Obama, Zelaya, and the rule of law

By Tim Dunkin

American conservatives may perhaps take some small comfort in the fact that there is at least one country in the Western hemisphere that actually takes its own constitution seriously. Unfortunately, that country is Honduras, and not the United States.

By now, most readers are probably familiar with the events that have taken place in Honduras over the past two weeks. If one only listened to the reports from the mainstream media, one would get the impression that horrible, evil right-wingers in the Honduran military had staged a coup d'etat against a popular democratically-elected President. This, of course, is not what happened. In fact, the deposeé — Manuel Zelaya — had attempted to amend the Honduran constitution by popular referendum to allow himself to serve a third term as President. According to said document, not only is the constitution not amendable in this fashion, but a sitting President immediately forfeits his right to hold that office if he proposes to alter the constitution to give himself extra terms. Hence, the moment he put forward the proposal, Zelaya legally deposed himself.

Further, the Honduran military removed Zelaya from office as their constitution expressly says they can do in such a case, and this move was approved (in fact, it was ordered) by the Honduran Supreme Court, acting in its capacity as the interpreter of Honduras' highest law of the land. To top it off, Zelaya was replaced by Roberto Michelleti, formerly the President of the Honduran Congress, by a nearly unanimous vote of Honduras' legislature — again completely in accord with what their constitution stipulates.

Yet, America's Hypocrite-in-Chief calls these events "illegal."

What we see in Obama's statement is not merely a lack of understanding of the situation, or even a position in which partisan expediency has been allowed to overrule good sense. Instead, we see that it is the result of a fundamental difference between the worldview that Obama and other leftists like him have and the one held by those who hold to traditional Western values such as the rule of law.

In archaic and classical Greece, there existed during periods of political turbulence the institution of the "tyrant." A tyrant was a man who, in contravention of the prevailing constitution of a city-state's government, would seize control of the reins of government for himself. Despite our modern assumptions that a tyrant is one who is ruthless, violent, and destructive towards the people as a whole, Greek tyrants often were quite cultured and peaceable. They were often great supporters of public works and civic beautification, and in many cases dealt with the citizenry with a slack hand. Typically, these were part of the tyrants' efforts to buy legitimacy for their rule, legitimacy that their usurpation had voided.

Yet, this benevolence did not usually get them much sympathy in the long run. The Greeks did not take kindly to those who sought to overturn the established and traditional legal frameworks governing a polis in favor of their own power to rule, no matter how "well" the tyrant may have ruled in practice. Momentary success was not a justification for unconstitutional usurpation. Tyranny, in ancient Greece, was abhorred not so much because it necessarily meant oppression for the people, but because it was a direct assault upon the ideals of civic legitimacy and the rule of law — concepts that were supremely important to the Greek ideal of a well-ordered polity.

Manuel Zelaya was essentially trying to establish himself in a tyranny. He purposefully tried to subvert the Honduran constitution so as to enable himself to become yet another tinpot "Presidente for Life" like his allies — Venezuela's Chavez and Cuba's Castro brothers — had done. Indeed, the constitutional provisions that were legally used by the Honduran Supreme Court and military to remove Zelaya from office were designed to prevent just this sort of thing. They were meant to keep Honduras from returning to the typically Latin American cycle of banana republic dictatorships that it had suffered under for so long before the present constitution was established. Unlike many of the Greek tyrants, Zelaya was so corrupt and inept in office — under his governance even when he was legitimately the President, Honduras was defaulting on its debts — that he didn't even have the pretended legitimacy of wise or beneficent rule. All he has is the support of his fellow corrupt haters of the rule of law.

One of these haters is Barack Obama. Now, we all must admit that the American government has, since either 1865 or the 1930s, depending on your perspective, had some problems with understanding just what our Constitution limits it from doing. Even under Republican Presidents, our government has grown and expanded into roles that the Founders never envisioned it to fill. But Obama takes this to a whole new level. Soviet-style takeovers of whole corporations. Attempts to dominate entire blocs of the American economy. The establishment of dozens of Constitutionally impossible "czars" who are unaccountable to the legislative branch and who oversee segments of our economic and personal life which the government has no business being involved with. Obama and his cadre have gone far beyond the typical Constitutional "fudging" that we've all, unfortunately, gotten used to in recent decades. He has struck out into new territories that show that he doesn't view the Constitution to be any sort of restraint on his power whatsoever.

We knew this was to be the case, even before he took office. This is what Obama and his lackeys meant when they said he would be ready to "rule" from Day One. Not govern, but "rule."

And therein lies the rub — Obama and those like him, including petty Latin American tyrants like Zelaya and Chavez — do not operate under the worldview that government should have restraints upon it that cannot simply be undone at the slightest caprice, even by the people themselves if attempted in an unlawful manner. They do not acknowledge that laws and constitutions apply to them, too, and that these documents restrain them from doing what they want to do. In Obamaland, legality is defined by his own personal whim — which is why he called the completely legal Honduran removal of Zelaya "illegal." He wanted a fellow Marxist to remain in power in a nation that had hithertofore had drifting into the Marxist Latin American axis being built by Chavez, Castro, and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, and the Honduran constitution be jiggered. Obama and those like him completely subvert the whole notion that law transcends and defines government, rather than the other way around.

What we as conservatives need to understand and uphold, both in this particular case of Honduras and in our approach to those who are in positions of power in general, is that government must be accountable to law — and the law in our system is fundamentally rooted in our Constitution. In theory (and I wish it were in practice too!), any law that does not conform to our Constitution is immediately null and void, and any action of an officeholder that goes against this fundamental Law is illegal. We cannot get wrapped up in merely applying this to political enemies like Obama, while turning a blind eye to it when "our guy" is in office, as many conservatives and Republicans did during the Bush years.

As I said above, law transcends government. Law is what establishes government, and therefore those in government are subject to law. Government does not operate independently of foundational law, nor do government officials, even to the highest in office itself, simply have leave to make and remake law according to their personal desires. Our government has been so unconstitutional in recent decades specifically because it has been so lawless — in the sense that bureaucrats, administrators, regulators, and politicians have been unfettered from any sense of having to have their governing behavior checked by the originating power of the Constitution. We conservatives need to regain, reiterate, and reintroduce into our nation's political discourse the importance of foundational, establishing, original Law. Law, ultimately, should not be just so much statute that limits the people from doing harm to one another, but also a fundamental that limits the arbitrarity of government and disables it from putting men into positions of unrestrained power, no matter how much benevolence they profess "for the people."

The rule of law is one of the "pillar" principles of Western civilization. Without it, we crumble to dust. Greek constitutionalism set us on that course, and passed it on to Rome. In the Roman Republic, as imperfect and unrepresentative by our standards as it may have been, law was a bulwark against the whims of populist demagogues, and the Republic fell when supporters of law were unable or unwilling to withstand the tyrannical forces that led to Julius Caesar. Rome itself fell, not so much because of outside attacks by the Germanic tribes, but because of the demoralization that centuries of arbitrary government (as well as licentious morals among the ruling classes) had imposed upon a people who were taxed to the hilt and not even able to choose their own profession anymore. The rule of law enabled the limits on monarchical power that were represented in the Magna Carta. The rise of Renaissance republicanism and the liberal political philosophies of men like Locke, Sydney, and Montesquieu implicitly understood the importance of restraint upon the government by law. The distilled product of such enlightened support for law over and against arbitrary government was, in fact, our own Constitution, engineered by men who were thoroughly schooled in the history and political philosophy of the Western tradition.

In short, our Constitution is not important just because it is traditional. It is not important just because it is American, and hence the patriotic thing to support. Our Constitution is important because it is the check upon government that separates us from much of the rest of non-Western history in which nations have been ruled by men, rather than by laws; by absolute monarchs and dictators and Politburos, rather than by constitutionally-delineated powers that act to restrain tyranny.

Likewise, then, the situation in Honduras and Obama's response to it are not so much important because of the momentary politics or events. Rather, they enlighten us to the underlying attitude toward transcendent law held by Obama, and other leftists like him. For them, government is about power — and those in government, if they are ideologically correct, naturally have the right to wield power to whatever degree they like. Obama's buddy Zelaya was in power, and since he's a leftist, he ought to be able to do whatever he needs to do to make sure the Honduran people continue to "enjoy" his rulership. Similarly, in Obama's view, "he won," and that means he can do what he likes regardless of the constitutional "discrepancies" involved. This many explain why there is talk among Obamatons of doing away with our own constitutional prohibition of third terms for Presidents.

Nevertheless, our opposition to Obama should not be simply focused on the fact that he disagrees with us politically. It needs to be rooted in the fact that we are aware of and opposed to the terrible damage that he is doing to one of the pillars of our society, and the regression towards humanity's unfortunate baseline of tyranny that he represents.

© Tim Dunkin