I just lost a fairly long and link intensive blog excerpt. And thus, after a small bit of cursing, I… repiece this together again. (Please note that in the famous poem, Humpty Dumpty was never identified as an egg.)

Senator Larry Craig of Idaho has taken my “What if it were Hillary” Challenge:

Republican Sen. Larry Craig is citing Hillary Clinton as the reason he opposes renewing the Patriot Act in its current form, saying Mrs. Clinton is likely to abuse the security measure if she becomes president – unless additional safeguards are built in.

The Idaho Republican told Limbaugh: “You know, I’ve been here a little while, and I remember Janet Reno, and I remember Waco and Ruby Ridge.”

And thus, Senator Larry Craig gets the “Decent Douche-bag of the Week” Award. I do wonder — Did Senator Feingold ask him the “Hillary Clinton” question, or did he come upon it on his own? I note that his premise is false. He is thinking in partisan terms of whose guy/gal gets to do the extra-constitutional malarking. And he seems to think Bush is better than Hillary in terms of how the extra-constitutional malarky is put to use. I guess he likes his Ruby Ridgers more than Vegan War Protesters (or Executive Branch whistle-blowers), to which I say: to each their own, and every politico has different sets of constituencies. We live in a two-party state, I suppose, and he is a politician that relies on the party-head for his continued powers, so he may or may not see the trap he has set for himself, and he may or may not cynically rationalizing his stand against the Patriot Act for the benefit of the partisan Limbaugh listeners. It is sometimes difficult to ascertain where politicos fade in and out with their stated principles.

In the meantime, our awaited Supreme Court nominee came out (big surprise) in favour of furthering the powers of the Executive Branch (though, to be honest, we have no record on whether this extends past Republican Administrations to the realm of Democratic Administrations.)

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration, like other White Houses before and after, chafed at the reality that Congress’s reach on the meaning of laws extends beyond the words of statutes passed on Capitol Hill. Judges may turn to the trail of statements lawmakers left behind in the Congressional Record when trying to glean the intent behind a law. The White House left no comparable record.

“Since the president’s approval is just as important as that of the House or Senate, it seems to follow that the president’s understanding of the bill should be just as important as that of Congress,” Alito wrote. He later added that “by forcing some rethinking by courts, scholars, and litigants, it may help to curb some of the prevalent abuses of legislative history.”

In a purely “original intent of the founding fathers strict constructionalist” manner, the line about “president’s approval is just as important as that of the House or Senate” is a false one. I also note that the powers of the Executive, which the danged Stubborn Legislation being the bone of contention here and the fact that they yield some powers in government, are such that the Executive controls the flow of Intelligence Information to the Legislation. (Yes, that is a slam against the line “They had the same information we did” — a statement that was absurd on the face of it.) I will also note that the whole “wire tapping of American citizens” (and circumventing FISA, a secret court which has from the Carter Administration to the Bush II administration been quite lenient in ruling in favour of the Executive Branch, which assures us that your next phone call from “al Qaeda” will be monitored, and the proliferation of rejected requests that has come under the Bush II administration — well, never mind, Bush has opted to ignore that through means of — wait for it –) Decision came from both his reading into the Authorization of Force into Afghanistan (I guess Barbar Lee’s lone “no” vote has been exonerated, after all) and — heh heh heh heh — an EXECUTIVE ORDER!!! And I ask the question that begins with “You know, back during the Clinton Administration Republicans were blasting Clinton for his liberal use of Executive Orders” (regularly used to save small parts of national forests, for example, from development), and finish the question in the same manner that Larry Craig finished his question of the Patriot Act.

So, a quick look on how Bush “interprets” the laws passed by the Legislative Branch and… it’s not particularly pretty.

The CATO Institute asks the question: “What’s the purpose of the Patriot Act” if, indeed, you can read into any separate bill what Bush has read into separate bills? It’s a good question, and one to ponder as the Imperial Presidency of George Bush continues.

One last note: Dear Russ Feingold, Now is a good time for your principles of civil libertarians to ascend past your principles of deference to the president’s choice of nominees, with respect to Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Just a thought.