Liberal friends are praising actor Brandon Victor Dixon’s plea to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who dared to show up to a performance of the hit Broadway show Hamilton on Friday night. The audience hated Pence so much that they didn’t really give a crap about the Broadway smash, at times electing to just boo straight through the performance to make sure Pence knew he was unwanted. If that isn’t obnoxiously immature enough for you, the spirit of Dixon’s remarks should send you over the edge:
“We, sir — we — are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights,” he said. “We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf all of us.”
If our founding fathers, so lovingly portrayed in the Broadway musical, were to hear such a plea spoken to a newly elected member of the executive branch, they’d most likely do a double-take and wonder if they were still in America. The presidency was never supposed to be an absolute monarchy ruled by a leader from which the people beg benevolence. In fact, precisely because of our ugly relationship to England’s monarch, the founders established a government that would grant the least amount of power possible to one single person.
I guess the presidential oath isn’t in the script. Here’s a little refresher: The incoming president swears to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” (Emphasis mine.) The entire cast and audience of Friday night’s performance conveniently forgot that fact when pleading for mercy. Perhaps that is because Democrat administrations starting with F.D.R. and culminating with Barack Obama have manipulated the media and the law to give the presidency the regal image and legal authority the founders, most notably President George Washington, despised and rejected. Liberals like those attending Friday night’s performance of Hamilton didn’t blink twice when Obama was taking massive executive actions to empower the presidency. (Perhaps they never saw 1776?) Now their fear is too little, too late:
Never mind that some constitutional scholars believe that those “executive actions” in some cases represented a constitutional breach. The left enthusiastically embraced Obama’s use of extraordinary presidential powers because, hey, “elections have consequences,” “the ends justify the means,” and, as Obama himself once so eloquently put it, “I won.”
They may now live to regret that. President-elect Trump will enter office with an extensive list of things to do — and, perhaps, equally important, to undo, including much of Obama’s questionable agenda from eight years. Democrats in Congress will no doubt fight a rear-guard action to keep Trump from acting without congressional authority. Expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth. And no doubt, Trump will remind them: “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone.”
The failure of the presidency is not in the election of Donald Trump. It is in the willingness of the American people to pursue and empower demagogues who manipulate political offices in order to usurp massive amounts of power and control. The minute we began to turn our back on the founding principles of American government, we began to relinquish our inalienable rights to whoever sat in the Oval Office, Democrat or Republican alike.
Spare us your impassioned pleas, paranoid Manhattanites. If you truly cared about executive power you would’ve been booing a long time ago. Or, better yet, taking an American civics class and going to the polls to vote.
Image via the Telegraph
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