EOs - not to be confused with Eos, the supernaturally beautiful goddess of Greek mythology - have become an ugly fact of American life, ever since our terrible conflagration known as the American Civil War.

An Executive Order (EO) is an order made by a president that has the full force and effect of any laws constitutionally passed by congress, and signed by the president.

In a representative democracy, laws are made by duly elected representatives, not by a head of state, with mere arbitrary edicts, that carry no congressional debate, or samplings of public opinion.EOs are dictated into law, and are known as "rule by men," rather than "rule by law."

When establishing our US Constitutional Republic, our founding fathers instituted the strict principle of governance known as the Rule of Law (as opposed to the Rule of Men). This standard was intended to be a safeguard against any arbitrary governance, and the unconstitutional edicts imposed by would be tyrants.

Executive Orders are not in accordance with written, publicly disclosed laws, and enforced within legally established guidelines and procedures made by the people’s congress, and signed into law by our chief executive, the president.

When a president tries to effect one of his Executive Orders into being a national law, he is attempting to circumvent congress, and contravene our American Constitution, and move us closer to being a country ruled by self-serving men rather than a nation ruled by constitutionally legislated laws, that are hopefully with the consent of the governed.

This whole unconstitutional seizure of congressional power was done slowly, over time, incrementally. It began innocuously enough as mere directive-memos, to the offices of the Executive Branch of our federal government. George Washington was the first to set the dangerous precedent of issuing orders that had the full force and effect of legislative law. His first Executive Order prevented Americans from trading or even associating with any of the countries in Europe, who were then at war.

It was not that President Washington’s order was a bad idea inand of itself; but, it was patently illegal forWashington, single-handedly, to make a law, when he had absolutely no legal authority to do so, either in the Constitution, or in any statute law passed by congress.

Posing legislation was meant to be the duty of congress; signing (or vetoing), and then enforcing laws are the job of the president.

George Washington, in effect, took the law into his own hands, and violated our principle of the Rule of Law, the very basis of a Constitutional Republican form of government. Allowing Mr. Washington to create a law, he could by rights only legally enforce, is akin to letting our police establishments create the laws they are commissioned to enforce. To allow our president such powers, begins the destruction of our "separation of powers," another fundamental in any real Constitutional Republic.

Freedom and living by the Rule of Law have been rare commodities during the long and tumultuous history of Earth; and perhaps, America has enjoyed the longest run of any nation to have been so ruled. But since Washington's time, our Constitution has been breached in thousands of ways, until at last, we've become a nation ruled by the law of men ... very elite and secret men, who have long controlled the Office of the Presidency.

Very few Executive Orders were issued by the 14 presidents that followed Washington. It was Lincoln's "dictatorship" that began the onslaught of laws issued by one man, but covertly supported by the hidden men of the secretive International Monetary/Banking Cartel, who wanted to reduce the growing affluence and influence of the United States with a self-defeating civil war. Sadly, Mr. Lincoln fell into the Cartel’s trap.

Yes, the Great Emancipator controlled the Union like a dictator, exercising autocratic rule by claiming "war powers"after the April 12, 1861 attack on Fort Sumter, SC by the South Carolina militia; and then, running the federal government through Executive Orders, Lincoln utterly by-passed the US Congress.

Without Ole Abe there might not have been a war that denuded America of over one million of its finest men, when the entire population of the United States was not much more than thirty million people.

Lincoln’s motivation in prosecuting the Civil War was not to free the slaves, but to keep the Union intact; and, he could have done so without waging war against a portion of the nation he had been elected to serve. Had President Lincoln been far wiser, he might have used his great personal intention and courage to have eliminated the main reason forthe well founded Southern discontent: the US Tariff of 1828, called the Tariff of Abominations by the antebellum South.

It was this piece of trade protectionism of 1828, that so discriminated against the South, which did more than anything else to bring on the Southern attack at Fort Sumter.

If Lincoln was set on using Executive Orders to save the Union with a devastating war, one simpleEO abolishing the Tariff Act of 1828 might very well have prevented our civil war. In fact, the great American economist, Murray Rothbard said true free US trade, without the Banking Cartel’s imposed Tariff Act of 1828, might have prevented the American Civil War.

And in time, Mr. Lincoln could have worked to have convinced congress to pass legislation that subsidized Southern plantation owners for their slaves, at far less cost to treasure, infrastructure, and lives than what it eventually cost America for its avoidable war against its own states.

But Lincoln chose a different path, a war path, and made many enemies in the process, ranging from newspaper editors to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, as he repeatedly broke the fundamental law of our land. Lincoln even had editors arrested, and went so far as to draft a warrant for the arrest of Chief Justice Roger Taney, all because they objected to Lincoln throwing our country into the hands of those who would rule our country by men – hidden men - rather than by laws that had the consent of the governed.

With guile, unlimited money, plenty of blackmail and the threat of assassinations, eventually agents of the International Monetary/Banking Cartel subverted our entire congress, making all of their legislation de facto laws of a few hidden men rather than laws for the people. Today, the leaders of all three branches of our federal government work exclusively for the Monetary Cartel, with little concern of how the US public reacts.

This downward cascade of a truly representative government began in earnest in the Office of the President – with Executive Orders – and then progressed to congress, a process Abraham Lincoln could have slowed rather than sped up.

Nevertheless, I believe Abraham Lincoln to have been a man of great stature and integrity. Had he lived, he would have healed our nation’s wounds far more quickly than they were ever set to rights.

Remember, it was Lincoln, like Andrew Jackson, who dared to oppose the International Monetary/Banking Cartel. Lincoln and his Treasury Secretary, Salmon Portland Chase, were both outraged by what they estimated the Banking Cartel would have charged American citizens in interest on loans to pursue the Civil War.

As a result, Lincoln by-passed the Banking Cartel by convincing congress to enact legislation authorizing the printing of dollars that carried the full legal tender of US Treasury notes, that came to be called Lincoln’s “greenbacks.”

The Monetary/Banking Cartel, based in London, was not at all pleased with Lincoln’s greenbacks, and said so in their flagship newspaper of that era, the London Times:

“If this mischievous financial policy should become endurated down to a fixture, then that government [Lincoln’s administration] will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debts. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It [America] will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”

Destroy every monarchy? No! But, Lincoln could have likely severely damaged the Monetary/Banking Cartel, had he lived.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, however, Abraham Lincoln’s administration ended prematurely, when the president was fatally shot in the Ford Theatre, while Abe and his wife were watching the British play, “Our American Cousin.”

Abraham Lincoln was an amazing man, but still history must judge him harshly; his Civil War and its attendant Executive Orders, cost humanity far more than his greenbacks gained us.

Ever since Lincoln's administration, he has been both the model and excuse for almost all other presidents to make up their own laws, to the point that such gross violations of our Constitution are now widely and routinely accepted.

Our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, widely considered one of our greatest presidents (who is even enshrined on Mt. Rushmore, as was Lincoln), used the White House as his "bully pulpit,"and from there issued more EOs than all 25 presidents (other than Lincoln) who preceded him.

Teddy Roosevelt even formed a national police force, an idea that had always been rejected by American congresses, and was deeply abhorred by our nation’s founding fathers, and public as well.

By Teddy calling his national police force a mere "investigative bureau" of his Executive branch of government, Roosevelt was able to avoid wide public resistance; in those days, Americans were wisely antipathetic to national police forces. Today, however, there is scarcely a citizen who would suggest we do away with Roosevelt's FBI, or even curb their bestial practices.

William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, who followed Roosevelt as presidents, were no better than Teddy in obeying our Constitution.

Democratic President Wilson even imprisoned some 5,000 Americans, who opposed his World War I, the war he had promised to avoid if he were elected president.

It was Wilson who was the first to declare "National Emergencies," in order to assume even more powers not granted to the Executive branch, by either our congress or our Constitution.

Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt (distant cousin to Teddy Roosevelt), our 32nd president, was presented by his "advisors" with a clever way for presidents to assume even more dictatorial powers, with the mere labeling of domestic problems as "Wars." In this way, future presidents could cite the unconstitutional presidential "war powers," brought into existence by Lincoln, in their pretended wars on CO2, drugs, poverty, or any other phony excuse to expand presidential powers.

Franklin D. Roosevelt ended up issuing over 3,000 Executive Orders, thus destroying much of what was left of the American democracy.

In only one term of office, President Jimmy Carter had the nerve to add about 24,500 pages of EOs during his last 90 days in office, in addition to all his other EOs.

Not to be out done, Democratic President Bill Clinton added another 30,000 pages of EOs, during his last 90 days in office.

The Federal Register and the Cato Institute gives us the numbers of Executive Orders ( not the number of pages) issued by 20th century presidents: Theodore Roosevelt - 1,006; William H. Taft - 698; Woodrow Wilson - 1,791; Warren G. Harding - 484; Calvin Coolidge - 1,253; Herbert Hoover - 1004; Franklin D. Roosevelt - 3,723; Harry S. Truman - 905; Dwight D. Eisenhower - 452; John F. Kennedy - 214; Lyndon B. Johnson - 324; Richard M. Nixon - 346; Gerald R. Ford - 169; Jimmy Carter - 320; Ronald Reagan - 381; George Bush - 166, Bill Clinton 364; and the numbers of EOs signed by presidents continue from there.

But there are also Presidential Directives, that are a form of EO, that are issued by presidents with the advise and consent of the unelected National Security Council, which have the full force and effect of constitutionally passed laws. But the real kicker is these Presidential Directives are classified, using the old "National Security" ruse. This is how America, now, officially tortures human beings in military bases all over the world ... torture in the name of every American.

Additionally, back in 1916, Democratic President Wilson began creating many of our federal agencies, by the use of EOs, each of which has ballooned to about the size of a large foreign government, each of which is headed by un-elected directors, each issuing their own thousands of orders and directives, that have the full force and effect of constitutionally passed laws.

One such agency, the Internal Revenue Service has issued a tax code that is over 60,000 pages long, and growing.

Moreover, Americans today are burdened with thousands of pages of President Review Directives (PRDS), Presidential Decision Directives (PDDs), National Security Reviews (NSRs), National Security Directives (NSRs), National Security Presidential Directives (NSPDs), and even Homeland Security Directives, all having the full force and effect of law, and all in addition to EOs.

In order to maintain the illusion of a democracy, we are still allowed a presidential election every four years; and no one president can serve more than two four year terms. But, it's not any one president who has become a dictator, it is the huge and growing Office of the Presidency, and those faceless autocrats who control the presidency that has become dictatorial, without many of us ever knowing it.

No, we are hardly a democracy. Our beloved United States of America has become a fascist dictatorship, and will remain so, until the majority of Americans come to realize the sad state of our ship of state.

J. Speer-Williams

Jsw4@mac.com

April 14, 2010

April 14, 2010