You may be willing to let the end justify the means in this case. You may well like the fact that the president has abused prosecutorial discretion and conferred benefits in an unprecedented way. You may benefit from the president’s failure to enforce the law, today. But I’ll make you this promise: There will come a day where you will cry out for the enforcement of the law. There will come a day when you long for the law to be the foundation of this republic. So you be careful what you do with the law today, because if you weaken it today, you weaken it forever.
Category: laws
Laws must apply to all
If this spirit shall ever be so far debased, as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate any thing but liberty.
Purpose of just laws
Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.
Extending police power
Law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.
Bad precedents
All bad precedents began as justifiable measures.
Without liberty, all is lost
Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.
Denigrating the rule of law
Whether it is blocking the prosecution of voter intimidation in Philadelphia, illegally running guns to Mexican drug lords, or assisting voter fraud in Texas, Barack Obama has decided the rule of law takes a back seat to ‘Rules for Radicals.’
Support the rule of law
The philosopher Hannah Arendt once observed that it was arbitrariness, not necessarily severity, that distinguished totalitarian from law-abiding states. Stalin may have had his Gulags, Hitler his concentration camps, but the key to understanding the exercise of totalitarian power there and elsewhere lay in its capricious, unpredictable application, not its harshness. The operation of law is public, regular, knowable in advance. The eruption of the totalitarian impulse inserts a vertiginousness element of whim. That’s part of what makes it terrifying. In a free society governed by the rule of law, people know where they stand. In the normal course of affairs, most people will never directly experience the coercive power of the state. They are not subjected to harassment at the arbitrary direction of state officials. With the erosion of the habits of liberty, however, everything changes. Now the state tends to regard the people first of all not as its raison d’être but as a potential threat. The result is a sharp contraction of that latitude that free societies allow their citizens.
Compassion
We want to be compassionate, but if our compassion doesn’t follow the law, it creates problems.
The tyranny of the law
Confronted with such a tight regulation, can man pretend to be free because the tyranny he is subjected to derives from the law? Of course, the legal power is not called ‘tyranny’ since it appears to be established by the general will in the common interest, and since, in any event, occurrences of arbitrary power are infrequent. But a master’s equity does not mean that his subjects are not slaves … And when their servitude lasts and their thoughts follow their behavior, the state becomes totalitarian and subjection is complete. Since it is legal servitude, the regime is still said to be democratic. Such is the hypocrisy of political language.