Honey, They Shrunk the Congress

[babylonsister]

Honey, They Shrunk the Congress

By ADAM COHEN
Published: October 30, 2007


President Bush’s nominee for attorney general, Michael Mukasey, was asked an important question about Congress’s power at his confirmation hearing. If witnesses claim executive privilege and refuse to respond to Congressional subpoenas in the United States attorneys scandal — as Karl Rove and Harriet Miers have done — and Congress holds them in contempt, would his Justice Department refer the matter to a grand jury for criminal prosecution, as federal law requires?

Mr. Mukasey suggested the answer would be no. That was hardly his only slap-down of Congress. He made the startling claim that a president can defy laws if he or she is acting within the authority “to defend the country.” That is a mighty large exception to the rule that Congress’s laws are supreme.

The founders wanted the “people’s branch” to be strong, but the Bush administration has usurped a frightening number of Congress’s powers — with very little resistance. The question is whether members of Congress of both parties will do anything about it.

Congress is often described as one of three coequal branches, but that is not entirely true. As Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale law professor, observed in “America’s Constitution: a Biography,” Article I actually makes Congress “first among equals, with wide power to structure the second-mentioned executive and third-mentioned judicial branches.”

Article I, which describes Congress’s powers, is the Constitution’s first, longest and most generously worded article. It gives Congress a wide array of specific powers, but also broad authority to pass laws that bring to life “all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.”

It would be hard to recognize that powerful Congress today. In part, that is because Congress has been unwilling or unable to enact laws on the most important issues facing the nation — Iraq, immigration reform, health care.

Just as troubling, though, is how it has allowed its institutional power to erode. President Bush has regularly issued signing statements — including on critical issues like the ban on torture — that assert his right to ignore new laws at the same time as he signs them. These signing statements are not just talk. A report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office states that in nearly one-third of the cases it looked at, after President Bush issued a signing statement objecting to a provision of a new law, his administration did not implement it as written.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/opinion/30tues4.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

[flashl]

1. This type of discourse sometimes drives me nuts

On one hand, America accepts that its Constitution is a "dead letter" as this admin rejects all instruments and methods to return this country to three branches of government. On the other, we are to accept that within the remaining 300M citizens there is no one bright enough to devise a means to restore the three branches of government.

So, this means, that only the SMART people who understands law, the Constitution, and governance works for this admininstration.

[babylonsister]

2. Well, that's because not too many from the 'majority' party seem to

feel this is worthy of discourse. Dodd does seem to understand what's going on, but not too many others.