The biggest threat to our democracy is the Democratic Party. They may be the ones crying the loudest about how “our democracy is under attack” every time they lose an election or fail to advance their agenda. But the truth is that they are the ones who are actively undermining our republic due to their careless disregard of the Constitution and political norms. Our government has become increasingly partisan over the years, seemingly only able to function when one party has control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.
Without a doubt, Democrats have set the most partisan and dangerous precedents in our republic, and it’s time for Republicans to step up their game and call them out for their “assault on our democracy.”
Using impeachment as a political tool
Democrats promised to impeach Donald Trump before he even took office, and once they had control of the House, it was inevitable they would gin up something to impeach him over. So in 2019, they began an impeachment inquiry over a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. However, the charges were so weak that Democrats were accused of politicizing impeachment, and Republicans indicated that the next Democrat president would end up impeached thanks to the partisan standards Democrats set.
“I’m really saddened for my country. I’m really concerned that the irreparable damage that now every president that has a different party in the House, in control of the House, will have to fight impeachment his whole term,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said. “It’s just a very, very dangerous precedent. There will definitely be some people wanting payback.”
Sure enough, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) introduced articles of impeachment on Biden’s first full day in office, and Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-Ohio) filed articles of impeachment back in September, alleging violations of his oath of office. Since Democrats control the House, those efforts went nowhere. Still, Republicans are expected to win big in November and are already promising a slew of investigations, and impeachment attempts are widely considered to be inevitable.
They should impeach Biden and Harris simultaneously in my opinion.
Legislating via executive action
Obama spent most of his presidency with a divided Congress or a GOP-controlled Congress. Rather than seek consensus with the Republican Party, his default position was to act independently, Constitution be damned. The best example of this is when the DREAM Act failed to pass. Rather than sit down with Republicans to work on a more limited version of the bill, he issued an executive order creating DACA, an executive-branch version of the DREAM Act. Obama bypassed Congress, changing U.S. immigration law via executive pen to appease his pro-open-borders base. Obama knew that he didn’t have the power to create immigration law unilaterally, but he did anyway. Trump ended DACA via executive pen, but an activist Clinton-nominate judge reinstated it in Dec. 2020. In November, should Republicans win the majority, expect Biden to similarly bypass Congress.
Legislating via regulation
When Title IX was written, the goal was to protect people from discrimination based on sex in education. The notion of “gender identity” or “gender expression” wasn’t even a thing back in 1972 when it was passed. Nevertheless, Obama unilaterally decided that “sex” meant “gender identity” and threatened to enforce this bizarre idea. This was a massive violation of the rights and privacy of women and girls nationwide without so much as a national debate in Congress, where this issue needed to be worked out.
Instead of going to Congress, Obama threatened educational institutions at all levels with the loss of Title IX funding if they didn’t comply and allowed boys to share bathrooms, locker rooms, and dorm rooms with girls and let boys play on girls’ sports teams. Obama’s going around Congress on this issue was a massive violation of power. Rather than attempt to have the law updated by Congress, Obama abused his power by simply reinterpreting the law on his own, knowing very well Congress wasn’t going to change the law to include “gender identity.”
Joining treaties that the U.S. Senate hasn’t ratified
Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution explains unambiguously how the United States can enter treaties. It says that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.”
But, Barack Obama entered the United States into two treaties during his presidency without getting ratification from the U.S. Senate first: the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal.
According to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, a treaty is “an international agreement concluded between [two or more] States in written form and governed by international law.” The Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal qualify as treaties under this definition.
So why weren’t they ratified? Obama didn’t even send them to the Senate for a vote because he knew that getting two-thirds of the Senate to ratify either would be impossible. So, rather than make a case for ratification of either, he pretended that they weren’t treaties at all, explicitly avoiding referring to them as such.
Filibuster abuse
Democrats currently believe the filibuster is an old-fashioned, anti-democratic tool of racists. Still, they have a history of using it and abusing it to obstruct the majority party. For example, under President George W. Bush, when Democrats were in the minority in the Senate, they used the filibuster to block an unprecedented number of judicial nominees. Then, of course, the tables were turned in 2013 when Obama was president and Democrats had the majority in the Senate, as Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) nuked the filibuster to stop Republicans from blocking Obama’s nominees the way they had blocked Bush’s. To them, the virtue of the filibuster depends entirely on who’s using it, and their abuse of it has made Congress increasingly partisan.
