This is a rush transcript from "Glenn Beck," March 9, 2011. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO, GUEST HOST: Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Are the rights we have from birth, free speech, privacy, travel, fairness from the government truly ours or can they be taken away by a piece of paper signed by the president?
Tonight, freedom, Gitmo and you.
As many of you know, in addition to filling in for Glenn Beck this week on the Fox News Channel and my other Fox assignments, I also host my own show called "Freedom Watch" on the Fox Business Network at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time.
If you watch both of the shows, and if you have heard me talk about freedom before, then none of what I'm about to say should come as a surprise to you. On the "Glenn Beck" show and on "Freedom Watch" my closing statements this week have addressed the recent decision by President Obama to issue an executive order declaring that he can keep people in jail, even after a jury has found them not guilty, and he can lock up whomever he wants and not even file charges against them.
The e-mails and tweets and Facebook comments to my statements on this have been overwhelming. Most of you agree that the president is wrong, terribly wrong. But many of you were surprised to learn that a president can do this.
If history has taught us anything, it is that the presidents can do whatever they can get away with. And President Obama is no exception. Lincoln arrested newspaper editors who challenged his politics. Wilson arrested people for speaking German in public. FDR arrested Japanese Americans just because of their ancestry.
President Obama is not only no exception, rather, he is an example, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Now, when I say "corrupts," I don't mean corruption in the sense, in the tabloid sense of receiving something of value in return for the exercise of governmental power. That's not the case here.
Rather, the case here is different but equally as serious. You see? When Barack Obama was a senator, he argued against military trials for folks who are not accused of violating the rules of war. He argued against America operating a penal colony off our shores where no federal judges could assure fairness and he argued against the incarceration of people who have not been charged with a crime or people who juries, whether military or civilians, have already acquitted.
And when he became president, he promised to uphold the Constitution and the values that underlie it. But now that he has the power of the presidency, he has rejected what he once believed and he has refused his oath to uphold the Constitution. George W. Bush did the same and I did not hesitate to address those wrongs when he did them.
But here you have a president who was a star student at Harvard Law School, one of the best law schools in the country, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, also one of the best in the country. And who held himself out as an expert on the Constitution.
But now that he has the ability to affect human liberty and to enhance his standing with certain political groups here at home, he has claimed for himself powers nowhere even in to that in the Constitution and utterly rejected by the Supreme Court.
A school child could tell you that when a jury finds you not guilty, the government lets you go. A first year law student knows that if the government doesn't have enough evidence to charge you, the government must let you go. All lawyers know that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and the president must uphold it whether it's convenient for him or not.
But this president has rejected those truths. How about this, Mr. President? All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Does that sound familiar, Mr. President? The rights are inalienable, as you cannot take them away.
When you reject words upon which the nation was founded, the framers gave us a president not a king. If the president can decide what laws to enforce and what laws to reject, if he can decide that the government will respect the rights of some and reject the rights of others, if he can claim powers on some unnamed source other than the Constitution, then he is a king and not a president. And you all know what happened the last time we had a king.
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