Alan Keyes wrote last month about Governor Palin’s veto of a bill passed by the Alaska Legislature that would have banned same-sex marriage:
But won’t Vice President Palin be able to prevent President McCain from making decisions that conflict with Christian conscience? I can think of no example of a morally principled, but unequally yoked, running mate who achieved this result once in office. The American republics are based upon Constitutional principles inconsistent with a divided executive. Therefore, lieutenant governors and vice presidents have no reliable say over the chief executive’s decisions and actions. This would be especially true of someone like Gov. Palin, who will enter office with no strong national constituency of her own beyond the possible influence of those supposed moral leaders whose unprincipled support for McCain has already placed them at his mercy. Unfortunately, a decided ignorance about the prerogatives and responsibilities of the chief executive is also the one glaring flaw in Sarah Palin’s tenure as governor of Alaska. When she began her gubernatorial duties, the state was in the midst of a constitutional crisis. The Alaska Supreme Court issued an opinion in favor of marriage benefits for homosexual couples, and subsequently ordered the Alaska commissioner of administration to draft regulations implementing that opinion. A clearer violation of the constitutional separation of powers can hardly be imagined. For this reason, Lieutenant Governor Loren Leman refused to sign the regulations.
Meanwhile, Alaska legislators passed a law to prevent any changes from being made that legitimized homosexual marriage in the state. Gov. Palin vetoed the law, and in effect granted marriage benefits to state employees and their partners. One of her advisers, Kevin Clarkson, claims that she did so on his advice, on the specious grounds that the law would have made permanent the changes ordered by the Alaska Supreme Court. But in Alaska as elsewhere in our republic, the Judicial Branch has no constitutional authority to carry out the laws. The executive power, which is to say the force of law, is entirely vested in the chief executive. Therefore, no regulations issued by the Alaska Supreme Court have the force of law. Where the chief executive and the legislature agree, as they did in this instance, that the judiciary had superseded its legal and constitutional boundaries, the Court’s preferred regulations were a dead letter. However, Gov. Palin’s veto gave credence to the Court’s usurpation.
During her campaign for office, she is reported to have said, “Elected officials can’t defy the court when it comes to how rights are applied.” (Anchorage Daily News, Online Edition, Aug. 6, 2006) This view vitiates the separation of powers, and would establish a judicial dictatorship over every aspect of legislation (since all legislation involves issues of rights in some fashion). Thus, through a combination of her own ignorance and advice from constitutionally incompetent lawyers, she surrendered the integrity of Alaska’s executive power in a way that hardly qualifies her to stand at the head of the line for the office of chief executive of the United States.
In this respect, Gov. Palin apparently belongs at the side of John McCain, whose record has established his disdain for the survival of our constitutional system of self-government. With respect to the McCain/Palin ticket, those of us who remain the partisans of self-government have good reason to remember another word of guidance quoted by St. Paul: “Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord.” For conscience and the Republic, we must declare ourselves independent of a party system that places good people under the yoke of iniquity.
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