The cynic in me is nodding her head. Governments never give up power.
[T]he Obama administration is explicitly arguing that the President can break the law with impunity -- can commit crimes -- when it comes to domestic surveillance because our surveillance programs are so secret that national security will be harmed if courts are permitted to adjudicate their legality.I would not be surprised if the next position taken by those putzim is "well, we've changed our mind, we'll torture people if we want to." There would seem to be no check on the power aggregated to the presidency. Thanks to George W. Bush, Richard Cheney and now, sad to say, Barack Obama, we now have a system of elected tyrants. It was the Bush Administration that took the position that they could arrest and hold, without trail, anyone on the planet for as long as they saw fit, for any reason or for no reason whatsoever and, if they wanted to, they could crush the genitals of a young boy if they felt a hankering to do so. It would seem that the current administration is heading rapidly towards that same point of view.
The only check on their power is to throw them out at the next election (or to impeach them). Which means that, for all practical purposes, once a president has won re-election, there is no check whatsoever, as long as he doesn't have to go to Congress to fund the program.
(H/T)
2 comments:
It actually started with Saint Ronnie Raygun, in case you're too young to remember. Ole' Raygun broke the law tons of times whether it was selling guns to Iran, sending guns to Contras, reclassifying ketchup as a vegetable, whatever, and whenever he got called on it, some junior administration member got thrown under the tank treads somewhere and Ole' Raygun would blink and say "I don't recall" if asked anything about it. Sort of like the Bushies and torture, where some random GI's at Abu Ghraib got thrown to the dogs when it turns out that torture was a central policy of the Bush Administration and those poor bastards were just the sacrificial scapegoats...
-- Badtux the History Penguin
It's worse than that, BadTux. Those soldiers were put on trial because they did what they did without orders. The lesson you can draw from that is that obedience is the most important behavior, not obedience to the law.
As for the thought that somehow a President could be stopped from doing something Congress hadn't funded, that's certainly not true. A President who wants to do something, and doesn't have to worry about Congress impeaching him, can find the money somewhere.
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