Only the usual suspects, like the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and conservative columnists like The Washington Post’s George Will and Charles Krauthammer, have called this and other ACA delays what they are: “lawless.”
But their partisan affiliation undermines the righteousness of their argument. The whole of the national political media establishment should be incensed by this administration’s effrontery. Instead, they are complacent. Their collective non-reaction has the cumulative effect of acclimating the nation to the rule of man over the rule of law. It is a condition that should move the honest to weep as the precepts of this, the most successful constitutional republic in human history, are perverted to further the political goals of one man in one fleeting moment. The acceptance of this manner of casual subversion is how republics die.
The press has a job to do and it is failing in its charge. That the majority of respected media outlets cannot even move themselves to justified criticism of this and other illegal maneuvers will be judged harshly by posterity.
A few might awaken to the dangerous precedent they have enabled when Obama is out of office and a new president subverts law in order to expediently pursue a goal deemed sufficiently critical. But the most searing indictments of the next president will be dismissed. The moral gravity of future admonitions will have been greatly diminished by their inaction today.
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