Currently I have enjoyed the sight of Democratic Senators, Congressmen, Bureaucrats and other sundry government workers losing their minds over the recent Executive Orders from President Trump. These orders were the result of promises that Trump made during his campaign to end the destructive practices of the Biden administration.
On his first day in office as the 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders which rescinded many of the previous administration's executive actions, withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization and Paris Agreement, rolled back federal recognition of gender identity, founded the Department of Government Efficiency, reaffirmed the existing constitutional right to free speech, reversed the withdrawal of Cuba's designation as a state sponsor of terror, reversed sanctions on Israeli settlers, rolled back policy on artificial intelligence, reversed the Family Reunification Task Force, pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 rioters, designated Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, attempted to end birthright citizenship for new children of illegal aliens and immigrants temporarily present in the U.S., delayed the U.S. government's ban of TikTok by 75 days, and declared a national emergency on the southern border, triggering the deployment of the U.S. military to the border to stabilize the situation.
Since these orders have gone into effect, there has been discoveries of waste, fraud and abuse that are at a level most analysts feel must compel criminal investigation. The politicians and bureaucrats that fear these investigations state that they are unfair since the practices were decades in the making and were standard operating procedures. Some have declared that Trump's orders are blatantly unconstitutional. Some believe we are in a Constitutional crisis that we have never had before. This is of course nonsense on its face!
When President Lincoln was elected President in 1860, he did not take office until March 4, 1861. During those four months, seven states had seceded from the United States and founded the Confederate States. The threat of war was their number one topic and compelled Lincoln to issue the suspension of “habeas corpus.”
Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the first year of the War, responding to riots and local militia actions in the border states by allowing the indefinite detention of “disloyal persons” without trial. Habeas corpus, which literally means “you have the body,” is a constitutional mandate requiring the government to give prisoners access to the courts.
On May 28, 1861, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney directly challenged President Abraham Lincoln's wartime suspension of the great writ of habeas corpus, in a national constitutional showdown. However, Taney noted that he didn't have the physical power to enforce the writ in this case because of the nature of the conflict at hand. “I have exercised all the power which the Constitution and laws confer on me, but that power has been resisted by a force too strong for me to overcome,” he said. But Taney did order that a copy of his opinion be sent directly to President Lincoln.
Lincoln ignored the Supreme Court justice's decision overturning his order, and over the next few years, the Great Emancipator, in one of the war's starkest ironies, allowed these new restrictions, which also imposed martial law in some volatile border areas and curbed freedom of speech and the press, to expand throughout the Northern states. The fact that he ignored the Supreme Court on this matter suggests a level of tyranny that President Trump has yet to reach!
Lincoln's actions were a true Constitutional crisis and shortly before he was assassinated, he tried to end what he had done only to have states like Missouri refuse to go back to normal procedures. It took years before civil liberties were finally restored.
I think most Americans would agree that we aren't in a Constitutional crisis, but we are in the depth of a true financial crisis. President Trump's Executive Orders are painful to some, but must be embraced, if we are to survive as a country!