Here’s a photo of House Speaker Dennis Hastert as he leaves a hydrogen-fueled car he used for the press conference photo-op. Note the SUV. He’d been discussing gas prices, and once away from the cameras (he thought) he got into his SUV to drive the few blocks back to the Capitol.
Priceless.
That’s the number of laws that Bush has claimed authority to disobey.
Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ”whistle-blower” protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.
Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush’s assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government.
The President’s job is to faithfully execute the laws. In his (or his advisors’) view, the Supreme Court’s job and the Congress’ job is really his job too.
I think that perhaps he’s spent a little too much time with the Royal Family – no, not his own, but the Saud variety. American boots on the ground in Saudi Arabia, protecting the regime of the royal family, acted as one of the first recruiting points for bin Laden’s terrorist network (despite his own ties) there. Our role in the middle east has been unpopular — supporting dictators, establishing military bases, things like that. Our decades-long protection of this family has been documented to some extent already – but I fully expect to see more revelations of just how deep our complicity has been, and how much it has really cost, as time goes on. Meanwhile, they’re raking it in even faster than ExxonMobil.
In any case, the expansion of executive power in this administration has been striking. They must feel very confident in continuing “Republican” power (They’re not really Republicans, are they…).
Here’s how it’s done, the modus operandi: Signing statements. It’s a form of crossing fingers behind your back, if you remember that children’s “loophole on a promise.”
Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation’s sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.
Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ”signing statements” — official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.
In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills — sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.
”He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises — and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened,” said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.
Here are a couple of examples:
Dec. 30, 2005: US interrogators cannot torture prisoners or otherwise subject them to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
Bush’s signing statement: The president, as commander in chief, can waive the torture ban if he decides that harsh interrogation techniques will assist in preventing terrorist attacks.
Oct. 29, 2005: Defense Department personnel are prohibited from interfering with the ability of military lawyers to give independent legal advice to their commanders.
Bush’s signing statement: All military attorneys are bound to follow legal conclusions reached by the administration’s lawyers in the Justice Department and the Pentagon when giving advice to their commanders.
Nov. 6, 2003: US officials in Iraq cannot prevent an inspector general for the Coalition Provisional Authority from carrying out any investigation. The inspector general must tell Congress if officials refuse to cooperate with his inquiries.
Bush’s signing statement: The inspector general ”shall refrain” from investigating anything involving sensitive plans, intelligence, national security, or anything already being investigated by the Pentagon. The inspector cannot tell Congress anything if the president decides that disclosing the information would impair foreign relations, national security, or executive branch operations.
The method of “no veto, then ignore with signing statement” is deceitful, especially given the way he does it. A Presidential veto can be overturned by Congress, but this cross your fingers behind your back is just plain infantile – not to mention creepy – and more than 750 examples is rather excessive.
“Ha-ha – take it back! Fooled ya again!”
It’s amazing to me that Congress is handing over its powers like this. It’s got to burn even the most rabid right-wingers a little bit.
So what does Sandra Day O’Connor say (in case you’ve forgotten, she is a Republican but not a neo-con) now that she has announced her retirement from the Supreme Court?
Speaking in Spokane WA to a group of lawyers and judges in late July, retiring U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said she is worried about the future of the federal judiciary because of a “climate of antipathy” in Congress. “I’m pretty old, you know. In all the years of my life, I don’t think I have ever seen relations as strained as they are now” between the judiciary and Congress, O’Connor said. “It makes me sad. … The present climate is such that I worry about the federal judiciary.”
There is sentiment that courts are overreaching,” and in our country today, “we’re seeing efforts to prevent that: a desire not to have an independent judiciary, and that worries me,” she said. “A key concept of the rule of law is the concept of an independent judiciary.”
Not surprisingly, John Roberts is expressing a firm view of an independent judiciary, but I’m not he means what she means by the phrase.
“Judicial activism” is another strangely loaded phrase, used primarily to accuse judges of “legislating from the bench” or being “out of (our) control” when they don’t get into lockstep with the President’s (or the religious right’s) agenda. It is used to generate antipathy toward the check and balance of the judicial branch as against the executive and legislative branches. Somehow, though, it’s never used to describe examples such as Justices Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist, who have explicitly said they want to overturn the legal precedent of Roe v. Wade. Bush has loaded up as much as he can with right-wing judges – but even a couple of his appointments have this distressing tendency to look at the case at hand and to make a real judgment, not just move with the ideological wave.
Roberts writes on the Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire:
“It is difficult to comment on either ‘judicial activism’ or ‘judicial restraint’ in the abstract, without reference to the particular facts and applicable law of a specific case. Precedent plays an important role in promoting the stability of the legal system. A sound judicial philosophy should reflect recognition of the fact that the judge operates within a system of rules developed over the years by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath.”
Roberts said that “judges must be constantly aware that their role, while important, is limited. They do not have a commission to solve society’s problems, as they see them, but simply to decide cases before them according to the rule of law.”
I agree with what he says in a general way – it’s well-crafted, although I’m a little worried about the emphasis on the limited role of the judiciary. What he leaves out is that the cases often establish new precedents that further impact rulings in other cases, and that judges still interpret – that is, after all, their purpose. That is why the Supreme Court is a body of judges and not just one judge, or a computer, or the President.
Besides not “remembering” his involvement in the Federalists, Roberts spent some time assisting Florida Gov. Jeb Bush during the disputed presidential election count in 2000. He said he went to Florida at the request of GOP lawyers, assisting an attorney who was preparing arguments for the Florida Supreme Court and at one point meeting the governor, President Bush’s younger brother, to discuss the legal issues “in a general way.” Other political affiliations Roberts listed were the executive committee of the D.C. Lawyers for Bush-Quayle in 1988, Lawyers for Bush-Cheney and the Republican National Lawyers Association. Last month, a three-judge federal court ruled the Bush administration’s plan to convene military tribunals to try terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay was constitutional, overruling a lower court’s opinion that the tribunals violated the Geneva Convention. The opinion of the court in that decision was joined by none other than Judge John Roberts, who days later became President Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court.
My only real hope, a long shot I know, is that once he is facing the actual position, a certain gravitas will let him use that great mind of his to good purpose, even occasionally against his entire history of contacts and networks. Who knows? Someone that smart might have hidden depths. What else can we hope for? It’s going to be difficult to challenge him. He’s got the credentials. Some of the papers that would show his lines of thought on different issues are not going to be released – for good reason, one has to think, or else they would be proud to do so.
Roberts wrote that he was interviewed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as early as April 1. Besides Bush, Roberts reported having discussions with Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, White House Counsel Harriet Miers and Chief of Staff Andrew Card. To the question whether if any of them asked about his specific legal views or positions on cases, Roberts gave a one-word reply: “No.”
Of course, they really didn’t have to ask, did they – he is well-vetted. I wonder why they keep repeating this refrain as though we would believe that they had absolutely no idea about his opinions and viewpoint. The far right is celebrating for a reason.
The funny thing is, I don’t actually think Roe v Wade will be overturned. If it’s not about money and power, I don’t think it really truly interests this administration all that much. I think they will make some noises in that direction to manipulate the pseudochristians – but they won’t deliver it.
Why? Abortion is a very controversial issue – and along with birth control allowed the liberation of women. Roe v Wade was the compromise that honored both positions. Right now, the majority of American women are somewhat depolicitized. Feminisms have, for a host of reasons, lost ground. Many women are somewhat disenchanted with their options and careers, and feeling as though they might have given up more than they got – after all, the childcare options and equal pay and respect from men never entirely came through. Feminists got painted as feminazis and a lot of women, including many of my friends and on certain days even myself, entered a sort of post-feminist phase.
I don’t think they can go that far all at once. So what they do instead is start working against birth control and sex education… and they’re getting pretty good at that. A lot can be done there against women that is less noticable than overturning Roe v Wade. They even used the case of that poor Lacey woman. Do a little research.
It’s all about controlling women – it’s about power, it’s not about spirituality.
Well – overturn Roe v Wade and you are going to see a lot of angry women. A lot of angry women – we just aren’t willing to go back to the days of my mother, the days when your husband or father had to sign off his permission for a woman to get a loan, the days of backalley wire hanger abortions when only certain wealthy women had control over their reproductive options – those little trips to Europe. Not all women are ready to go back that far, to lose their hard-won rights.
I honestly don’t think they’ll risk the consequences of a fully-politicized female population.
The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Volume XV – The Presidency: The Middle Way Part VI: Crises Abroad, Party Problems at Home; September 1954 to December 1954 Chapter 13: “A new phase of political experience”. Eisenhower Presidential Papers, Document #1147; November 8, 1954
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
“Political consultant” Ralph Reed, who was in charge of President Bush’s southeast regional campaign last year and who also once ran the Christian Coalition, is seeking Georgia’s second-highest office in the 2006 election – Lt. Governor.
Ok, that’s it. That’s it. I somehow didn’t realize that this was happening. Ralph Reed? Ralph REED?
From The Nation:
When Ralph Reed was the boyish director of the Christian Coalition, he made opposition to gambling a major plank in his “family values” agenda, calling gambling “a cancer on the American body politic” that was “stealing food from the mouths of children.” But now, a broad federal investigation into lobbying abuses connected to gambling on Indian reservations has unearthed evidence that Reed has been surreptitiously working for an Indian tribe with a large casino it sought to protect–and that Reed was paid with funds laundered through two firms to try to keep his lucrative involvement secret.
Reed’s involvement with the casino effort followed his departure from the Christian Coalition in 1997 and his reinvention of himself as a corporate lobbyist and campaign hatchet man. One of his first clients was the Enron Corporation–a deal arranged by Karl Rove when George W. Bush was starting to think about running for President in 2000. Rove wasn’t ready to put Reed directly on a campaign payroll but presumably wanted to cultivate good will from Reed toward the coming Bush candidacy. Enron paid Reed’s Century Strategies more than $300,000 to generate support for energy deregulation. In the 2000 GOP presidential primary, Reed justified his big Enron fee by helping to smear John McCain during the South Carolina primary. Now McCain’s Indian Affairs subcommittee is investigating Indian gambling in the context of lobbying abuses, kickbacks and money laundering, with public hearings scheduled for early September.
Reed is in charge of Bush’s 2004 election campaign in the Southeast, including Florida. In 2000, he was paid almost $3.7 million for helping Bush. In 1995, when he was still exploiting intolerance and fear, Time did a story on him that included the cover line “The right hand of God.” Today God’s right hand seems to be holding dice and a bloody political hatchet.
According to the New York Times, Mr. Reed wrote in his book “Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics” that Mr. Abramoff was “a conservative firebrand.” The men became so close that Mr. Reed sometimes slept on Mr. Abramoff’s couch and later introduced Mr. Abramoff to his future wife.
AmericaBlog also has some serious questions about why he was being paid by Microsoft.
Oh, no… uh-uh. No way. Not gonna happen. Not if I have to scream “wake UP, wake UP, wake UP” in people’s faces.
How can this happen? Don’t give me that trauma-theory about 9/11. People in New York voted for Kerry. don’t give me the scapegoat theory – Republicans have been misdirecting anger for a long time. What is it? The dumbing-down, infotainment, bad education? What is it? How can so many American’s have willed themselves blind? When they finally open their eyes, will it be too late? There is already so much corruption and thuggery.
Will there be a country left to recover?