"Power Grab" - the Bush Administration's unprecedented reach for power

[swag]

Elizabeth Drew, New York Review of Books, 06-22-2006

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19092

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the White House has made an unprecedented reach for power. It has systematically attempted to defy, control, or threaten the institutions that could challenge it: Congress, the courts, and the press. It has attempted to upset the balance of power among the three branches of government provided for in the Constitution; but its most aggressive and consistent assaults have been against the legislative branch: Bush has time and again said that he feels free to carry out a law as he sees fit, not as Congress wrote it. Through secrecy and contemptuous treatment of Congress, the Bush White House has made the executive branch less accountable than at any time in modern American history. And because of the complaisance of Congress, it has largely succeeded in its efforts.

This power grab has received little attention because it has been carried out largely in obscurity. The press took little notice until Bush, on January 5 of this year, after signing a bill containing the McCain amendment, which placed prohibitions on torture, quietly filed a separate pronouncement, a "signing statement," that he would interpret the bill as he wished. In fact Bush had been issuing such signing statements since the outset of his administration. The Constitution distinguishes between the power of the Congress and that of the president by stating that Congress shall "make all laws" and the president shall "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush claims the power to execute the laws as he interprets them, ignoring congressional intent.

Grover Norquist, a principal organizer of the conservative movement who is close to the Bush White House and usually supports its policies, says, "If you interpret the Constitution's saying that the president is commander in chief to mean that the president can do anything he wants and can ignore the laws you don't have a constitution: you have a king." He adds, "They're not trying to change the law; they're saying that they're above the law and in the case of the NSA wiretaps they break it." A few members of Congress recognize the implications of what Bush is doing and are willing to speak openly about it. Dianne Feinstein, Democratic senator from California, talks of a "very broad effort" being made "to increase the power of the executive." Chuck Hagel, Republican senator from Nebraska, says:

There's a very clear pattern of aggressively asserting executive power, and the Congress has essentially been complicit in letting him do it. The key is that Bush has a Republican Congress; of course if it was a Clinton presidency we'd be holding hearings.
The public scenes of the President surrounded by smiling legislators whom he praises for their wonderful work as he hands out the pens he has used to sign the bill are often utterly misleading. The elected officials aren't informed at that time of the President's real intentions concerning the law. After they leave, the President's signing statements—which he does not issue verbally at the time of signing— are placed in the Federal Register, a compendium of US laws, which members of Congress rarely read. And they are often so technical, referring as they do to this subsection and that statute, that they are difficult to understand.

For five years, Bush has been issuing a series of signing statements which amount to a systematic attempt to take power from the legislative branch. Though Ronald Reagan started issuing signing statements to set forth his own position on a piece of legislation, he did it essentially to guide possible court rulings, and he only occasionally objected to a particular provision of a bill. Though subsequent presidents also issued such statements, they came nowhere near to making the extraordinary claims that Bush has; nor did they make such statements nearly so often.

. . . http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19092

[opihimoimoi]

1. Me thinks We are being HiJacked big time...spooky and dangerous

A Thin Line exists....The Peeps will understand soon and all will be rectified with a return to Common Sense and Reason....

[teryang]

2. The creation of a totalitarian state is virtually complete

The only way to stop it is to pull the plug on the Iraqi war budget, thereby turning the political tide against a regime that has spent billions of treasure and tens of thousands of lives in a failed military adventure.