Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela and avowed socialist, has been granted authority to rule by decree by the outgoing Venezuelan parliament. But he has nothing on our liberals. They have been doing that for decades now by judicial decisions and bureaucratic regulations that have no basis in law. The latest example is cited here by Charles Krauthammer discussing the regulations mandating government payments for end-of-life counseling, the EPA plans to enact cap-and-trade by regulatory fiat, and other measures that liberals cannot enact by legislative action in Congress in the manner established by our constitution.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/30/AR2010123003047.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
That is why I found Nancy Pelosi's pronouncement that Congress had to pass Obamacare so we could know what was in it not only laughable but totally immaterial. It never mattered what was in the Obamacare legislation. Liberals do not limit their agenda by what laws are passed or what passed laws actually say.
If you go back to the legislation that is claimed as the basis for racial quotas and preferences, before passage it was surrounded by controversy in Congress by claims of opponents that it would result in racial quotas in employment and other arenas within our society. The sponsors of the legislation proclaimed in Congress that there was nothing in the legislation requiring racial quotas and in fact it prohibited racial quotas so it passed Congress.
Of course, we know what happened. That legislation was used as the justification for all kinds of government regulations establishing racial quotas in hiring, education, government contracts, and any other facet of life that Congress could figure out how to control despite court challenges against racial preferences. Liberal judges even acknowledged while denying court challenges to racial quotas the statements of legislative sponsors that the law prohibited racial quotas and still ruled that Congress did not intend to prohibit racial preferences which really became quotas anyway as practiced by bureaucrats and administrative law judges. And the concept still lives on today with mandates for gender equity and diversity in the Wall Street Reform Act.
Citizens can have differences of opinion on whether measures like racial preferences and cap-and-trade are good or bad or of no consequence. But how long can our system of government survive a concerted effort by liberals and judges and bureaucrats carrying out the liberal agenda to make laws out of thin air because they cannot get them enacted by legislation in Congress in the manner established by our founding fathers?
