The U.S. Constitution specifies that the President of the United States “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Americans pride ourselves on being a nation of laws, not of men, so here are some suggestions for our government to faithfully enforce our laws.
Every year, Congress appropriates enormous amounts of taxpayers’ money to colleges and universities over and above subsidies for the tuition of individual students. Most colleges and universities are run by very leftwing administrators and professors who are anti-military and sometimes even anti-American, so some of the elite universities decided to bar U.S. military recruiters from coming to their campus to recruit students for our Armed Services.
Several years ago, Congress passed the Solomon Amendment to condition federal funding to colleges on their fair treatment of military recruiters. As the sponsor, the late Congressman Gerald Solomon, said, “If you do not like the Armed Forces, . . . that is your First Amendment right. But don’t expect federal dollars to support your interference with our military recruiters.”
Leftwing universities have been trying ever since to evade this law, and they finally found some activist judges to help them circumvent it. A 2-to-1 panel of judges on the Third Federal Circuit recently blocked enforcement of the Solomon Amendment.
These supremacist judges seem to believe they can rule supreme over the other two branches of government and create a new right to receive taxpayers’ money without obeying the legal conditions on that money. As the dissenting judge said, these judges simply “created new law, totally unsupported by binding precedent.”
It’s the duty of the President to order the Justice Department to use its full legal powers to defend this good law. Congress should rally to enthusiastic support of the Solomon Amendment by cutting off generous grants to anti-military colleges and universities, since it is well established that Congress can put conditions on the spending of taxpayers’ money.
The advocates of legalizing marijuana have been placing ads in public buses and subways to promote the legalization of this dangerous drug. Public transportation is another recipient of large sums of taxpayers’ money every year.
Congress has often put strings on taxpayers’ money spent for transportation purposes. Congress passed laws to cut off highway funds to any state that declined to enforce a seat belt law or the old 55-mile-an-hour speed limit, and also to force all states to raise the drinking age to 21.
The District of Columbia transit authority was running public service ads on its buses and subway that promoted the legalization and use of marijuana. Congress got fed up with these ads preying on captive public audiences, and passed the Istook Amendment to compel local officials to choose between receiving taxpayers’ money OR running pro-marijuana advertisements.
The ACLU filed a lawsuit to try to overturn the Istook Amendment. The U.S. Justice Department has taken the extraordinary action of notifying the federal Court of Appeals that it has withdrawn its defense of the statute on appeal.
The Justice Department implied that public buses and subways can ban ads that encourage illegal drugs only if they simultaneously ban ads discouraging illegal drugs. That argument defies common sense.
The Justice Department’s action is particularly strange since the Supreme Court has been consistently, and often unanimously, supportive of federal laws against illegal drugs. The President should order the Justice Department to defend this law all the way to the Supreme Court.
The most dangerous area where our laws are not being faithfully executed are the laws designed to protect Americans against the millions of aliens who enter our country illegally every year. The U.S. Constitution provides that the federal government “shall protect each of [the states] against invasion,” but little is being done to stop this invasion, and the President’s new budget would provide funds for only 210 additional border patrol agents instead of the 2,000 authorized.
Since 1986, federal law has made it a crime for employers to hire illegal aliens, and President Ronald Reagan called the sanctions for violations the “keystone” of the law. But no administration has shown any willingness to enforce that law, even though a recent study by the Wall Street firm of Bear Stearns (as reported in Barron’s) estimates that the taxes lost from the underground economy could wipe out our entire federal budget deficit.
Our government has admitted that it isn’t deporting 400,000 illegal aliens (80,000 of whom have criminal records) because it can’t find them. If our government can track and locate one case of mad cow disease (out of millions of cows), why can’t Homeland Security faithfully execute our laws and deport these criminals?
When is our government going to be more faithful about enforcing our laws?
