Last night was the constitutionally-obligated State of the Union that the president is required to give to Congress on how the country is doing and what he plans to do.  Well, this president has made one thing clear — what he wants this year is more power and less interference from that pesky check that Congress has on his power.

During the 50th minute of his hour-plus-long speech, he said, “The executive branch also needs to change.  Too often, it’s inefficient, outdated and remote.  That’s why I’ve asked the Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy so that our government is leaner, quicker and more responsive to the needs of the American people.”  The only thing scarier than this trampling of the Constitution is the reception to this notion.  It was met with thunderous applause.

This is exactly what authors like George Orwell and Edward Mandell House were warning us in their novels 1984 and Philip Dru: Administrator, respectively.  Both books are about a future of dictators and social control by the government, and this is how it starts.

Allowing the president to have more power is incredibly dangerous.  Our founders set up this country with the belief that government was too powerful for just one man to be in charge of.  That is why the legislature was in charge of creating the laws and the President was there only to enforce the laws that Congress had set up.  Granted, he could veto the laws that Congress passed as checks on Congress, but he was never supposed to create laws.

Even though many other presidents have used executive orders to push their own agenda, they still had checks from Congress on those orders.

This is a crucial time in America.  We must keep the country that has been the pinnacle of liberty and freedom for over 200 years from continuing to crumble by taking more and more liberties out of the hands of us, the collective, and give it to a single man, whether he be Republican, Democratic or anywhere in between.  We cannot let democracy die to the sound of thunderous applause.