Vol. 80/No. 26 July 18, 2016
(Reply to a Reader)
The dangers of presidential orders
In the introduction to Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Socialist Workers Party leader Steve Clark explains, “The expanding concentration of power in the hands of the presidency — including the de facto power to declare wars, and to bypass legislation and debate by issuing Executive Orders — is dangerous (ultimately a bonapartist threat) to the interests of workers, working farmers, and the labor movement. [My emphasis]”
Under the U.S. Constitution the president’s role is to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, won as a result of the First American Revolution for protection of workers and working farmers from the state, not to be a new king and concentrate all power into his hands.
The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863, signaled a political and military shift from a defensive war waged by Union forces to a revolutionary war. The proclamation declared slaves within the 11 rebellious states free, but not nationwide. It took adoption of the 13th Amendment nearly three years later to make abolition of slavery the rule of the land.
The executive orders issued by President Franklin Roosevelt June 25, 1941, banning discriminatory practices in the defense industries and by Harry Truman “for equality of treatment and opportunity” in the armed forces seven years later were based on enforcing the law, especially the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That amendment, ratified in 1868, says that no state will “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” They were not the beginning of an experiment in social engineering promoted by “smart” people.
Roosevelt issued his order one week before a mass march on Washington for Black rights was to take place, which union leader A. Philip Randolph and Walter White of the NAACP then abruptly called off.
It was the struggles by Black workers and farmers against racist discrimination and lynch-mob terror leading up to and through World War II that laid the basis for the proletarian-led street protests in the 1950s and ’60s that eradicated the Jim Crow segregation system once and for all — not executive orders. Details of this wartime resistance are presented in the Pathfinder book Fighting Racism in World War II.
Truman’s order was strongly opposed by Gen. Omar Bradley, Army Chief of Staff. It took many more years before the military was fully desegregated, impacted by the rise of the civil rights movement.
On issues like immigration, we’re for no deportations, but an executive order by the president is not the way to achieve this. Real advances on uniting working people regardless of where they happen to be born can only be won through debate, discussion and mobilization of working people.
Likewise the Obama administration’s May 13 directive mandating that anyone can use whatever bathroom or locker facilities they want based on how they “self-identify” is no step forward. It’s an attempt by the “smart” people to bypass debate by simply ordering those they consider “uneducated” and “uncosmopolitan” to comply.
While tremendous gains have been made as more women have entered the workforce and proven they can do the same work that men do, women are still an oppressed sex. As the Militant pointed out in the article Nimtz cites, directives of this type undermine the right of women to have privacy in bathroom facilities, and do nothing to aid the fight against discrimination in job, housing and education against those who consider themselves transgender.
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