A little late, maybe, but applicable.

The office of President of the United States is a unique one for the history of our world. It is was created with a perspective of crippling limitations upon its power, making it largely incapable in all but a few duties. Even among those responsibilities vested into the executive branch, a great many hurdles are erected by the Constitution, which heavily limit the exercise of power; Congressional power to declare war, for instance. Since the responsibilities of a President are very clearly defined, so should the actions of that President be very defined and by such virtue confined to those duties.

A trend which is has been present in all modern Presidents has seemed to explode in this current administration, and that is one of the office of President being used as a platform of commentary, not just on matters of disputed policy, but on all things, including a recent drunken faux pas on stage by a musician. Many people will recall, when asked, the President referred to the musician very casually, and correctly, as a jacka**. The comment was in response to a question posed by a reporter but one must ask, what has this to do with the executive office of the United States federal government? Why was such a question relevant and why should the President have anything to say about it at all?

No one could be derided for having an opinion on a matter which is made public, regardless of who the opinion-holder is, but is the time of the President to be so callously wasted? Should he be answering questions which do not, in any way, pertain to his office, or should he be answering questions which directly correlate with the duties of his presidency? Should the principle of a school in Memphis use time at a PTA meting to discuss such matters?  The answer is quite clear, and it is fairly obvious that the fawning love of this President has overtaken the United States media, to the point of hearing their childish giggles of glee in response to his every whim.

Many other examples of such indiscretion from the administration can be pointed out. Queries from news organizations nearly always seem to focus on ambiguous trivialities or at least as much as they do on the business of government. And this trend, while less prevalent, was present none-the-less in prior administrations and is, therefore, a cause for concern.

This is an example of expanding government, in that people expect the White House to have an opinion on everything, when the President's opinion, in real terms, is utterly meaningless, since his duties do not expand to the realms in which he finds it necessary to comment. Does our President have authority to censure the drunken musician? No, he does not. The drunken musician can do as he pleases and the President has no say in the musician's affairs unless they violates a federal law.

Our society has increased the socially accepted powers of the federal government by allowing it to make statements about our lives which it never had any business making, and to turn this page a little more, I shall point out an area where the federal government is taking this commentary to a level of invasion against our rights.

For many years, we have heard the call by public officials, including Presidents, for people to curb 'pollution' (this word is used in quotes because much of what is referred to as pollution is not, but some is as well). Environmentalism is very tricky, the federal government is given authority to regulate the business between states, and what merges seamlessly between states but the environment on the borders of those states? So, it would seem the federal executives have authority to regulate pollution, entirely at its own discretion as to just what qualifies as 'pollution'.

Yet, by allowing the federal government to have a running commentary on how 'bad' certain products are on the environment, Americans have essentially expanded executive authority into the realm of controlling the population's consumption of those 'bad' products, through the EPA and the CPSC. Our President ought not comment on what he thinks of the CO2 emissions of the cars on the street, because there is significant research showing that CO2 is beneficial to plants, a naturally-occurring component in our atmosphere, is crucial to our ecology, and is not at a dangerously high level. But, since Presidents have taken it upon themselves to berate this particular greenhouse gas, we now have an executive branch who has the power to regulate the production of CO2, although government is currently attempting to cement this power more fully. This essentially becomes the power to regulate every aspect of every American life, thus destroying all liberty and undoing what it means to be American.

A callousness has been developing in the executive branch of government, which not only ignores the principle of the Constitution but also its spirit. Instead of referring to the musician as a jacka**, our President ought to have replied that the situation had and has nothing to do with the office of the President or the federal government and as a representative of that government, he will not provide an unnecessary, irrelevant opinion. Rather than this reverence of limited government, the signs of an ever expanding government are present in commentary as well. An executive who finds every occasion to have an opinion on every situation is a hair's breadth away from making his opinion dictatorially pertinent to that situation, and therefore a tyrant to those involved. The President will not take that step into such minutia in the musician's life, nor will he do so as a pinpoint, in all people's lives. Yet, as stated before, the government is taking on new roles in this way, very obviously in the safety and 'green-ness' of products. We should be forewarned of this next step.