Today is “Presidents Day.” It’s a generic name for a Monday that will no doubt be celebrated in a generic way – i.e. not at all. The only celebrating that will go on will be done by those happy to be off work.
Before George Washington’s birthday was taken, renamed, and replaced with the blanket Presidents Day,” the 22nd of February was a day to celebrate our first president and the father of our country. While being America’s first president is kind of a big deal, George Washington was much, much more than just a first president. This day is therefore much more significant than we give it credit for.
Daniel Horowitz explains at the Conservative Review:
Because Washington refused to become king and instead opted to humbly serve his country as its first elected president, the observance of his birthday is really a celebration of our Constitution and the entire republican system of governance upon which our nation depends. In that sense, Presidents Day is truly a day to recognize we are a Republic, not a monarchy.
… the newly-crafted Constitution vested the president with executive authority to “faithfully executive the laws,” not craft the laws.
How far we have fallen, from the time of President Washington, who faced a citizenry that was prepared to elect him king. Today, the office of the presidency carries so much power that our lives and our country hang in the balance of one day in November, 2016. This was not intended to be so.
The one-man executive branch has turned into a power usurping machine. Behind the president now sits a Department of Justice that intervenes in state law enforcement more than ever before. Behind the executive branch now sits the EPA, Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Treasury, and Department of State, and countless unelected employees with no accountability to the governed.
In addition, the executive branch no longer acts as the independent branch that the Founders intended.
Horowitz continues:
Although the power of the presidency was not to have any semblance of the power of the king, our Founders still felt that the faithful execution of the laws was a grave task that should only be vested in one man and in a man of faith …
However, the Founders never envisioned two problems: the creation of political parties and the decline of religion and virtue among our civil society.
Political parties have rendered the desideratum of separation of powers and checks and balances moot. The legislature can no longer properly check a lawless executive because it is most often comprised of enough party loyalists who will operate in tandem with the president instead of as a separate body of government.
We as a nation and as a governing body, we have also failed to hold up religious virtues. In George Washington’s farewell address, Horowitz points out that Washington devoted the largest portion of the speech to the necessity of religion and virtue.
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Read the rest of at Conservative Review. We can only hope that in November, the nation might take a step back towards the virtues George Washington, our nation’s greatest president, held dear.
