Revisiting the Obvious

The Boston Globe reported yesterday that The Decider!

has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Every once in a while it's valuable to restate the obvious, and this is one:

The Decider!, and the oligarchal powers behind The Decider!, are not avidly acquiring power and authority to make America safer, they are avidly acquiring power and authority to make their power safer, power they feel is theirs by divine right, power that was stolen by the masses in the form of minimum wages and workplace health standards and environmental rules and all the other advances hard won by progressives and Liberals. The oligarchs, hankering for pre-Great Society, pre-New Deal, glorious days of robber baroncy, understand that consolidation of power in the person of a monarch offers the best and safest route to those ends. It is not an accident that the ur-objective of The Decider! Administration is the obsessive pursuit of expanded executive power.

The rich, the powerful, never feel rich or powerful enough. It's all zero-sum. Minimum wage is a personal affront to their morality. Workers demanding compensation when injured on the job is a direct challenge to their sense of regality. Any law that hampers the maximalization of profits or the fullest exertions of authority are by essense laws that need amending or, as demonstrated by The Decider!, brazen disobeying. Beyond legality, there is a philosophical issue at stake: Do we want to live in a country where the most powerful literally, legally, are without constraint?

Because when the powerful negotiate their contracts with us littles, that's the end game they're playing for. If The Decider! gets away with abolishing his obligations to uphold and obey 750 laws, do you think the oligarchs will say, Enough, we're satisfied? Do you think that once the foundations of the laws have been eroded to their satisfaction they won't use that erosion to undermine your franchise? To negate your rights as a worker, won over the past 75 years?

It's important to remember that the greatest threat to the oligarch's power is you. You. Not al-Q, not a nuclear Iran, not a bustling China or reinvigorated Russia, you. The Decider! is not waiving his sceptre and repudiating the Constitution because of a terrorist living in a cave in Pakistan, he's repudiating the Constitution because they want more power over you. You.