Nero.
When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act’s expanded police powers.
Bush did the same thing when he signed the McCain backed Torture Bill. It’s the neat new trick of American Checks and Balances. Congress passes a law, straying from Presidential Authority. The President signs the law. He then makes a note saying that he doesn’t like part of the law, and will therefore not bother with that one.
In the system we have worked out for ourselves, we also have this unique ability to rewrite into existence legal premises whereby the President no longer disobeyed the law. If the President asserts that a previous law he signed gives him authority that law never gave him, well… Arlen Specter may have had this discussion on “Meet the Press”:
RUSSERT: The administration says that they didn’t need to, that they already had authority from Congress when, back in October 2002, Congress voted an authorization to go to war against Iraq, and this is part of that war.
SPECTER: I believe that contention is very strained and unrealistic. The authorization for the use of force doesn’t say anything about electronic surveillance, issue was never raised with the Congress. And there is a specific statute on the books, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which says flatly that you can’t undertake that kind of surveillance without a court order.”
All but certain, Arlen Specter has offered up a bill to revise FISA that would sweep the fact that Bush broke the law under the rug. The beat goes on from there.
Bush wrote: ”The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . “
“The Unitary Executive Branch”, a unique Legal Theory that comes out of the “Federalist Society” which had its advocate in recently confirmed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. To be fair, the name “Federalist Society”, although deriving from the “Federalist Papers”, could just as easily backtrack to the late “Federalist Party”, and there is a strain of Aristocracy therein.
We’ve sort of been down this road before and we’ve sort of not. I reprise for you:
The far seeing men who fashioned our Constitution and established our government 150 years ago provided a system of checks and balances which should insure the perpetuity of the government.[…]
This system worked perfectly until [—-]. Then the President demanded and received from Congress extraordinary powers, which he has never surrendered. Congress [—] ceased to be a deliberative body. The vast majority of members did not even read the bills submitted, much less debate them. It was enought to know the President wanted them, and they were passed without debate[].
The function of the Supreme Court is to interpret the law. [–]
Witness within the past few days the demanding of Congress that it pass “with all possible haste” an act establishing [–]. Witness too a president demanding of Congress the passage of a certain bill with the instruction “not to be deterred by considerations of its constitutionality.” This is the blackest phrase on the records of this government.
This is the most critical moment in the history of our nation. If the President has his way and is permitted to Emasculate the Supreme Court, the US may classify itself as a nation of puppets. Was it for this that we re-elected Mr. Roosevelt by such an overwhelming majority?
I removed a lot of specifics, but left the last one up there, and I repeated my blog entry from just a few posts back. Though some of what I removed is a bit troubling in considering our situation today. “Because of the Overwhelming Democratic Majority” precedes “ceased to be a deliberative body.” Congress ceased to be a deliberative body with the slimmest of Republican majorities. The Democratic Party as an institution is nowhere near as dead as the Republican Party was following 1936 and leading into 1938 (where it recovered to a decent enough point), and Bush was never elected or re-elected by an overwhelming anything… and his party’s Triumph in 2002 Midterm election was relatively minor as well. To say Bush is a Poor Man’s Roosevelt is an understatement: Bush is a hobo; Roosevelt is Gates.
Nonetheless, a rebuff in the polls at 2006 should go somewhere to, if not leaving Bush with his willy-nilly decisions as to how to Interpret the laws he signs in the Most Elastically Self-Serving Manner Possible, tell his handlers and the Invisible Hands of Government to give us a different goddamned “Most Powerful Person in the Free World”.