Tea at Trianon: Attack on the Constitution

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, August 5, 2021

Attack on the Constitution

From The National Review:

None of this is to even speak of the tremendous abuse of power inherent in the underlying eviction moratorium itself. Biden’s new 19-page order includes draconian penalties, fines, and potential jail time for violating a concocted “law.” Forget that it’s terrible public policy, it is also, as I noted when it was first issued by the Trump administration, state-sanctioned theft. At best, such an “emergency” infringement should be left to state and local municipalities. Does anyone really believe that the Founders would approve of the CDC — an incompetent agency tasked with dealing with infectious diseases — retroactively ripping up millions of legal contracts and unilaterally suspending the property rights of 90 percent of landlords? If it can do that, what can’t it do?

Some have argued that Trump’s reappropriation of funding for a southern wall or Obama’s power grab on DACA paved the way for this kind executive abuse. But neither the wall nor DACA policies had yet been adjudicated by higher courts when they were put into play. Obama had, on numerous occasions, admitted that he had no constitutional authority to enact amnesty for millions of Americans by fiat. In 2010, he said, “I am not king. I can’t do these things just by myself.” The next year he again acknowledged that as president he was not empowered to “just bypass Congress and change the law myself. . . . That’s not how a democracy works.” Obama, of course, didn’t believe in any such limitations, and he went ahead with DACA anyway. Yet not even he enacted the executive action after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. That is unique. (Read more.)