By What Authority?

Years ago, one basic rule in the lawyer’s toolkit was to ask the question, “By what authority?” If there were not a constitutional, legal or legislative authority, then the courts would strike down the executive action.

Recently, the price and wage czar for President Obama told the president of Bank of America that he had to return close to $2 million of his salary. The loony newspapers thought this was a good thing. The question they should have asked, however, was, “By what authority?”

Of course, the czar doesn’t have such authority. The government doesn’t have the authority to fix wages and prices. This is a bold, outright communist power grab by another refugee from the Dark Ages of the 1960s.

Acclaimed anti-communist author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told an audience at Harvard in 1979 that, if the Russian people had opposed the Soviet Communists, the Soviets would not have been able to devastate the country and send tens of millions of people to their untimely deaths.

It is time for us to stand up. This czar has no authority to do this. The government has no authority. We need to hold their feet to the fire of the Constitution and restore the United States to a country where the law reigns over the government rather than the government making its own laws for its avaricious, psychopathic power grab. If we sit back and do nothing, we will find ourselves in the gulag.

Of course, the ultimate law is the Law of God found in the Old Testament and New Testament documents. We need wise conservatives who will abide by that Divine Law.

The United States will have either biblical laws or anti-biblical laws – and we will either have constitutional laws or unconstitutional laws. There is no in-between.

Furthermore, the liberal, leftist, libertarian, atheist and secular activists and leaders who cry “separation of church and state” or “separation of religion and state” are actually hypocritically violating their own standard because their vocal opposition to God’s Law is itself a commingling of church and state or religion and state, according to their own definitions. They are like the Muslim who wants to replace the traditional Judeo-Christian laws of the United States and Great Britain with some weird kind of Middle Eastern Islamic law, or “Shariah.”

That’s because you can’t very well support a moral/religious law that attacks other people for supporting their own moral/religious law. That is contradictory, hypocritical and illogical.

Someone’s moral/legal theology, or doctrine of God’s Law, has to win in the end. Either the Christian’s, the atheist’s, the Muslim’s, the Talmudic scholar’s, the libertarian ideologue’s, etc.

If we want to live in a civilized society, then the biblical doctrine of law and morality should prevail.

Be that as it may, it is clear that the wage and price czar’s interference is not only anti-biblical, but also unconstitutional. Neither the Bible nor the U.S. Constitution gives government the right to determine the salaries of private citizens in private companies.

Note: Tom Snyder, editor of Movieguide®, contributed to this article.

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Dr. Ted Baehr is the founder and publisher of MOVIEGUIDE, chairman of the Christian Film & Television Commission, and a well-known movie critic, educator, lecturer and media pundit. He also is the author of several books, including “The Culture-Wise Family” with legendary entertainer Pat Boone, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow for Study of Culture, Media, and Mass Entertainment at the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought. For more information, please call 800-899-6684 or go to the MOVIEGUIDE website.

This article was originally published at wnd.com on November 3, 2009.. The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.

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