The Constitution Trumps

I am supporting the President’s position on DADT. Yes I am.

Why?

Because the Constitution of this nation trumps everything else and because we are a nation of laws we must follow the proper and legal process for making laws. If a law needs to be changed the Constitution is very clear as to how to change it.

The Congress of the United States makes/changes the laws.

The President of the United States does not make the laws he enforces them. The President has been pretty clear in his support for changing DADT but he is required by the constitution to defend this nation and its laws.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is the law of the land, it was passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress and signed into law by the President of the United States.

There are those who have called on the President to void the law via executive order and he can do just that. I hope he does not. All of us on the left who were critical of Bush for all the executive orders he signed to not enforce the laws written by Congress would prove ourselves to be hypocrites if we now support a President for doing the same thing. I try very hard to be consistent and I am going to remain consistent on this issue despite my urgent and passionate desire to see the law changed. It would be easy for me to turn on the President and not support him on this but then I would be no better than the Republicans who did not care about the reckless spending by Reagan, Bush and Bush and now criticize Obama for reckless spending with almost violent language.

I have made it very clear that the big four issues for me now are LGBT issues; void Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, void Defense Of Marriage and allow Gays and Lesbians to get married, adding LGBT to the Employment Non-discrimination laws and adding violence against LGBT people to the federal hate crime laws.

These laws/changes must happen but it must be done correctly and within the structures of what the constitution spells out. If I am allowed full citizenship via an executive order rather than through the law the next President can just void this President’s executive order and I am back where I started from; nowhere.