential for the greatest case of election fraud in the history of the United States. I can see results-changing, undetectable, voting machine hacks on a grand scale, and I can see any number of ways our newly-outsourced U.S. election results reporting—now in international hands—has serious potential for fraud. And, of course, I can see the foot soldier fraudsters on the ground committing voter fraud till they’re blue in the face—especially since this communist regime under Obama is hell-bent on preventing common-sense voter ID laws from being enacted. In other words, I can see Obama being “reelected” just like Vladimir Putin was “reelected.”
Regardless—and back to the topic of this broadcast—the current executive order signed by Obama on Friday is indeed scary, simply because of who Obama and his friends are. We are dealing with a breed of radical, anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-Constitution revolutionaries in our executive branch and throughout the Congress and the Courts, and we most certainly do have cause for alarm at this supposedly innocent “updating” of an already tyrannical, unconstitutional executive order.