Today’s Topic: Again With the Signing Statements Thang
"Every Republican member of the committee who spoke during the hearing defended Bush's use of signing statements. Former OK Republican Congressman (Mickey) Edwards said (in House Judiciary Committee hearings Monday) he was shocked by the number of people on the committee who could not get beyond their party affiliation. "The Constitution is beyond party. I'm really disturbed by this."" David Swanson, Truthout guest contributor, 5 Feb 2007
Well, gee, Mickey, I’m still really upset that the Newt Gingrich Congress spent $70 million trying to contain any advancements by the Clinton Administration on behalf of the American people by pinning him down under 8 years of legal shenanigans.
I’m kinda really disturbed that this President has gobbled all the power he could under the same Republican majorities in the House and the Senate. You know, the ones that still gripe about Bill Clinton’s blowjobs whilst this President has been giving many a country and certainly millions of people worldwide big gaping butt holes with the American military Green Weenie. Again, not so surprisingly, some of the Republicans involved with the Blowjob Clinton impeachment were not only getting blowjobs from their gay lovers, but were actively seeking consensual sex with those of the same sex within Congress’ own hallowed halls.
I’m amazed, yet not so surprised, that Connecticut Independent Senator Joe Lieberman’s first major act in this Congress was to break with his supposedly "democrat" friends and vote to bar any debate in the Senate over the President’s new Surge. In a body of government where debate reigns supreme over any other in terms of national interests, the Senate’s only real job is to allow for equal debate amongst the elected from all the states.
But what I’m really just plain pissed about is that America is still being taken down the wrong road, apparently in a 2.8 trillion dollar tractor-trailer on a very steep and slippery slope without brakes of any sort.
Legally, the President’s grabs for power have no precedence in American history, although there have been people holding the office of President that have oft tried to use "plenary" power of the "unitary executive". However, other than within those particular administrations, never has the Constitution given even the basic idea that the President could arbitrarily control the departments Congress approved. If you don’t know, "unitary executive" means that the President (the office, not the man) controls all departments of the executive branch of government by virtue of being the leader of the Executive Branch. In action this is plain false. Only Congress can pass legislation to create those departments within the Executive, and since Congress holds the purse strings, they certainly can place restraints upon how those branches spend the money allocated to them via the budgetary process. Congress also has the right to create Executive Branch offices that are responsible only to Congress and not to the Office of the President, which has been accomplished in a number of oversight circumstances.
And since we now see that the Constitution doesn’t give credence to the idea of a "unitary executive", ipso facto there can be no plenary control. For in the term first clearly defined by then Justice Department lawyer, now Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, he largely based his definition on the idea of a unitary executive. If you don’t have control over all the departments of the Executive, then you also cannot claim that you have total control over the Executive. The logic is so simple that the Founding Fathers couldn’t conceive of such a power grab not being immediately killed by action from either the Congress of the Supreme Court.
Ah, but this President has not only tried to make Congress a useless appendage, he has tried to fill the vacancies of those judges of the supreme law of the land with like minded individuals who can use their votes to garner a new age in American jurisprudence and end any meaning of the Constitution whilst saying that they are preserving the original values of that same historical document.
But this whips our heads right back to the topic again because of the usage of Presidential Signing Statements which openly declare that only the President has the right to decide if bills passed by Congress and signed into law by himself are even Constitutional or not. Well, one would suppose if such were true, then no President other than a self-serving one would sign a bill into law knowing that he considered it Unconstitutional. So he fills the court with like minded Justices to hedge his bets, whilst he tries to claim responsibility for deciding which laws are Constitutional without the Supreme Court having a say.
So now Republicans, in order to get their shots in on the President whilst allowing some level of the same abilities the President says are inherent in his power, have been talking up the idea of a Line Item Veto, which has already been tried by Congress and pronounced Unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. You see, if Congress determines that pork barrel spending is appropriate for a bill, or if an amendment such as the Boland Amendment, which prohibited President Reagan from using funds to support the Contras, then the President could easily play partisan politics. He could do so by killing line items from the opposing party, even though enough votes were garnered for passage in Congress. This type of action gives presidential power over Congress, which negates the idea of co-equal branches of government.
Hence, the concept of co-equal branches of government gives Congress the right to pass a bill into law over the objection of a presidential veto. With the line item option, the President would force Congress to specifically go back and write a new bill with those vetoed items, which may or may not equal what Congress had originally determined to be in the best interest of the American people.
The concepts being thrown around by both the Republican White House, and the Republican sides of Congress are efforts to continue to grab as much power as possible regardless of whether those power grabs are to the detriment of the American people. And we can see it very clearly these days because we have 6 years of bad executive branch decisions to ignore the opposition party (unless it proves to their advantage), to ignore the professional operation of the federal government by using loyalty and cronyism to fill positions as heads of that federal government. Where professionals disagree with the administration’s goals and direction, those professionals are removed or their job slots retired, such as were those professionals most likely to help give this country a leg up on lessening our addiction to oil directly after Bush’s 2006 State of the Union call to do so.
I find it dismaying that this President can so easily say one thing to the American people and then do something so entirely different that most of the American public doesn’t even seem to notice they’ve been had again. One of the obvious ploys has been to conceptualize his initiatives with such grandiose nomenclature that the normal American seems to think it is a good thing, when history has shown us that these initiatives have only been good for his cronies and his loyal Republican backers.
For instance, No Child Left Behind has done just the opposite, whilst allowing the President’s own brother, Neil, to profit handsomely from what appears to be something akin to no bid contracts. In the process of defining who would receive these funds for grade school reading supplies, oft times only those with inroads to the Republican party or directly to the President have been awarded the contracts and those who don’t have such inroads but hugely successful products are ignored our stalled out until they can no longer survive.
If Capitalism is supposed to be a market based effect, then the government shouldn’t be the ones determining who gets most of the marketplace by playing favoritism.
And yet this is exactly what this administration has done time and time again. First, by using a contract with CACI, Inc., to oversee government contract spending, which is by virtue of the Constitution, a power applied to Congress. Congress is supposed to hold the purse strings of the nation’s treasure and to apply that treasure to the advantage to all of the people. But this administration believes that those who have are the ones who create the national treasure and therefore they should profit from their efforts by the awarding of multi-billion dollar no bid contracts without any oversight from Congress.
One of the most recent straws this President has thrown onto the camel’s back is to decide that all Executive Branch departments and agencies will essentially have a political officer who will make rules and regulations based on the desires of the politics of the administration rather than allowing government to function for the betterment of its people. Again this takes Congress out of the picture on oversight, but worse, it makes all levels of the federal government’s professional workforce compliant to the desires and whims of political pressure.
A reticence by this administration to admit that global warming is a product of man’s use of fossil fuels is but one item on the list of political pressure on the professional government’s workers. The net result is the lost of highly qualified professionals to the private sector. When you lose the competence in your professional workforce, and you place incompetent people into positions with political clout and no responsibilities to Congress, you place the entire nation’s operations at risk. There is no way anyone can say that this hasn’t been evidenced by this administrations incompetence in appointments which have already lost us a historic city which will come back to be something other than what the people built. The same incompetence is raising its ugly head higher and higher in the prosecution of the war efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
And there seems to be no end in sight. More contracts have been awarded to privatize governmental functions under this administration than all previous administrations put together. But the important thing to remember is that privatization of governmental functions means that Congress has no oversight, and without oversight has only the ability to deny the funding of these contracts, thereby hurting the programs that have positive affect upon the American people. On the other hand, to accept the concept of privatizing governmental functions without oversight means that Congress won’t really ever know if the American people are being served.
Corruption runs rampant in a Capitalistic environment without governmental oversight and the end around means that the American people will become nothing but a cheap workforce for the 1% of the richest people/companies in the world. And the people will have no protections under law, no guarantees of workplace ethics or benefits.
Effectively this means everyone will be working for the Company Store, which right now seems to be Wal-Mart. In the meantime this administration means to continue with its dismantling of the Constitution, the destruction of the co-equal branches of government and the decimation of the American people so that their Republican buddies and their religious right can do what they want in perpetuity.
8:42:07 AM 
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