Imagine if you lived on the 10th floor of an apartment complex and the children of the vertical community devised a game which involved pulling the fire alarms for the amusement of watching people scramble. We would stop that kind of vandalism in a heart beat.  But here we have a president using the fire alarm called The Executive Order to establish the tempo of what he calls a democracy. Every building needs a fire alarm and every government needs the emergency executive order for when the world is on fire, but what should we do when the executive order is vandalized at the highest levels. 

Governing by executive order is often euphemistically called authoritarianism, but that denigrates the word ‘authority’. We all need true authority.  Perhaps we should call it what it is; dictatorship.   Dictate, sign, and watch the bricks fall.  The veterans didn’t die in the wars of this nation for this kind thoughtless behavior.  Lets start calling things what they are. This side stepping the complexities and work of governing through a balanced democracy in favor of simply writing orders for the system is not just unconstitutional, it is anti-constitutional. Children know better than to pull the fire alarm because the adults taught them.  We need to start adulting our own government.

A Modest Proposal for Better

We have to treat the executive order more like the nuclear code than a light switch. One administration abuses the orders, then the next feels obligated to exceed the excesses by issuing even more orders to balance things out again. The abuse of executive order very clearly negates the necessity of a congress and we have watched a lot of well paid men and women sit out this crisis of governance acting as if something really bad wasn’t happening. The Supreme Court seems to act like a mini-congress ruling by majority of opinion rather than the Constitution. The voters seem more interested in winning than being truly represented as the founding fathers intended. Both Democratic and Republican voters need to vote for people who are committed to our democratic origins and the Constitution and are willing to do the hard work of consensus building and governing.  That would be good, moral, and rescue our nation from our slide into an undeclared dictatorship.