Lately, people have asked me more often than ever, “Is that legal?”
Does our Constitution allow the government to break into someone’s home or place of business without a warrant? Does it allow ICE agents to use force, even lethal force, against law-abiding protesters, without accountability? Can the federal government send military troops to a state that doesn’t want them there? Can the president unilaterally decide to kill people in another country’s waters, where we are not at war, without providing any concrete justification to Congress or anyone else?
The Founding Fathers recognized that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. They built safeguards into our Constitution that presumed that even if we elected an authoritarian leader with no moral compass or respect for the law, the legislature and the courts would keep him in check.
Right now in the United States of America, you can’t say that checks and balances are working as they should against an authoritarian and overreaching executive. Far-right extremists have managed to intimidate an incredibly weak and timid Congress into abandoning its duty to uphold the Constitution. A largely complicit Supreme Court has allowed it to happen.
Our state, to a lesser extent, is in danger of losing the same checks and balances. We have an extremely powerful Legislature and an executive who is largely powerless. Our state judiciary has risen to check the Legislature’s power. Rather than respecting the rule of law, our state Legislature is corrupted by the same authoritarian quest for power as our president. Just this week, they passed legislation with the clear intent of diluting the judiciary’s power.
The Utah Legislature is also passing legislation that would strip our citizens of their rights. Our state constitution recognizes the people’s right to enact legislation through the initiative process. But our Legislature is about to make that process much more difficult, if not impossible.
The rule of law largely depends on people agreeing that we are all bound by it. Whether our federal and state constitutions protect us depends largely on “We the People” agreeing that they are not merely advisory. Our elected officials, at both the state and federal levels, have not only a legal but also a moral obligation to respect the checks and balances designed to protect the rights of the people. They have forsaken that responsibility. It falls to us to hold them accountable at the ballot box.