Shapiro: A Government of Men, Not Laws

"There is no good government but what is republican,"
John Adams wrote. "(T)he very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws,
and not of men.'" Adams meant that a government in which law is applied at the
discretion of powerful people is a bad government. The law must be applied in a
straightforward, nonarbitrary fashion or the entire governmental system should
be called into question.

This week, the Supreme Court called the entire governmental system into
question.

A couple of weeks ago, President Obama unilaterally declared that he would
cease to enforce major provisions of federal immigration law. Now he's
campaigning on that reckless disregard for the constitutional structure. "You
can decide whether it's time to stop denying citizenship to responsible young
people just because they were brought here as children of undocumented
immigrants," he told an audience in Boston. "I know where I stand on this."

Actually, we can't decide. That's because President Obama decided for us. And
when we try to decide for ourselves via state governments, we are told that
we're violating the constitutional order.

That's precisely what happened in the Supreme Court's decision about
Arizona's SB 1070. Essentially, the Court found that the state of Arizona
couldn't enforce immigration law, even if the federal government refused to
enforce its own immigration law. By this logic, if the federal government passed
a law regarding kidnapping across state lines, then refused to enforce it, a
state which decided to arrest people for kidnapping at all would be in violation
of the Constitution. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it in dissent, "(T)o say, as
the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications
of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the
mind."

It does boggle the mind. But not the liberal mind, which is far more
interested in placing dictatorial power in the hands of a massive federal
government than in preserving the constitutional structure. Every time someone
has the gall to mention states' rights, liberals imply that America's just a few
steps away from reinstituting slavery; each time somebody has the temerity to
suggest that states -- which absorb virtually the entire cost of illegal
immigration -- ought to be able to police their own borders when not in conflict
with federal law, liberals raise the specter of racial profiling and lynch
mobs.

It's sheer nonsense, but it plays into the liberal agenda: maximization of
federal power, by any means possible. And the easiest means to maximize federal
power is to place unlimited power in the hands of the president of the United
States.

There is a danger for liberals, however: What happens if a conservative gains
the reins of power? If the executive branch can simply ignore implementation of
any law a president doesn't like, how about Obamacare? How about the vast and
growing entitlement system?

Liberals don't want to think about this possibility, because theirs is a
politics of expedience rather than of principle. While conservatives worry about
institutional power, liberals flit from position to position on the issue,
depending who is in power. That's a recipe for governmental disaster. Because
sooner or later, somebody no one likes will be in power -- and armed with a
government free of all checks and balances, he or she will do something truly
outrageous. That is, if President Obama hasn't already done so.

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Ben Shapiro, 28, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, a radio host
on KRLA 870 Los Angeles, and Editor-At-Large for Breitbart News. He is the
four-time bestselling author of "Primetime Propaganda."