Today’s Topic: Behind the US Attorney Firings on the Fourth Anniversary of the War in Iraq
OK, so the truth of the matter is that this or any President has the right to hire and/or fire anyone within the executive branch without the necessity of justification for the firing unless the position were a union represented one.
However, its unlikely that any peon within the executive branch would have a run-in with the President that would require that person being fired. So now it comes down to the fact on the board, and that is political appointment.
Now in a previous blog I talked about political appointments and political officers, which are two different things. The insidious move towards politicization of executive branch offices offers one view of the administration and the efforts to consolidate more and greater power under the banner of the President.
But politicization of positions such as the US Attorney’s Office entails a much more sinister outcome, first in terms of testing a new law passed recently by Congress in an "Omnibus" type of massive spending bill, and second, in terms of negating the autonomy of the judicial process.
I wrote about using politics to make policy maybe a year ago (I CAN look it up if anyone wants), and I find that I have a constant nagging feeling pertaining to such a reckless manner of establishing our policies when dealing with the world.
Remember, the Congress is elected to represent the American people. The House is the people’s direct form of representation, supporting the constituents within their own districts.
The Senate is our deliberative arm and those elected to see to it that our executive branch has the tools necessary to faithfully execute the law, whilst providing oversight on that same executive to make certain abuses during the execution of the law are not tolerated.
Ah, but there are legal abuses and political abuses. One political abuse can be seen by the repeated Republican mantra of a liberal media whilst denying that there is anything like a right winged Republican conspiracy. However, it is a piddling abuse. The real abuse is in the efforts of this administration to consolidate as much power as possible in the person of the President with the additional goal of capturing and maintaining a Republican majority. Truly an ideology of a one party system, which is diametrically opposed to the design of the Founding Fathers.
This is not so bad as written if, in fact, voters are allowed their true votes to be counted and legally tallied when the outcome is just such a system. But how about when using US Attorneys to investigate voter fraud and the political end of the Republican Party constantly uses intimidation and misleading statements to cut down opposition votes? That is voter fraud. When phone lines are systematically jammed on political opponents it is voter fraud. When seemingly innocuous posters depicting Republicans as Democrats using the right picture but the wrong name, that is voter fraud.
The point is that an abuse need not be technically illegal but it can still be an abuse. The abuse the past Republican majority heaped upon the American people was the absolute concern for maintaining majority power forever regardless of the outcome. They didn’t and don’t care how they do it, but do it they must, and if the average Joe American is now out of a job or even holding a lower wage job without health benefits, well, that’s just fine for the Republican majority. They only look at the American people as a possible inexpensive workforce for the emerging and old boy network of robber barons.
Think not? Well, tell that to the millions of people who worked a lifetime under union labor contracts and have had Republican appointed judges negate these people’s ability to actually receive their retirement benefits forcing them to take on menial jobs during the years they were supposed to be able to enjoy as their "golden" years.
Now again, this is not an abuse that could be construed as illegal, but one wonders just how much productivity any country would have if the people only had the prospect of working their entire lives at menial jobs without advancement or benefits. In other words, by kowtowing to the extremely wealthy in this country (and even abroad) the Republicans actually represent those who would gladly steal the American Dream away from the people who actually work to achieve that dream. This is an abuse of power, and such an abuse should be illegal.
I honestly think Congress should only be paid an hourly wage and not be allowed to work for more than 6 months out of the year. Then they would know something about having to hold down two jobs just to survive. And if they were serving the people for the people, then we’d have candidates running knowing that they couldn’t make millions in these positions of power.
The funny thing about this American Dream thing is that the administration talks about all the new small businesses as the fulfillment of that dream. Little does the average American know that fully 80% of all new small businesses fail within the first two years of operation. But no, by pushing for new small business in Bush’s "ownership society" we have created an even larger number of people in debt and without health coverage, thus adding even more cheap labor to the workforce. And these people are so down by the failure that they don’t even perceive the injustice of encouragement towards owning one’s own business, largely without any business acumen to guarantee the success of said business.
Let’s put it this way. If you can’t balance your checkbook then you shouldn’t think about owning a business.
And yet even this killing off of the American Dream isn’t illegal. However, it is nefarious and purposeful. Labor unions were virtually all but killed off by Ronald Reagan when he busted the Air Traffic Controller’s Union for refusing to work under stress loads and with outdated equipment that actually endangered the flying American public. Since then certain judicial rulings have incorporated the same idea of "necessary services" as acceptable reasoning for busting unions. Corporations and non-union American workers applauded as experienced Air Traffic controller’s were replaced by people without the appropriate training who were willing to take less money and sign off on not joining a union. How is this a positive?
Today unions represent a mere 7.5% of the workforce whereas unions represented as much as 34% of the workforce during the 1950s. This downfall of unions can’t be totally blamed on a Republican effort to create a cheap workforce as organized crime caused a substantial amount of questions about the veracity of those same unions. But whatever was left over (still 25% of the workforce) was most certainly a target of the Republican party as proxies of their corporate sponsors.
Once Ronald Reagan broke the ATC union without any serious opposition or legal challenges a precedent was set. George W. Bush simply pounded in the final nail by negating the ability of the government’s own workforce to be represented by unions in the Department of Homeland Security. The ultimate Republican Party goal is to eliminate labor unions in toto.
Again, an abuse, but not necessarily illegal. And even less so once precedence has been set by actions of a President with no legal challenge. The changes become set in policy and then a part of the history of American protections of law without having actually been passed as a law by Congress or signed into law by the President, which means that it cannot be reviewed by the Supreme Court as to the Constitutionality as a law.
Now here’s an abuse by the Republican Party and this administration, and an abuse that has been instituted a number of times. I am talking about an insidious and purposeful abuse, which needs to be brought to light so that the perpetrators of such law breaking can be brought to justice. What I am talking about is the substitution of George Bush’s original Patriot Act, which was rejected by both houses of Congress. That’s right. Congress did not vote on the Patriot Act that is now the law of the land.
Congress voted and approved a different bill, and the Bush administration, obviously with the consent of the Republican Majority in both houses, allowed the original Patriot Act to replace the Congressionally approved bill with a 4 AM printing such that one Democrat Senator lamented on the Senate floor "This is not the bill we agreed to. The paper is still warm and we need to take some time to make certain that the bill before us is in fact the bill to which both houses of Congress have agreed."
It was not the bill Congress had agreed to. A clear case of abuse being illegal.
We can also see the abuse of the President in signing bills into laws. This president has not once signed a bill into law without adding signing statements suggesting that he, the President of the United States, is not required to "faithfully execute the law" if HE finds that the law in question is unconstitutional. Well, forgive me, but this abuse sets up the potential for again establishing a precedent thus moving abuse into law by virtue of the lack of opposition.
The President doesn’t have the right to declare any law unconstitutional. Such a declaration is not within his purview as established by the Constitution itself, and thus signing statements trying to establish the ability to declare a law unconstitutional is itself unconstitutional.
We’re not talking about the President being able to assume the power to declare laws unconstitutional because it wasn’t specifically disallowed in the Constitution under Article II. No, we are talking about the fact that Article III pertaining to the Judiciary is the only place that the Founding Fathers talked about the purview of Constitutionality of law. Therefore, if only the Judiciary has the ability to declare a law unconstitutional, then the President may not claim that right for himself via a signing statement.
One only has to look at the recent administration misdirection in Congressional testimony in Senate hearings by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, to which, "The Constitution does not guarantee the right of Habeas Corpus to a Citizen. It only guarantees that the right cannot be suspended without certain circumstances prevailing." This is a statement aimed towards garnering powers not bestowed upon the presidency by the Constitution and suggests that the presidential signing statements are based upon the same effort to grab said power.
Again, if power is not granted by the Constitution, then the power is not present. The bastardization of this principle by Alberto Gonzales shows his politicization within the Justice Department and the effort to interpret law rather than faithfully executing said law.
Now I’ve already recently written about this under a blog titled "Alberto Gonzales is a Legal Idiot", but it bears repeating every once in a while so that people understand just what has been happening in the Justice Department as it becomes a more politicized entity. First, whilst Gonzales might not have written the memo suggesting that the law of the land by the adoption of the Geneva Conventions was "quaint and outdated" (that memo was written by John Woo, currently a political science professor at Georgetown, I believe), he was the man who authorized such tripe to be forwarded to the President as an ACTIONABLE interpretation of this country’s laws. Hence, AND TO THE SHAME OF AMERICA, torture has been redefined to effectively mean "torture until dead" and the Executive has, without legal challenge or congressional approval, negated a treaty with 130 other countries in the world. How not? For the other 129 signatories of the treaty torture still means the same thing it did prior to George W. Bush. But for the US it is somehow different now, under the guise of "clarification and definition".
This is abuse with legal ramifications and yet no one is up in arms about it because as they come to realize these abuses, they get barraged again with even more abuses by this administration. And this, in itself is an abuse.
It is an abuse in the same way that the Clinton administration was beset by numerous and myriad Republican allegations of corruption such that the administration need pay attention to their defense so that the American agenda could not go forward. This current administration is besetting the American people with so many abuses as to keep them befuddled and guessing, which is just what one Bush administration official said in 2002. "We make the reality, and when you think you’ve figured out that reality, we’ve changed it again."
As we see, there are plenty of abuses, some of which are nefarious and purposeful, yet not illegal, some which are illegal. We see that the Republican Party and the Administration have an agenda to garner more and greater power to the President whilst using that power to deter legal actions on some and encourage legal action on others.
But what many may not see is the fundamental change in American politics that allows, ostensibly through the sheep-like commitment of the American people, this administration to change the bedrock of American society, American justice and the American way of life.
America is indeed becoming a sad country, wallowing in its own despair without a single champion to defend her.
And here I thought that the President’s oath of office meant that the President was supposed to be America’s champion.
How stupid of me.
11:55:04 AM 
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