On Tuesday, Barack Obama will be sworn in as America’s 44th president. It will be a poignant moment as America’s first black president takes the oath of office facing the Lincoln Memorial and with his hand on the same Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his inauguration in 1861.
Much has been made of Obama’s decision to use Abe’s Bible, as well as Obama’s ambition to model his presidency after that of Lincoln, America’s first Republican president and historically one of its most beloved.
I hope President Obama succeeds, and in two ways in particular. I hope Obama follows Lincoln’s example in steadfastly fighting a difficult but winnable war. And I hope Obama emulates Lincoln in recognizing that all America’s citizens are entitled to the constitutional right to life.
During the Civil War, President Lincoln made many decisions that were criticized harshly by the press, Democrats and even the U.S. Supreme Court as affronts to civil liberties. Shortly after the war started, Lincoln declared martial law and authorized military tribunals. He unilaterally suspended habeas corpus, the constitutional right to appear before a judge before being imprisoned. Overall, as many as 15,000 people were arrested without a prompt trial.
Lincoln also increased the size of the Army and Navy, hiked military spending and instituted a blockade, all without congressional approval.
Lincoln wasn’t the only president to take bold and prompt action in a time of war. Consider the other president Obama hopes to emulate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR authorized the FBI to investigate suspected fascists and communists in America. And in 1940 he signed the Smith Act into law, which required resident aliens to register with the federal government. Roosevelt also signed executive order 9066, which authorized the relocation of 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry to protect military bases and manufacturing plants from possible sabotage. Two thirds of those relocated were American citizens. We now recognize that this was a human rights mistake, but at least everyone understood that Roosevelt was putting national security first.
When it was discovered that eight Nazis had made their way to the U.S. to blow up power plants in 1942, all eight were captured, tried and convicted by a military court. Two of the men received 30-year sentences while the other six were executed by electrocution. And it was all done within two months of them entering the country.
Like other wartime presidents, President Bush has been criticized by political opponents, scolded by the courts and demonized in the media for real and perceived infringements on personal freedom. But then again, the Bush Administration’s tactics, such as surveillance of suspected terrorists, helped produce its greatest achievement: keeping America safe from terrorist attacks in the years since 9-11.
Many Americans doubt whether Obama recognizes that his first job as president is to keep Americans safe from terrorists, not to appease his party’s leftwing base. Recent events have not been reassuring. The Obama transition team leaked this week that the president-elect intends to issue an executive order shortly after Inauguration Day ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay. But Obama has not yet explained what he would do with the over 200 suspected terrorists if GITMO were closed, not to mention other enemy combatants held in military prisons across the world.
Last year, when the liberal majority on the Supreme Court granted certain constitutional rights to foreign terrorists, Justice Antonin Scalia warned, “America is at war with radical Islamists. …today’s opinion … will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” Justice Scalia’s commonsense warning was prophetic.
The Pentagon announced this week that 61 former GITMO prisoners released in recent months have rejoined their holy warrior colleagues on battlefields around the world, where they are doing their very best to kill our sons and daughters serving in the U.S. military. While presidents must walk a fine line between protecting civil liberties and safeguarding our nation’s citizens, in times of war and crisis, the nation needs a strong chief executive.
Obama should also emulate Lincoln in the 16th president’s recognition of the value of all human life. Abraham Lincoln was elected president four years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its infamous Dred Scott decision, which affirmed slavery and defined slaves as property, not citizens. Lincoln was a strong, prudent, opponent of slavery and often voiced his concern that Dred Scott would lead to a Supreme Court ban on state abolition of slavery.
Just as slavery was an assault on human dignity, the slaughter of millions of unborn children is an assault on the most basic human right, the right to life.
Obama’s inauguration will take place just two days before the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that claimed to find a constitutional right to destroy the life of an unborn child. Unlike Lincoln, Barack Obama does not believe in the right to life and citizenship for all Americans. Obama’s pro-abortion record is well known. He has promised that the first thing he’ll do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), a law that would overturn the few existing state and federal restrictions on abortion. Researchers estimate that FOCA would generate at least 125,000 more abortions a year in a nation already devastated by 4,000 a day.
With its Roe decision, the court again wrongly declared that some Americans are not entitled to the constitutional right to life and that they can be destroyed at the discretion of others. Sadly, that evil philosophy of death will be given new life under President Obama, unless he embraces Lincoln in affirming the equality of all human life.
Barack Obama has indicated he will look to Abraham Lincoln as a role model for principled leadership in a time of war and instability. Let’s hope he has the audacity to do just that.
Tags: war on terror