The Conservative Love of Right-Wing Dictatorship
The issue revolving around the Trump administration’s intentional violation of an order of a federal judge to not deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador — and the Justice Department’s refusal to provide answers to questions posed by that judge about circumstances surrounding those deportations — does not revolve around whether a person loves or hates Donald Trump. The issue also does not revolve around whether someone loves or hates the federal judge, James Boasberg. Instead, the issue is simply this: What type of governmental system does a person who wants to be free want for the United States?
The Constitution called into existence a type of governmental system called a limited-government republic. It is a system that divides political power within the various government spheres to ensure that the government does not acquire too much concentrated power. The idea was that divided power would best ensure the freedom of the American people from the potential tyranny of their own government.
Thus, the federal government was not vested with the traditional “police powers” or “inherent” powers that had characterized governments throughout history. Instead, its powers were limited to those few powers that were enumerated in the Constitution.
To ensure an even weaker federal government, the Framers divided the federal government into three branches — executive, legislative, and judicial. The legislative branch would have the power to enact laws. The executive branch would have the power to enforce the laws. The judicial branch would have the power to interpret the laws and would be the deciding factor in determining whether a law or action of the executive or legislative branch was constitutional or not. No branch could exercise the powers of the other two branches.
The Framers didn’t need to do that. They could have simply had a government with an executive branch only and no legislative or judicial branches. The president would have the authority to enact laws, enforce them, and decide whether they were constitutional or not.
Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Chile license.
American conservatives have long hated the type of government that the Constitution called into existence. It is a deep hatred that is being manifested today in the El Salvador controversy. Castigating and condemning the federal judiciary for its “interference” with President Trump’s deportation schemes, they want the federal judiciary to butt out of whatever Trump is doing, especially in the area of immigration. They want to
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