Dec 01 2008

P-P-P-Pragmatically Preserving The Power of the President?

The US federal government has made strong preparations for “continuity of government” in the event of a national catastrophe.

A full army brigade is now on active duty within domestic borders, and the Bush administration has issued a directive which allows the president to coordinate all three branches of the federal government in such an event.

The Real News spoke to Bruce Fein.

Real News: December 1, 2008

US prepares for “continuity of government”

Bruce Fein: Army to deal with potential domestic “civil unrest and crowd control”



Bruce Fein is the founder of the American Freedom Agenda, that works to restore constitutional checks and balances. He served in the US Justice Department under President Reagan and has been an adjunct scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a lecturer at the Brookings Institute, and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. He is an adviser to Ron Paul.

Fein and the AFA in April 2007: The Right Seeks to Rein In Presidential Power

“The Democrats in Congress have done absolutely nothing to tell the president he is not a king and we do not live in a monarchy. They are allowing him to trash the Constitution because most of them know nothing about the Constitution and are concerned only with making headlines about minor issues and getting themselves reelected.”

Fein acknowledged that things were probably worse when Congress was under Republican control, “but only marginally.”

“Neither party has shown the courage to assert the power of Congress as a coequal branch of government. Congress should be telling the president it’s not OK to detain people without trials, to grab people off the streets and ‘render’ them to other countries to be tortured, to listen in to our telephone conversations, and to issue signing statements that nullify laws he doesn’t like.”

He added, “We elect members of Congress to lead, not to follow. If they are going to lead, they need to understand the Constitution and the vision of its framers, and then have the backbone to insist that the executive branch stop usurping the responsibilities assigned to the legislative and judicial branches of our government.”

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    • Edger on December 1, 2008 at 17:23
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  2. We elect members of Congress to lead, not to follow.

    As long as this is how we interpret representative democracy, we’ll keep getting the same old same old.

    This is a real dilemma for us I think, as banger has written about so well.  

  3. but I was at the grocery store.

    Out of olive oil…. national state of household emergency.

  4. has been happening over time.  Urban warfare trials have been practiced in various parts of the country.  The National Defense Authorization Act, of 2007, was a “cap” on all the other acts prohibiting individual rights.  

    Here is an article on the current efforts with respect to the Pentagon to Detail Troops to Bolster Domestic Security

    The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials. . . . .

    Domestic emergency deployment may be “just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority,” or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU’s National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of “a creeping militarization” of homeland security. . . .

    • Edger on December 1, 2008 at 19:42
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    As Congress Lay Dying:

    The debate among progressive activists and commentators in recent weeks has tended to range from the leave-Obama-alone-and-he’ll-fix-everything position to the stage-a-protest-at-Obama’s-house-for-the-next-month position, including numerous stances in between those extremes. What all these positions share is acceptance of the incredible shift of power from Congress to the White House that we have seen in just the last eight years. It is in these concluding moments of the Bush-Cheney era that Congress’s coffin is being constructed just outside our window, and I’m afraid that the peace and justice movement is picking flowers to bring to the funeral.

    Congress is corrupted by money, media, and parties, and it has chosen its impotence. We’ve replaced a disastrous president with one who can’t help but be in at least some ways dramatically better. Why in the world would we distract ourselves with worrying about Congress? The frightening reason is this: if we leave all power in the hands of the president, sooner or later all power will belong to someone even worse than Bush.



    [snip…]

    Congress was supposed to write every law. The president can now ignore laws at his or her whim and rewrite new laws with signing statements. Congress was supposed to have the exclusive power to begin wars and the power to end wars. The president now does both and even negotiates treaties authorizing war without even obtaining Senate authorization of the treaties.

    [snip…]

    What if the peace movement had not played dead for six months because there was an election coming, but instead had put some fraction of the time and energy and resources that went into the election into demanding that Congress not permit a treaty with Iraq without Congressional approval, and demanding a rejection of any treaty that extended the occupation?

    [snip…]

    …those who have a voice are our president and the legislatures of our imperial outposts, but not our own legislature, much less the residents of the “homeland.”

    What if we learned that over $8.4 trillion was being looted from our grandchildren and given to some of those who least need it, and reacted appropriately? That much money could have been spent differently. Our government could have given almost $30,000 to every man, woman, and child in the country.

    [snip…]

    Only one nail remains to be hammered home, and we may never again hear from the first branch of our late republic. Both James Madison and George Mason wanted the impeachment power placed in the Constitution in case a president ever pardoned someone for a crime he was in any way involved with, much less a crime he authorized, much less the crime of obstructing an investigation into a crime committed by the president, much less a direct self-pardon. I didn’t go to law school, but anyone who did who argues that the pardon power includes the right to commit the same offense the impeachment power was created to counter deserves their money back.

  6. all kinds of other laws, etc. in this “eleventh” hour.

    Check them ALL out in this The Bush Move Game

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