… it will not be possible to dispense with those corporations which today we designate as parliaments … responsibility, however, can and may be borne by only one man....
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool.
— Presidential aide Paul Begala, Quoted in New York Times, July 5, 1998

He’s [Clinton] ready to work with Congress if they will work with him. But if they choose partisanship, he will choose progress.
— Clinton adviser Rahm Emanuel,
Quoted in Los Angeles Times,
July 4, 1998

I have a continuing obligation to act, to use the authority of the Presidency and the persuasive power of the podium to advance America’s interest at home and abroad.
— Bill Clinton, July 6, 1998

We have a congressional majority right now that seems intent on thwarting the will of the majority in this country on gun safety, on tobacco.... But while the President is here, he has executive authority.... And there are a number of ways that we can go at this problem, and the President I think believes that it is his responsibility, indeed his obligation, to do that.”
— White House press spokesman
Joe Lockhart, January 12, 2000

The Führer-Reich of the [German] people is founded on the recognition that the true will of the people cannot be disclosed through parliamentary votes and plebiscites but that the will of the people in its pure and uncorrupted form can only be expressed through the Führer.... He shapes the collective will of the people within himself and enjoys the political unity and entirety of the people in opposition to individual interests.... [His] power is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited.... He is responsible only to his conscience and the people....
— The Organization Book of the German National Socialist Party, explaining the concept of Führerprinzip
(the “Leader Principle”)

I am not prepared to sit back and let this Congress do what it has done for the last seven years on these areas, which is virtually nothing.... If Congress does not act and produce an acceptable bill protecting these lands, I will consider asking the president to use his power.
— Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt,  October 19, 1999

The White House calls it “Project Podesta” — a calculated strategy of circumventing Congress through the use of presidential directives and executive orders. “There’s a pretty wide sweep of things we’re looking to do, and we’re going to be very aggressive in pursuing it,” chief of staff John Podesta, the strategy’s namesake, told U.S. News & World Report. The administration’s newly aggressive approach to rule by decree can be seen in executive branch initiatives against the gun industry and tobacco companies, as well as the January 11th proclamation setting aside more than one million acres of land in the western United States as national monuments. However, there is certainly nothing novel about Bill Clinton’s penchant for rule by decree.

“It’s been a mark of the Clinton administration to rule by executive fiat, circumventing a hostile Congress by signing presidential orders that affect everything from patients’ rights to conservation to a war against Yugoslavia,” observed the November 9, 1999 Christian Science Monitor. In an ill-conceived stab at constitutional analysis, the Monitor asserts that the Constitution “speaks only vaguely about the president’s powers, designating Congress as the body that makes the laws and the executive branch as the one that carries them out. Nowhere does it define or limit the president’s power to rule by executive order.”

In fact, the powers of the Presidency are all explicitly defined in the Constitution, and the power to “rule” — either through executive order or in any other sense — is not among them. The President may properly issue such orders as necessary to administer the affairs of the executive branch. The responsibility of this branch is not to legislate but to execute the legislation passed by Congress.

According to the Monitor, though, Congress is largely powerless to rein in Bill Clinton’s promiscuous use of executive orders “because the body of law to which presidents can turn for their authority is now huge.” That collection of precedents consists of powers accumulated through usurpation, not through a legal redistribution of authority. The supreme “body of law” remains the U.S. Constitution, which specifies (Article I, Section 1) that “all legislative [law-making] powers herein granted shall be vested” in Congress, not in the Presidency, the Supreme Court, or federal bureaucracies. “We’ve come a long way toward tyranny” through presidential usurpation, observes legal scholar William Olson, “and [Capitol] Hill — I hope and pray — is finally waking up.” Congress can indeed reclaim its usurped powers, and the Clinton administration’s “Project Podesta” may help arouse Congress from its apathy.

Leninist Lineage

While Podesta may wish to claim credit for the administration’s brazen campaign of usurpation, a better title for it might be “Project Lenin,” or “Operation Führer,” either of which captures the essence of our predicament: Bill Clinton, in defiance of both Congress and the Constitution, has signaled his intention to spend the balance of his term ruling as an elected dictator. Through the 20th century, the Leninist model of dictatorship, known in the Communist lexicon as “democratic centralism,” was employed, with appropriate variations, by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, by Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy, and by dictators and despots around the globe. Under that doctrine, the country’s chief executive claims a “democratic” mandate that gives him the right to impose socialist measures by executive decree.

To a remarkable extent, the Lenin model was followed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who declared in his 1933 inaugural address (as paraphrased by the December 1, 1999 Christian Science Monitor) that “the urgent needs of the day could justify a ‘temporary departure’ from the normal balance of powers.” Under the pretext of addressing a national economic crisis and the exigencies of a world war, FDR issued 3,723 executive orders. Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Bill Clinton’s imperial Presidency is the fact that his usurpation of power has not been justified by war, economic depression, or any similar crisis; it is simply a way for a lawless President to circumvent organized political opposition.

Like previous dictators — both elected and unelected — Bill Clinton considers the disarmament of law-abiding citizens to be a high priority. Accordingly, reported the December 15, 1999 Washington Post, the administration plans “an all-out offensive on guns in the coming year.” Toward that end, several high-ranking administration officials — including Podesta, White House domestic policy chief Bruce D. Reed, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo — huddled at the White House “to come up with a series of actions to build pressure on the gun industry for an agreement,” including “a series of executive actions [Mr. Clinton] can take in the weeks and months to come.” “The country is tired of waiting for Congress to respond to the tragedy in Littleton,” asserted Reed. “The administration is going to do everything in its power to make progress on guns.” Presidential spokesperson Joe Lockhart was even more brazen, telling reporters, “We’re not going to rely on Congress.”

Ironically, former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, who could accurately be described as a democratic socialist in political outlook, has pointedly criticized the Clinton administration’s assault on the gun industry and tobacco companies by executive decree. “If I had my way there would be laws restricting cigarettes and handguns,” wrote Reich in the January 12th Wall Street Journal. “But Congress won’t even pass halfway measures.... Almost makes you lose faith in democracy, doesn’t it? Apparently that’s exactly what’s happened to the Clinton administration. Fed up with trying to move legislation, the White House is launching lawsuits to succeed where legislation has failed. The strategy may work, but at the cost of making our frail democracy even weaker.”

Reich criticized the administration for pursuing “blatant end-runs around the democratic process.” Reich warned his fellow leftists that while they “might approve the outcomes” achieved through executive decrees and lawsuits against gun and tobacco companies, “they establish a precedent for other cases you might find wildly unjust.”

Asked about Robert Reich’s criticism of the administration’s executive order strategy, presidential spokesman Joe Lockhart, in a gesture that reflects the adolescent arrogance of his boss, first alluded to Reich’s diminutive physical stature. “I will resist the temptation to call it short-sighted,” sneered a smirking Lockhart, who continued by asserting, once again, that the President’s powers are essentially limitless.

As if in conscious mimicry of the Nazi Party’s Organization Book, Lockhart accused Congress of “thwarting the will of the majority in this country on gun safety [translated: gun control] and tobacco” and claimed that Bill Clinton “believes it is his responsibility, indeed his obligation,” to use his “executive authority” to carry out policies Congress refuses to enact through legislation. Or, as Lockhart’s Nazi predecessors may have expressed it, Mr. Clinton is “responsible only to his conscience and the people.”

Eco-Imperialism

The administration has not seen fit to “rely” on Congress in enacting landgrabs in the western U.S. and other eco-socialist measures. “Conservation proposals are falling like rain from the White House as President Clinton tries to create an environmental legacy,” reported a January 16th AP dispatch. “Authorities inside and outside government cannot remember when there has been so much activity.” Dale Riddle, who monitors regulatory proposals for the Seneca Sawmill Company in Eugene, Oregon, compares the onslaught of executive actions and regulatory decrees to the New Deal era. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” Riddle told AP. “There’s so many, it’s hard to keep up with all of them.”

Andy Stahl of the radical environmental group Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics explains that “the administration is in its two-minute offense,” an allusion to a football strategy in which a quarterback, seeking to beat the clock, marches his team down the field without pausing for huddles. Of course, the analogy breaks down once it is translated into constitutional terms: A President, unlike a quarterback, has very little discretionary authority; “huddles” with Congress are mandatory; and, in legislative terms it is Congress, not the President, that calls the plays. But such considerations matter not at all to the administration, which has simply tossed the rulebook — the Constitution — in the trash. “Where Congress has been unable or unwilling to act, this administration has not hesitated to use its full executive authority to protect public health and the environment,” declared Elliot Diringer of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. “This is all fully within his authority.”

Last October, the President directed the Forest Service to place up to 50 million acres of “roadless areas” in federal forests off-limits to development. This decree had an immediate economic impact upon thousands of Americans who own lands that abut the affected forests. “Robin Hood and his gang enjoyed greater freedom in Sherwood Forest than our citizens will have on their own lands under this particular proposal,” complained Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) elaborated upon Hatch’s medieval imagery. “Over two hundred years ago, we decided that the King would not rule,” observed Craig. “Today we have an attitude in this administration that not only does King William want to reign, but he appears at this moment to be setting up a monarchy for Prince Albert.”

According to the November 3, 1999 New Orleans Times-Picayune, Forest Service head Dan Glickman, seeking to placate critics of the presidential decree, promised that “Agency officials will hold hearings in the next year near every forest where roadless areas are considered for greater protection” — meaning that the executive branch seeks to cut Congress out of the process altogether as it tightens controls over the land.

“King William” enacted another installment of the executive landgrab through a January 11th proclamation that set aside more than one million acres in Nevada, Arizona, and California as “national monuments.” The executive order, which was issued in a ceremony near the west side of the Grand Canyon, was described by Mr. Clinton as “an act of humility for all of us.” Proving anew that humility is a sensation foreign to his nature, Mr. Clinton described his decree as “a legacy for the children of America, for hundreds of years into the future.... [I]t’s not a bad gift to give.”

The organs of the Establishment media cartel chimed in on-cue, hymning the landgrab as an act of high statesmanship. Newsreader Peter Jennings began the January 11th installment of ABC’s World News Tonight by praising the President for “govern[ing] his way around Congress.” NBC’s Tom Brokaw extolled the executive order as “an ambitious plan to save America’s treasures before time runs out for the President” and archly asked, “Why [are there] so many critics?” NBC reporter Roger O’Neill was “on message” with the Clinton junta as well, insisting that the President was simply “doing what he was afraid Congress wouldn’t do.” Brokaw concluded the segment by pointing out that “there’s more acreage on the President’s wish list” — and he intends to see it locked up, with or without congressional cooperation.

“What he [Bill Clinton] is doing amounts to feudalism with him as the king,” protested Arizona Senate President Rusty Bowers. Acting as the emissary of “King William,” Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt displayed regal contempt toward Congress during an October 19, 1999 hearing on the monument designations. “I’m not prepared to sit back and let this Congress do what it has done for the last seven years on these areas, which is virtually nothing,” sniffed Babbitt. “If Congress does not act and produce an acceptable bill protecting these lands, I will consider asking the president to use his power” to lock them up by fiat. When asked by Representative John Shadegg (R-AZ) for a list of all areas under consideration for national monument designation, Babbitt scornfully replied, “No.”

While Mr. Clinton’s critics condemn the administration for circumnavigating Congress, Forest Service spokesman Chris Wood insists that the executive branch eco-regulatory blitzkrieg “is nothing short of democracy in action.” Wood’s point is sound — once it is understood that Bill Clinton, like Adolf Hitler, subscribes to the view that because “the true will of the people cannot be disclosed through [legislative] votes,” the chief executive, who “shapes the collective will of the people within himself,” must exercise power that “is not limited by checks and controls.” Of course, this type of democratic tyranny is precisely what the U.S. Constitution was intended to prevent.

What Can Be Done

Many Republican lawmakers have reacted to the latest onslaught of executive orders by expressing hopes that a future Republican President would set things right.

According to the Associated Press, Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA), a critic of the Clinton administration’s “absolutely unprecedented” seizure of land through executive action, “is hopeful the next president can undo many of Clinton’s initiatives” — in other words, that a “conservative” Republican President would issue his own executive orders to supersede whatever previous executive orders he disagrees with. Never mind that neither a Republican nor a Democratic President has the authority to legislate. Only Congress possesses that authority.

According to Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), “What the president is doing with these [Executive Orders] … is just un-American, there’s no other way to put it.” However, he continues, it is a mistake “to place all the blame for this abuse of power on any single President. Congress and the courts have stood by while the misuse of executive orders has grown to gigantic proportions.” This indictment must be narrowed even further: Congress specifically is guilty of a gross dereliction of duty in allowing presidential usurpation to proceed unchallenged.

Once again, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich offers a surprisingly sound diagnosis of the problem. “The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress have become increasingly irrelevant,” wrote Reich in a January 17, 1999 USA Today op-ed column. According to Reich, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan presides over America’s domestic economy, the UN’s International Monetary Fund essentially dictates U.S. foreign policy, and “when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress. He just calls up a few generals, phones Tony Blair in Britain and sends in the bombers.” All of these developments have been made possible by Congress’ abdication of its constitutional responsibilities. But Congress’ dereliction of duty has been abetted by a similarly heedless electorate. In order to arrest America’s descent into tyranny, the electorate must be educated regarding the principles of our constitutional republic, and mobilized to hold Congress accountable for following those principles.

Toward that end, Congressmen Ron Paul and Jack Metcalf (R-WA) have co-sponsored H.R. 2655, the Separation of Powers Restoration Act. Among other objectives, the bill (in the words of Paul) “restricts executive orders by denying to them force of law except as provided for by Congress.” The bill also grants legal standing (that is, the right to sue in civil court) to congressmen, state officials, and private citizens who seek to challenge the constitutionality of a presidential decree.

Congress also has the authority to impeach a lawless President for crimes against the Constitution. The fact that Mr. Clinton has already been impeached once does not mean that he cannot be impeached again and (this time) removed from office. This necessary legislative check on the executive branch may be the only means to thwart Mr. Clinton’s continued exercise of dictatorial powers.

While these are worthy objectives, the work of restoring our constitutional framework will require educated, principled, and — most importantly — organized vigilance on the part of American citizens.

Presidential Pen Plunders Private Property

by William Norman Grigg

One of Bill Clinton’s most insidious executive orders was EO 12986, which was issued on January 9, 1996. The decree extended immunity from lawsuits to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), which is an accredited scientific advisory body to the United Nations. The IUCN, which liaises with more than 880 affiliates in 133 countries, including scores of state and federal governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the U.S., seeks to promote “alternative models for sustainable communities and lifestyles, based on ecospiritual practices and principles.” Toward that end, the IUCN created the “Wildlands Project,” a scheme to transform at least one-half the surface area of the continental United States into a vast “eco-park” purged of modern industry and private property.

The Wildlands Project was to be incorporated as part of the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity, which was signed by Bill Clinton in July 1993. One month later, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a directive instructing “Natural resource and environmental agencies” to develop “a joint strategy to help the United States fulfill its existing obligations (e.g. Convention on Biodiversity, Agenda 21).” Agenda 21, it should be noted, is the mammoth blueprint for global eco-socialism produced by the United Nations at its 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro. In September 1994, the Senate refused to ratify the Biodiversity treaty when it was discovered that its “binding protocols,” which had been devised by the IUCN, mandated the implementation of the Wildlands Project in order to conserve “biodiversity.”

Mr. Clinton, as is his custom, simply ignored the Senate’s refusal to ratify the treaty. Through EO 12852 he created the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, which coordinates federal efforts to “harmonize” environmental regulatory practices with UN directives. His subsequent decrees regarding “roadless areas” and new “national monuments” fit perfectly into the Wildlands framework, which is built around a network of existing “core protected areas” — such as the Grand Canyon — which are surrounded by “buffer zones” and then connected by “wildlife corridors.” Former Earth First! eco-terrorist Dave Foreman, who helped concoct the Wildlands Project, urges eco-radical groups to “look for gaps between wild lands or public lands” for future acquisition “by public agencies or private groups like the Nature Conservancy.” In this way, private lands abutting federally designated “protected” areas can be pried out of private hands, until (in Foreman’s words) “the matrix, not just the nexus, is wild.” With two strokes of his proverbial pen, Bill Clinton has placed millions of property owners in the path of the Wildlands juggernaut — and through EO 12986, he placed the IUCN beyond civil accountability for any injuries sustained by private property owners.

The “American Heritage Rivers Initiative,” another element of the Wildlands Project, was announced by President Clinton during his July 4, 1997 State of the Union address, and subsequently enacted through EO 13061. “The Clinton Administration has once again usurped Congress’ lawmaking authority,” protested Congressman Helen Chenoweth-Hage (R-ID). “Nowhere in law can one find the American Heritage Rivers Initiative.” The Wildlands-related purpose of the Rivers Initiative is to create arbitrarily defined “River Communities” in which land and water use policies would be placed under the control of unelected, unaccountable, UN-connected bureaucrats. Thus far, 14 rivers have been selected as “Heritage Rivers,” and the lands through which they run, including privately owned lands, are now considered “gaps” within the biodiversity grid, and thus subject to future acquisition by the federal government.

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