It's not a funding crisis; it's a constitutional crisis. Got it?

When the history books are written, they won’t write about whether or not the Department of Homeland a got funding in February of 2015; they will write about whether or not there was still a homeland at all.

The constitutional republic handed down to us by our Founding Fathers appears to have ceased to exist, and the blustering members of Congress circa 2015, with their sworn duty to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, can’t even work up enough outrage to pass a simple bill.

That bill, as originally formulated, would have funded the Department of Homeland Security but would withhold funds from being used to support the president’s executive order prescribing benefits, financial and otherwise, for a certain large class of illegal immigrants. The reason this is important is because the Constitution grants to Congress the exclusive authority for making laws; the president has no power to do so — at least not in a nation of laws.

Republicans thought they could force the president to do the right thing by using the congressional power of the purse, but the president used the power of scary words to bend Congress to his will. Those scary words? “Government shutdown!”

Since no one really wants to stop funding the department that defends us against terrorism, it was an inevitable conclusion that a bill would eventually pass sans the restriction on funding for the president’s illegal amnesty. The Democrats, as they usually do, had the upper hand politically, and the Republicans shot themselves in the foot again.

Conservatives had warned last fall that the GOP had adopted a strategy of failure when they stumbled upon their idiotic plan to hold the Department of Homeland Security hostage. But Republicans seem not to be capable of grasping the big picture, nor of governing pragmatically. Two vital flaws.

They also have an easy out today, which they are too myopic to see. A federal judge in Texas has already issued an injunction preventing the president from proceeding with his executive amnesty. If the Republicans had any political savvy, they would write a bill that fully funds Homeland Security as long as that injunction remains in effect. This would merely codify the status quo, and would give both sides something to vote for. Should the injunction be overturned, funding for the department would ipso facto cease within 30 days.

But Republicans don’t really want a solution; they don’t really want to challenge the president. They are as much a part of the problem as the president is, and in many ways they have abrogated their constitutional responsibilities just as much or more than the president has.

Let’s make it plain. We the People have a problem. No matter what the mainstream media tells you, this is not a funding crisis; it is not a government shutdown crisis; it is a constitutional crisis. What we have is a president willing to do anything to advance his agenda, and a Congress unable and very possibly unwilling to do anything to stop him. Since they both answer to us — to We the People — then it ultimately falls on us to make them pay a price for their misconduct and arrant disregard for the Constitution.

The issue Congress should be focused on is not immigration reform, nor government spending; the issue is a lawless president who wrested power and authority from the Congress unconstitutionally and got away with it. You don’t have to take my word for it; we have it on good authority from President Obama himself.

Here’s what he said on March 28, 2011:

“America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that. That’s part of my job… With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed …. [W]e’ve got three branches of government. Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws. And then the judiciary has to interpret the laws. There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.”

This is just one of the many times the president told the American public it would be illegal and unconstitutional for him to unilaterally change the law through executive fiat. That’s pretty compelling evidence, yet the gelded Congress can’t work up any enthusiasm for defending the Constitution against this blatant usurpation of power.

Time after time, you do hear senators and representatives decry President Obama for taking unconstitutional action, but then they fail to follow through and take the constitutional action they themselves are charged with when a president commits high crimes and misdemeanors, namely impeachment.

There is no argument whatsoever that a president overstepping his or her constitutional restraints is exactly what the Founding Fathers meant when they included the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” as grounds for impeachment. They were not concerned with presidents becoming murderers but rather tyrants, and with the near example of King George III in mind, the founders chose language that would provide future generations broad latitude to decide for themselves what abuses of power merited impeachment.

Although inherent to the meaning of the term, it should be pointed out here that impeachment itself does not assume guilt, but rather provides a president the opportunity to defend himself against charges he had overstepped his bounds. The House of Representative may file articles of impeachment against a president with a simple majority of members voting in the affirmative, but to convict a president and remove him from office requires a two-thirds majority of the U.S. Senate.

Impeachment seems like a mighty big word, but it has twice been used for considerably less flagrant offenses than those which are reckoned against this president. President Andrew Johnson was impeached for the offense of firing a member of his Cabinet without consulting the Senate, and President Bill Clinton was impeached for lying to a grand jury (and the nation) about his preference for young brunette interns.

It appears that President Obama is serious about violating the oath he swore that he “will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of [his] ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

That being the case, when will the Congress get serious about stopping him? Probably never, which raises the question of when will We the People get tired of living in a fake republic and listen to the advice of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations... evinces a design to reduce them [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

Constitutional convention, anyone?