The Cavalier Presidency by DePlato Justin P.;

Author:DePlato, Justin P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Here he explains that, in his theory of executive emergency power, the executive must act to execute the law faithfully with the intent to preserve the Union. Furthermore, he understood that in order to do so, a law or two may need to be violated so as to safeguard the rule of law. Lincoln revealed that although the faithful execution of the laws should be considered paramount in U.S. constitutional obedience, if some members of the Union do not adhere to the law and undermine the stability of the Union, the executive is forced to decide whether to be handicapped to law, bound so tightly that the Union shall cease to exist, or to compromise some laws so as to save the institution.

Lincoln likewise posed a similar question: “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken, if the government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding the single law, would tend to preserve it?”[60] Clearly, he claimed that, above all, the Union had to be preserved because without it, the Constitution and the rule of law would be rendered meaningless.[61]

Moreover, in a letter to Senator Albert Hodges, Lincoln clarified his rationale for using executive emergency power during the war:

I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primarily abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. . . . I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by ever indispensable means, that government, that nation, of which the constitution was the organic law.[62]

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