December 19, 2014 --

The trillion dollar-plus spending bill pass by Congress was a huge Christmas present for the president -- and government insiders. Unfortunately, it was another step in making the Constitution irrelevant. Congress gave President Obama ( to be recognized in 2015 as Supreme Ruler Obama?) just about everything he wanted to fund both Obamacare, and immigration legislation that was not actually legislation but the action of the President erasing the separation of powers construct of the Constitution. Perhaps this would not have happened had a Republican president acted to cancel separation of powers. LPR expects that Republican senators like Susan Collins, impatient with colleagues who would hold President Obama to constitutional account, would move to oust a Republican president who put himself above the Constitution. It is, apparently, far easier for Senator Collins to denounce conservatives who honor their oath to the Constitution than to stand firm against a leftist president who dishonors the Constitution and our founding legacy.

In Federalist No. 47, Madison wrote: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." Madison went on to indicate that the president "cannot of himself make a law, though he can put a negative on every law; nor administer justice in person, though he has the appointment of those who do administer it." Do Senator McConnell and Speaker Boehner now contend that disregard of separation of powers is no longer what James Madison called "the very definition of tyranny?"

In Federalist No. 58, Madison wrote that the "power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure."

LPR sees nothing in Federalist No. 58 declaring that the House of Representatives must never exercise its "power over the purse" to keep the President within constitutional bounds lest the media, Democrats and establishment Republicans cry: "The government is shutdown; the government is shutdown."

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial, December 16, commented: "The 1,600-page omnibus bill that passed this weekend is no way to run a government." Actually, this sort of legislation was seen by Madison, in Federalist No. 62, as poisonous to "the blessings of liberty itself." Madison pointed out: "It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows that the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow." Madison went on to warn that new regulations on "commerce or revenue" provide "a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences.... This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few, not for the many."

It is apparent to LPR that the wisdom of James Madison has become inconvenient for the left, the media and the Republican establishment. The actions of Congress, in enacting a voluminous $1.01 trillion budget bill, amounts to placing a lump of coal, this Christmas, on Madison's grave. But as Madison wrote in Federalist No. 41: "A bad cause seldom fails to betray itself."