Obama’s executive order granting amnesty to 4 million illegal aliens exposes yet again the hypocrisy and cynicism of the most partisan administration in recent history. Typical of a president who seemingly can’t remember or doesn’t care what he has publicly told the people, Obama went ahead and took action that more than 20 times he had publicly said he couldn’t legally take. And he did so not because of some pressing “crisis” of illegals living “in the shadows,” a rationale that ignores the real crisis–– illegal deadbeats and thugs serially passing though a porous border in order to create mayhem and disorder in our communities. Rather, this action was a rank partisan gift to vocal activists and clients of the Democratic Party.
More important, however, this latest instance of presidential overreach undermines the most important foundation of the Western political tradition going back to the ancient Greeks––the suspicion of any necessarily flawed man’s excessive power that inevitably flouts the limits imposed by the supreme law of the land.
In ancient Athens, for example, the turannos or “tyrant” was the exemplar of the dangers that flow from excessive power vested in one person. It wasn’t that the tyrant was completely evil and oppressive. Many Greek tyrants, like the Athenian Peisistratus, benefitted their communities. Yet given human nature, even a well-meaning leader given excessive power often will abuse it to gratify his own selfish desires, ambitions, and interests at the expense of the law and the freedom of his fellow citizens. In ancient Greek political thought, the tyrant became the monitory example of power’s ability to corrupt, and thus often was depicted as violent, paranoid, and excessive in his actions.
The American founders were intimately familiar with this tradition. For them a generalissimo like Julius Caesar, who violated the Roman Republican constitution and ruled as an autocrat until his assassination, was the warning against creating a too powerful executive. One of the most popular Romans of the pre-Revolutionary period was Cato the Younger, who committed suicide rather than submit to Caesar. Joseph Addison’s play Cato was the most popular theatrical production of this period. George Washington had it produced for his troops during the grim winter at Valley Forge, and Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death” was a paraphrase of a line from the play.
