Hillarysworld

A good article from Mother Jones.  I don't agree with everything in the article, but I certainly agree with the concerns about those who occupy the position of POTUS assuming too much power and control.  The system of checks and balances wisely put into place by the founders of this country is rendered useless, in some cases.  I recall when W was POTUS, reading an article about Cheney's belief that the executive branch should hold more power and autonomy.  Cheney focused much time and energy on this issue, and encouraged W to assume power, regardless of approval by the legislative branch.

I remember thinking at the time I read the piece that Cheney might not be so happy about Bush's successor assuming and wielding  executive powers, at will. 

This is a really long article.  Link is included if you want to read it in full.


The Imperial Presidency
(Snip)

All Power to the President
Any quick survey of the powers the presidency now claims would have to include the power to make laws, the power to make wars, the power to spend money, the power to make treaties, the power to grant immunity for crimes, the power to operate in secrecy, the power to spy without warrants, the power to detain without charge, and the power to torture.
Laws are still made by Congress, but they can be rewritten via signing statements; that is, statements announcing a president's intention to violate particular sections of the very bill he is signing into law. Neither Congress nor President Obama has thrown out all of Bush's extensive signing statements that did indeed alter laws. In fact, Obama has announced that his subordinates will review his predecessor's signing statements only as the need arises.
This policy might please those imagining that the Obama administration will always make the right decision about whether to maintain or reject a Bush-made amendment to a law, but it does nothing to strip the presidency of the power to use the mechanism of the signing statement to re-make or amend or alter new laws. As it happens, Obama has already published his own law-making signing statements.
Presidents now also routinely determine national policy through executive orders and, in doing so, run the country out of the White House rather than through departments headed by officials approved by Congress. They also increasingly dictate a legislative agenda to Congress—and both members of Congress and members of the public generally accept without comment or opposition that inversion of our constitutional system. And then there are the secret memos.
In those secret memos, Bush's lawyers in the Department of Justice dutifully "legalized" numerous illegal acts, including aggressive war and torture. Despite years of public back-and-forth between the White House and the Congress over the question of whether to ban torture, any act of complicity in torture was already a felony in the U.S. code under the Anti-Torture Act, which enforced the Convention Against Torture signed by President Ronald Reagan. However, the secret Justice Department memos were taken as the final word in legality, no matter what the law said.

Obama has directed the Justice Department not to prosecute those at the highest levels responsible for producing those memos, though he has permitted consideration—whether seriously intended or not—of the possibility of prosecuting a handful of low-ranking staffers who strayed beyond the illegal policies outlined in the memos. Not only does this bestow immunity on the most prominent criminals, reversing the approach—starting at the top—that the U.S. took at the Nuremburg war crimes trials after World War II, but it has the potential to create a terrifying precedent for the future. If a president can use his justice department to legalize a crime simply by asking a lawyer to write a memo, then who can doubt that a president has something approaching absolute power?
Presidents, not Congress, do indeed make wars now, whether or not they consult Jay Bybee's memo on the subject. They make wars without congressional declarations of war, using instead vague bills to maintain a pretense of congressional involvement—and then they don't even comply with the terms outlined in those authorizations. Illegal (as well as unconstitutional) as they may be, these wars can be expanded into apparently permanent occupations that include the construction of gigantic military bases from which additional wars may be launched. In the process, mercenaries often take the place of soldiers, and as "private contractors" they then operate even further from congressional oversight or the law.
To invade Iraq, President Bush spent money not appropriated for that purpose. He also gave himself the power to transfer money into "black budgets" beyond the purview of all but a few members of Congress, and so use it for secret tasks signed off on by his officials. Of course, massive secret budgets under the control of the president are nothing new, though they've grown through the years. Neither are they constitutional or sustainable.
On October 6th, the leaders of the two parties met with President Obama and, by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's account, let him know that he could end, decrease, maintain, or escalate the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan as he saw fit. The Senate had voted the previous week not to call on war commander Stanley McChrystal for public testimony about that ongoing war until after the president determines his war policy, which of course means a war policy for all of us. Two days later, in a surprising flicker of dissent, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey released a statement suggesting that, contrary to everything he'd said for years, he recognizes that Congress has the power to choose not to fund those wars and thereby to end them.
As his presidency was winding down, George W. Bush concluded an unofficial treaty (though it was called a Status of Forces Agreement) with the government of U.S.-occupied Iraq for three more years of war there without feeling the slightest need for it to be ratified by the Senate. Ever since, the U.S. military has actually violated the terms of that document, while its key commanders continued to publicly state their intention to remain in Iraq beyond the end of 2011, a clear violation of the agreement. In the meantime, this White House has used the treaty as cover for an ongoing illegal occupation of Iraq with, at this point, 120,000 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of private contractors.
(snip)
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/10/imperial-presidency-20

-- Edited by freespirit on Friday 23rd of October 2009 08:20:06 AM