By Jerry McDonough / Chronicle contributor
In his short presidency Lincoln seized an excessive amount of extra-constitutional power and wielded it ruthlessly without check. Lincoln ordered the naval blockade of Southern ports and seizure if shipping prior to the beginning of hostilities. Then he suspended the writ of habeas corpus and began arresting state legislators and a federal judge because they did not agree with him. He then blocked circulation of newspapers that opposed him and ordered marshals to arrest dissenters, draft resisters, war protesters and tried them before military courts martial. He advanced $2 million from the treasury to financiers for the short term and $440 million in “greenbacks” which were “funny-money” not adhering to the law stating money must be redeemable with gold. He seized railroads and ordered millions of dollars in locomotives and rolling stock be built. Then war came.
Woodrow Wilson copied Lincoln’s wartime seizure of powers before his re-election campaign on a peace platform. His powers were more institutionally organized because he had a pliant democratic congress to ratify his orders. His War Industries Board headed by Bernard Baruche, Wilson’s largest campaign donor, seized control of railroads and heavy industry. The Overman Act institutionalized control over food prices, the national import/export industries and forced the financial sector to finance the war with no complaint allowed. Newspapers were suppressed and protestors were jailed without warrant. Concentration camps were built at Fort Oglethorpe, GA and Chattanooga, TN to house more than four thousand German and Austrian citizens without legal recourse. Then war came.
FDR went further. When his plans did not alleviate the Depression four years after taking office, he took America off the gold standard and bullied the Supreme Court to accept his unconstitutional legislation with the threat of “court-packing.” In 1940, two years prior to war, he authorized warrant-less wire taps, sneaked the Navy onto a war time footing without congressional knowledge, and created a secret post war research staff to plan postwar American dominance of the UN. Then war came.
Obama has not yet had any dissenters thrown into prison. He has not suppressed his favorable press; why bother. But, he has seized extra-legal controls over our financial system, arbitrarily selected winners and losers in the private economy, fired executives and thwarted the mechanism of our bankruptcy laws and market forces. This endangers the entire country and the free world. With the 2010 elections fast approaching voters must become more educated on the issues and vote wisely if there is to be a future for following generations.
