Blogline of the Day - "I can just ignore laws I don't like" - Granite Grok

Blogline of the Day – “I can just ignore laws I don’t like”

  • President Obama (D-Ill) and US Attorney General Eric Holder (D) unilaterally deciding that they would not enforce or defend DOMA (Section 4 declared unconstitutional yesterday by SCOTUS).
  • Governor Brown (D-CA) and CA Attorney General Kamala Harris unilaterally deciding that they would not enforce or defend Prop 8 (whose citizen defenders were declared to “not have standing” to bring suit yesterday by SCOTUS)

Emphasis mine:

We are fast becoming a country governed by the rule of men and women, not by law. As I wrote here last February, allowing state officials to veto laws–not just bills–strikes at the heart of liberty We are far less free today because we are no longer a society that sees principle as paramount. All that matters, particularly on the left, is gaining the desired result in the issue at hand.

Many on the Right, including myself, are certainly not happy about the surface level decisions by SCOTUS on the gay marriage issue suit.  However, what has risen to be almost more important was the way that SCOTUS made their decisions legally and may well rise to the “bad law of Roe vs Wade” (regardless of one’s point of view of either yesterday or Roe).   Elected officials (especially at the Governor and Presidential levels) should NOT just be able to, willy-nilly, decide that they can just ignore that which has been duly Legislated and passed into law.

These officials are no better than Dictators who arbitrarily decree this, that, or something completely different.  If they do, they violate one of our most cherished precepts and pillars of American culture and power.  It is uncertainty that stops innovation and growth.  If more and more officials decided that their power permits them to sidestep the law (or worse, ignore them as in “does not apply at all”), how are we better than the Strong Man Rule?

At that point, we have also lost our Equality before the Law.  At that point, we might as well begin to band together and defend ourselves against a Tyrannical government.

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