David McElroy

When I was younger, one of my neighbors came over and said he had something important to talk about.

“I have good news,” he said as he waved a piece of paper. “I’ve just signed the neighborhood constitution. It’s going to keep you safe and free. You’re not going to have to worry about a thing, because I’m going to take care of you. Best of all, I’m protecting you against attacks from space aliens.”

I’d never considered the notion that I needed to worry about being attacked by space aliens, but the more I thought about it, well, it seemed like a good idea to have someone protect me from them. And Mr. Madison seemed so sincere, so I figured he must be right.

Not much changed at first. I went on living my life and kept to myself. Every now and then Mr. Madison would tell me that I needed to change something about my house or my yard, but it was no big deal. Mostly I was relieved because the aliens hadn’t attacked.

Mr. Madison couldn’t do all of the protecting and ordering himself, so he deputized members of his family to help out. He only appointed the best, of course, so they had my best interests at heart. That’s what they told me, anyway.

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The public media community around the country is outraged by the recent firing of two top staffers from Alabama Public Television. The commission that manages the network fired the executive director of APT along with his top assistant. Publicly, both sides just said there was a disagreement about the future direction of the network, but there was much more going on.

Conservatives who control the commission had asked for the network to consider showing a controversial 10-part series by a Texas minister named David Barton who considers himself a historian. (His only educational credential is a degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University.) The American Heritage Series presents this man’s view of the United States as a Christian nation and tries to debunk any notions that the Founding Fathers weren’t dedicated Christians.

The professionals at Alabama Public Television reviewed the material in Barton’s series and outlined why it was a bad idea and possibly illegal. The matter was supposed to be discussed at a commission meeting, but the commission went into executive session and fired the two instead.

At first blush, it seems that the story is simply that conservatives were unjustly trying to push their views onto the professional staff and fired them when they wouldn’t go along. That’s obviously what happened, but there’s a bigger issue here to me.

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When Barack Obama issued an order last week that will allow some undocumented immigrants to say in the United States without fear of prosecution, people generally supported it or opposed it based on the way they see the issue of immigration. Those who favor fewer restrictions on immigration welcomed the order. Those who don’t really like immigration denounced it.

The more I think about it, the more I think the immigration debate is completely secondary to the real issue. No matter whether you favor immigration or oppose it — for whatever your reasons — you should be afraid of this order, because it’s a very blunt statement by a sitting U.S. president that he can ignore laws that he doesn’t like.

Tomorrow, we expect the U.S. Supreme Court to issue its ruling about the constitutionality of key provisions of ObamaCare. If the court strikes down the law as unconstitutional, what’s to stop Obama from using the same principle he used with immigration and simply say he won’t abide by the law as interpreted by the court?

Now let’s look at the opposite case. Let’s say that the court upholds ObamaCare on Thursday. Then let’s say that Mitt Romney is elected president in November. Why couldn’t he simply issue an order for his administration to ignore the health care reform laws if he wanted to? How would that be any different from what Obama has done?

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