The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. We’ve got another great program lined up today. We’ll talk with John Schlafly in a few moments. His new column not only lays out some of what is happening with the poll numbers in this country on Biden and the presidency, but also it will talk about some of what the decisions are. And he highlights something that I’m going to talk about in what you need to know today, which is the power of the Biden presidency, even when they’re not passing anything in the legislature. So we will talk to John Schlafly.
Also we will visit with our friend Melanie Kirkpatrick, who wrote a book that I liked so much called Lady Editor. It’s a biography of Sarah Josepha Hale, but also Melanie Kirkpatrick a few years ago wrote a book called Thanksgiving: The Holiday At the Heart of the American Experience. And we’ll talk with her about Thanksgiving and the history of Thanksgiving. She’s a very cool lady. She was an editorial page editor at The Wall Street Journal, and she’s great to talk to. So we’ll visit with her.
Well, before we get to that, let me encourage you to visit proamericareport.com. If you go there, you will see there’s tons there. Lots of links, lots of segments from this program and lots to do, but also you can sign up for the daily email, which goes out every morning at 08:00 a.m. East coast and 05:00 a.m. Pacific. It’s called the WYNK, what you need to know. Sign up there with your email address and get that in your inbox. And it is very useful because what you need to know today – and in those emails you get is a few links, a few comments, a few key things so you can set up your day.
But today, I want to tell you in this opening segment, what you need to know here on The Pro America Report is this: What John Schlafly highlights in his column today… Pardon me there. What John Schlafly highlights is the power of the Imperial Presidency. And back in May of 2014, the late Phillis Schlafly, for whom I worked, she wrote her monthly Phyllis Schlafly Report, and the title was Unmasking the Imperial Presidency. And in that she goes through and catalogs exactly what was going on in the Obama administration.
Here’s the opening line, and the opening line of her weekly Phyllis Schlafly Report newsletter mailed out to tens of thousands of folks and one of the most effective newsletters ever in American history. Here’s the first sentence: Imperial presidency perfectly describes what the Obama administration has become, as it increasingly violates the limits on its power defined by the US Constitution.
Now, Phyllis goes on to catalog how the Obama administration was ignoring the Constitution and doing lots of things outside of their power. Here’s what I wanted to parallel to today. For months, we’ve been hearing about how there’s dissension in the Democrat ranks, in the US Congress, and that Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema are moderate Democrats, and they will hold up all this bad stuff and blah, blah, blah.
Well, at the beginning of the Biden presidency, with the help of Republicans for “Covid relief,” they passed trillions of dollars in payouts. Just last week, two weeks ago, they passed the so-called bipartisan infrastructure bill. 20% of it is actually for bridges and roads. The rest of it is giveaways and money. One trillion. $1.2 trillion. Now they’re coming together, the Democrats, they will get together and they might not pass $3.5 trillion, but they’ll pass 1.7 trillion. And they’re just pumping money out and they’re picking winners and losers, and they’re spending the money in priorities that don’t make sense.
And yet we’re all sitting here saying, oh, wow. Biden’s poll numbers are in the tank. He can’t win reelection. He doesn’t need to win reelection. He’s transforming the country through his Imperial presidency. And before you say I’m getting carried away, it’s Obama and Biden, let me say clearly, under the Bush administration, Bush 2, W., there was a growth in the Imperial presidency also. It generally had to do with the security state, but it also had to do with the bailouts that happened at the end of the Bush era. Bush terms. Had to do with the power of government, the regulatory power. And also even under Trump, the Trump, especially in the Covid era, there was a rush to spend money to try to save things and bolster the economy and prop up businesses, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, the Imperial presidency, another term you’ll hear people say is the growth in the administrative state, the regulatory state – it’s completely out of control. It’s opposite of what our founders expected. In fact, we’ll talk with Melanie Kirkpatrick about Thanksgiving. One of the questions I want to ask her is for the first, I don’t know, 50 years, 60 years, 70 years, states would choose, governors would choose their own Thanksgiving Day. They didn’t do it all federal holiday. They did their own things along the way.
Well, we have a problem with the Imperial presidency, and it doesn’t matter that in a year there’ll be maybe a change of the Congress. It doesn’t matter, because what Biden’s presidency, the Imperial Presidency will do is they might not pass anything through Congress again, but they’ll just keep doing the things they’re doing. Changing the rules, rewriting the rules, the regulations, the rules, rulemaking authority, not allowing people to access, for example, energy, oil, gas, natural gas. Pick a topic. You can use the power of the regulatory authority in the administrative state to continue your Imperial presidency.
And what Phyllis Schlafly was writing about in 2014, in particular was the fact that after a certain amount of time and in the case of Obama, it got particularly egregious in his last term. But that seems to happen by the way, to second term presidents. But if Biden is a lame duck and isn’t running again. He’s just using it, he’s going to get everything he can, do everything he wants to do.
But remember this example? When Obama said earlier in his presidency that he could not do anything about some of the major concerns he had in illegal immigration and immigration and amnesty because he didn’t have the power, it was Congress’s? And then what did he do? A few years later, he said, oh, well, Congress isn’t doing it. I know I said it was their authority. You know what I’m going to do anyway? I’m going to use my pen and my phone and I’m just going to do it that way.
Remember that? I mean, it used to be that we worried about the power, the growing power of the judiciary. I used to joke and use the phrase black robed oligarchs. You know, being led, our nation was led by these justices who were not supposed to be in charge of our country and they were. It’s still a problem. But right now, the runaway power in this country, the runaway power, the power that is changing the way we live and is a threat to our Republic more than any other misbalance, imbalance of power is the imperial presidency.
And the examples, by the way, are… Remember, under Obama they started to use the IRS to target tea party groups. And then under Biden they said, we just want tons of more money for the IRS. We’re going to do lots of things. We’re going to check everybody. We’re going to start to dig into everybody. And they don’t need that law to pass. They wanted the law to get more IRS agents, but they don’t need the law to pass to use the IRS. They don’t need any law to pass to have the FBI invade Project Veritas’s home. Homes, multiple homes.
They don’t need more regulations or more laws or more rulemaking passed. They have a lot now. And, as my example with Obama, when they get to the end of the line where they think there’s a line, they’ll just cross it and they’ll just wait. They’ll wait you out. They’ll figure you got to go to court, you got to fight it out in court. It’s going to take too long. That’s the reality we’re facing. It’s a big problem, and it’s getting worse.
And it’s one of the reasons why when people say, oh, yeah, we’re going to win next year, we’re going to definitely win next year. The conservatives, Republicans will win the House and Senate and we’ll change things. I’m not sure a) you’ll stop much of what’s going on because they’ll just become an imperial presidency with no Congress, and b) it’s a long way off. It’s a long way off.
All right, let’s take a break. When we come back, John Schlafly, Melanie Kirkpatrick, and a lot more. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Be back in a moment.
