Re: "every tree that we've barked up so far has had a cat in it,"
- From: "菩薩" <psychedelictourist@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 21 Mar 2007 17:25:55 -0700
Hey HIPPIE
Put down that bong and read this article!
Bush challenges hundreds of laws
President cites powers of his office
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | April 30, 2006
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to
disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting
that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when
it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.
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 Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the
power to write the laws and to the president a duty ''to take care
that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly
declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is
unconstitutional.
Former administration officials contend that just because Bush
reserves the right to disobey a law does not mean he is not enforcing
it: In many cases, he is simply asserting his belief that a certain
requirement encroaches on presidential power. But with the disclosure
of Bush's domestic spying program, in which he ignored a law requiring
warrants to tap the phones of Americans, many legal specialists say
Bush is hardly reluctant to bypass laws he believes he has the
constitutional authority to override.
Far more than any predecessor, Bush has been aggressive about
declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws -- many of which he
says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him
alone as the head of the executive branch or the commander in chief of
the military.
Many legal scholars say they believe that Bush's theory about his own
powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-
making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role ofthe
courts.
Phillip Cooper, a Portland State University law professor who has
studied the executive power claims Bush made during his first term,
said Bush and his legal team have spent the past five years quietly
working to concentrate ever more governmental power into the White
House.
''There is no question that this administration has been involved in a
very carefully thought-out, systematic process of expanding
presidential power at the expense of the other branches of
government," Cooper said. ''This is really big, very expansive, and
very
significant."
For the first five years of Bush's presidency, his legal claims
attracted little attention in Congress or the media. Then, twice
inrecent months, Bush drew scrutiny after challenging new laws: a
torture ban and a requirement that he give detailed reports to
Congress about
how he is using the Patriot Act.
Bush administration spokesmen declined to make White House or Justice
Department attorneys available to discuss any of Bush's challenges to
the laws he has signed.
Instead, they referred a Globe reporter to their response to questions
about Bush's position that he could ignore provisions of the Patriot
Act. They said at the time that Bush was following a practice that has
''been used for several administrations" and that ''the president will
faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the
Constitution."
But the words ''in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution"
are the catch, legal scholars say, because Bush is according himself
the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution. And he is quietly
exercising that authority to a degree that is unprecedented in US
history.
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.
Military link Many of the laws Bush said he can bypass -- including
the torture ban -- involve the military. The Constitution grants
Congress the power to create armies, to declare war, to make rules for
captured enemies, and ''to make rules for the government and
regulation of the land and naval forces." But, citing his role as
commander in chief, Bush says he can ignore any act of Congress that
seeks to regulate the military.
On at least four occasions while Bush has been president, Congress has
passed laws forbidding US troops from engaging in combat in Colombia,
where the US military is advising the government in its struggle
against narcotics-funded Marxist rebels.
After signing each bill, Bush declared in his signing statement that
he did not have to obey any of the Colombia restrictions because he is
commander in chief.
Bush has also said he can bypass laws requiring him to tell Congress
before diverting money from an authorized program in order to start a
secret operation, such as the ''black sites" where suspected
terrorists are secretly imprisoned.
Congress has also twice passed laws forbidding the military from using
intelligence that was not ''lawfully collected," including any
information on Americans that was gathered in violation of the Fourth
Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches. Congress first
passed this provision in August 2004, when Bush's warrantless domestic
spying program was still a secret, and passed it again after the
program's existence was disclosed in December 2005.
On both occasions, Bush declared in signing statements that only he,
as commander in chief, could decide whether such intelligence can be
used by the military.
In October 2004, five months after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in
Iraq came to light, Congress passed a series of new rules and
regulations for military prisons. Bush signed the provisions into law,
then said he could ignore them all. One provision made clear that
military lawyers can give their commanders independent advice on such
issues as what would constitute torture. But Bush declared that
military lawyers could not contradict his administration's lawyers.
Other provisions required the Pentagon to retrain military prison
guards on the requirements for humane treatment of detainees under the
Geneva Conventions, to perform background checks on civilian
contractors in Iraq, and to ban such contractors from performing
''security, intelligence, law enforcement, and criminal justice
functions." Bush reserved the right to ignore any of the requirements.
The new law also created the position of inspector general for Iraq.
But Bush wrote in his signing statement that the inspector ''shall
refrain" from investigating any intelligence or national security
matter, or any crime the Pentagon says it prefers to investigate for
itself.
Bush had placed similar limits on an inspector general position
created by Congress in November 2003 for the initial stage of the US
occupation of Iraq. The earlier law also empowered the inspector to
notify Congress if a US official refused to cooperate. Bush said the
inspector could not give any information to Congress without
permission from the
administration.
Oversight questioned Many laws Bush has asserted he can bypass involve
requirements to give information about government activity to
congressional oversight committees.
In December 2004, Congress passed an intelligence bill requiring the
Justice Department to tell them how often, and in what situations, the
FBI was using special national security wiretaps on US soil. The law
also required the Justice Department to give oversight committees
copies of administration memos outlining any new interpretations of
domestic-spying laws. And it contained 11 other requirements for
reports about such issues as civil liberties, security clearances,
border security, and counternarcotics efforts.
After signing the bill, Bush issued a signing statement saying he
could
withhold all the information sought by Congress.
Likewise, when Congress passed the law creating the Department of
Homeland Security in 2002, it said oversight committees must be given
information about vulnerabilities at chemical plants and the screening
of checked bags at airports.
It also said Congress must be shown unaltered reports about problems
with visa services prepared by a new immigration ombudsman. Bush
asserted the right to withhold the information and alter the reports.
On several other occasions, Bush contended he could nullify laws
creating ''whistle-blower" job protections for federal employees that
would stop any attempt to fire them as punishment for telling a member
of Congress about possible government wrongdoing.
When Congress passed a massive energy package in August, for example,
it strengthened whistle-blower protections for employees at the
Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The
provision was included because lawmakers feared that Bush appointees
were intimidating nuclear specialists so they would not
testify about safety issues related to a planned nuclear-waste
repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada -- a facility the
administration supported, but both Republicans and Democrats from
Nevada opposed. When Bush signed the energy bill, he issued a signing
statement
declaring that the executive branch could ignore the whistle-blower
protections. Bush's statement did more than send a threatening message
to federal
energy specialists inclined to raise concerns with Congress; it also
raised the possibility that Bush would not feel bound to obey similar
whistle-blower laws that were on the books before he became president.
His domestic spying program, for example, violated a surveillance law
enacted 23 years before he took office.
David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in
executive-power issues, said Bush has cast a cloud over ''the whole
idea that there is a rule of law," because no one can be certain of
which laws Bush thinks are valid and which he thinks he can ignore.
''Where you have a president who is willing to declare vast quantities
of the legislation that is passed during his term unconstitutional, it
implies that he also thinks a very significant amount of the other
laws that were already on the books before he became president are
also unconstitutional," Golove said.
Defying Supreme Court Bush has also challenged statutes in which
Congress gave certain executive branch officials the power to act
independently of the president. The Supreme Court has repeatedly
endorsed the power of Congress to make such arrangements. For example,
the court has upheld laws creating special prosecutors free of Justice
Department oversight and insulating the board of the Federal Trade
Commission from political interference.
Nonetheless, Bush has said in his signing statements that the
Constitution lets him control any executive official, no matter what a
statute passed by Congress might say. In November 2002, for example,
Congress, seeking to generate independent statistics about student
performance, passed a law setting up an educational research institute
to conduct studies and publish reports ''without the approval" of the
Secretary of Education. Bush,
however, decreed that the institute's director would be ''subject to
the supervision and direction of the secretary of education."
Similarly, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld affirmative-action
programs, as long as they do not include quotas. Most recently, in
2003, the court upheld a race-conscious university admissions program
over the strong objections of Bush, who argued that such programs
should be struck down as unconstitutional.
Yet despite the court's rulings, Bush has taken exception at least
nine times to provisions that seek to ensure that minorities are
represented among recipients of government jobs, contracts, and
grants. Each time, he singled out the provisions, declaring that he
would construe them "in a manner consistent with" the Constitution's
guarantee of ''equal
protection" to all -- which some legal scholars say amounts to an
argument that the affirmative-action provisions represent reverse
discrimination against whites.
Golove said that to the extent Bush is interpreting the Constitution
in defiance of the Supreme Court's precedents, he threatens to
''overturn the existing structures of constitutional law." A president
who ignores the court, backed by a Congress that is unwilling to
challenge him, Golove said, can make the Constitution simply
''disappear."
Common practice in '80s Though Bush has gone further than any previous
president, his actions are not unprecedented.
Since the early 19th century, American presidents have occasionally
signed a large bill while declaring that they would not enforce a
specific provision they believed was unconstitutional. On rare
occasions, historians say, presidents also issued signing statements
interpreting a law and explaining any concerns about it.
But it was not until the mid-1980s, midway through the tenure of
President Reagan, that it became common for the president to issue
signing statements. The change came about after then-Attorney General
Edwin Meese decided that signing statements could be used to increase
the power of the president.
When interpreting an ambiguous law, courts often look at the statute's
legislative history, debate and testimony, to see what Congress
intended it to mean. Meese realized that recording what the president
thought the law meant in a signing statement might increase a
president's influence over future court rulings.
Under Meese's direction in 1986, a young Justice Department lawyer
named Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a strategy memo about signing
statements. It came to light in late 2005, after Bush named Alito to
the Supreme Court.
In the memo, Alito predicted that Congress would resent the
president's attempt to grab some of its power by seizing ''the last
word on questions of interpretation." He suggested that Reagan's legal
team should ''concentrate on points of true ambiguity, rather than
issuing interpretations that may seem to conflict with those of
Congress."
Reagan's successors continued this practice. George H.W. Bush
challenged 232 statutes over four years in office, and Bill Clinton
objected to 140 laws over his eight years, according to Kelley, the
Miami University of Ohio professor.
Many of the challenges involved longstanding legal ambiguities and
points of conflict between the president and Congress. Throughout the
past two decades, for example, each president -- including the current
one -- has objected to provisions requiring him
to get permission from a congressional committee before taking action.
The Supreme Court made clear in 1983 that only the full Congress can
direct the executive branch to do things, but lawmakers have continued
writing laws giving congressional committees such a role.
Still, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton used the presidential
veto instead of the signing statement if they had a serious problem
with a bill, giving Congress a chance to override their decisions. But
the current President Bush has abandoned the veto entirely, as well as
any semblance of the political caution that Alito counseled back in
1986. In just five years, Bush has challenged more than 750 new laws,
by far a record for any president, while becoming the first president
since Thomas Jefferson to stay so long in office without issuing a
veto.
''What we haven't seen until this administration is the sheer number
of objections that are being raised on every bill passed through the
White House," said Kelley, who has studied presidential signing
statements through history. ''That is what is staggering. The numbers
are well out of the norm from any previous administration."
Exaggerated fears? Some administration defenders say that concerns
about Bush's signing statements are overblown. Bush's signing
statements, they say, should be seen as little more than political
chest-thumping by administration lawyers who are dedicated to
protecting presidential prerogatives.
Defenders say the fact that Bush is reserving the right to disobey the
laws does not necessarily mean he has gone on to disobey them. Indeed,
in some cases, the administration has ended up following laws that
Bush said he could bypass. For example, citing his power to ''withhold
information" in September 2002, Bush declared that he could
ignore a law requiring the State Department to list the number of
overseas deaths of US citizens in foreign countries. Nevertheless, the
department has still put the list on its website.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who until last year
oversaw the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for the
administration, said the statements do not change the law; they just
let people know how the president is interpreting it.
"'Nobody reads them," said Goldsmith. ''They have no significance.
Nothing in the world changes by the publication of a signing
statement. The statements merely serve as public notice about how the
administration is interpreting the law. Criticism of this practice is
surprising, since the usual complaint is that the administration is
too secretive in its legal interpretations."
But Cooper, the Portland State University professor who has studied
Bush's first-term signing statements, said the documents are being
read closely by one key group of people: the bureaucrats who are
charged with implementing new laws. Lower-level officials will follow
the president's instructions even when his understanding of a law
conflicts with the clear intent of Congress, crafting policies that
may endure long after Bush leaves office, Cooper said.
''Years down the road, people will not understand why the policy
doesn't look like the legislation," he said.
And in many cases, critics contend, there is no way to know whether
the administration is violating laws -- or merely preserving the right
to do so.
Many of the laws Bush has challenged involve national security, where
it is almost impossible to verify what the government is doing. And
since the disclosure of Bush's domestic spying program, many people
have expressed alarm about his sweeping claims of the authority to
violate laws.
In January, after the Globe first wrote about Bush's contention that
he could disobey the torture ban, three Republicans who were the
bill's principal sponsors in the Senate -- John McCain of Arizona,
John W. Warner of Virginia, and Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina --
all publicly rebuked the president.
''We believe the president understands Congress's intent in passing,
by very large majorities, legislation governing the treatment of
detainees," McCain and Warner said in a joint statement. ''The
Congress declined when asked by administration officials to include a
presidential waiver of the restrictions included in our legislation."
Added Graham: ''I do not believe that any political figure in the
country has the ability to set aside any . . . law of armed conflict
that we have adopted or treaties that we have ratified." And in March,
when the Globe first wrote about Bush's contention that he could
ignore the oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, several Democrats
lodged complaints. Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking
Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused Bush of trying to
''cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow."
And Representatives Jane Harman of California and John Conyers Jr. of
Michigan -- the ranking Democrats on the House Intelligence and
Judiciary committees, respectively -- sent a letter to Attorney
General Alberto R. Gonzales demanding that Bush rescind his claim and
abide by the law.
''Many members who supported the final law did so based upon the
guarantee of additional reporting and oversight," they wrote. ''The
administration cannot, after the fact, unilaterally repeal provisions
of the law implementing such oversight. . . . Once the president signs
a bill, he and all of us are bound by it."
Lack of court review Such political fallout from Congress is likely to
be the only check on Bush's claims, legal specialists said. The courts
have little chance of reviewing Bush's assertions, especially in the
secret realm of national security matters. ''There can't be judicial
review if nobody knows about it," said Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State
law professor who was a Justice Department official in the Clinton
administration. ''And if they avoid judicial review, they avoid having
their constitutional theories rebuked." Without court involvement,
only Congress can check a president who goes too far. But Bush's
fellow Republicans control both chambers, and they have shown limited
interest in launching the kind of oversight that could damage their
party.
''The president is daring Congress to act against his positions, and
they're not taking action because they don't want to appear to be too
critical of the president, given that their own fortunes are tied to
his because they are all Republicans," said Jack Beermann, a Boston
University law professor. ''Oversight gets much reduced in a situation
where the president and Congress are controlled by the same party."
Said Golove, the New York University law professor: ''Bush has
essentially said that 'We're the executive branch and we're going to
carry this law out as we please, and if Congress wants to impeach us,
go ahead and try it.' "
Bruce Fein, a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration,
said the American system of government relies upon the leaders of each
branch ''to exercise some self-restraint." But Bush has declared
himself the sole judge of his own powers, he said, and then ruled for
himself every time.
''This is an attempt by the president to have the final word on his
own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances
that keep the country a democracy," Fein said. ''There is no way for
an independent judiciary to check his assertions of power, and
Congress isn't doing it, either. So this is moving us toward an
unlimited executive power."
-----------
namaste;
bodhi
http://psychedelictourist.blogspot.com
菩薩 wrote:
Our American Fuhrer , George W. Bush, the (pre) S(E)lected President
of the United States, said yesterday:
'We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at
honorable public servants,'' he said. ''It will be regrettable if they
choose to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and
demanding show trials when I have agreed to make key White House
officials and documents available.''
http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/305672,CST-NWS-pros21.article
What exactly would be "regrettable" if Congress dosen't lay off Bush's
cronies? A clue might be found in a quote by Diana Irey, the
Republican candidate running against Rep. Murtha,
"Our 16th President [Abraham Lincoln] once said, and I quote:
'Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage
morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be
arrested, exiled or hanged.'"
... and preferably before the 2008 elections .....
"We've only had subpoena power for the last six weeks and every tree
that we've barked up so far has had a cat in it," said a senior
Democrat who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not
authorized to speak publicly. "Imagine where we'll be after six
months."
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0307/3155.html
.... er ......hanging from a tree?
Nobody asks questions. Dissent is smashed. Civil liberties eradicated.
Propaganda is veiled as news. The people have become superfluous
through the systemic elements of consumerism, the mass media,
hierarchical relations, etc., which start in the family and continue
through education. This is what ‘democracy’ is all about today!
http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/newsletter/despotic_legislation..htm
----------
namaste;
bodhi
http://psychedelictourist.blogspot.com
.
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