The Cato Institute's Gene Healy put together a three-part series that you absolutely must read. Excerpts are provided below. Click through to read the whole thing.
Even more important however, each and every American must read Healy's book "The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power," where he demonstrates in detailed fashion how perceived and expected responsibilities and powers of the United States president have dangerously morphed the office into something completely detached from the original intent at America's founding.
Get the PDF version here: "The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power."
America's Imperial Presidency problem is a left/right affair too. American's fall over backwards to support "their team" gaining more power today, without even the slightest concern about consequence to boot. Whether you're "left" or "right" doesn't matter much anymore. Either way, the ends always justify the means.
As Gene Healy puts it:
Left or Right, Red or Blue, no American should be comfortable with any one man wielding that much power. Yet too many Americans embrace a philosophy of "situational constitutionalism": they only get disturbed about the menacing concentration of power in the executive branch when they don’t care for the guy who has the scepter and the crown ...
But "situational constitutionalism" is the constitutionalism of fools ...
Blame power-hungry presidents and feckless Congresses all you want. We'll never solve the problem of the Imperial Presidency until more Americans manage to pry their eyes away from the Red-Team/Blue Team sideshow and recognize that who holds the office is less important than the powers the office holds.
Exactly. The problems are not personal but institutional.
In other words, our problems can't be fixed by simply the "right" people in charge. Because the system itself is corrupt, it's the system that must be changed.
America's Imperial Presidency Problem (1-3):
Bush II Goes to War Whether Congress Likes It or Not
Gen. Michael Hayden, President George W. Bush's CIA director, notes a "powerful continuity" between the two administrations on national security powers. Even former Vice President Dick Cheney now grudgingly praises Obama for leaving most of the Bush framework intact.
In some areas, "44" has gone even further than "43." Bush claimed "inherent power" to attack other countries at will, but never fought a war without congressional authorization.
Our new "decider" launched a war in Libya without so much as a by-your-leave to Congress. "It's nice to have a neocon back in the White House," the Washington Times enthused as the Tomahawks began to fly.
Your mileage may vary, though — especially if you worry about domestic spying. Last week's Patriot Act fight, in which the administration leaned on congressional allies to quash debate, highlighted how much Obama has "grown in office."
"No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime." Obama promised on the campaign trail.
Yet the Justice Department's latest report to Congress shows record-high use of NSLs: More than 14,000 Americans had their records searched last year using this extraordinary legal device, which allows the government to demand sensitive personal data like phone and bank records without the inconvenience of judicial review.
Obama now wants to expand NSL authority to "electronic communication transactional records," possibly including users' browser histories.
Will these vast powers be abused? We may never know, given Obama's legal position that the "state secrets privilege" goes beyond protecting "sources and methods" — it lets him quash entire lawsuits, barring the courthouse door to citizens fearing their rights have been violated.
There's a strange disconnect in the talk-radio right's view of Obama: Apparently, he's a crypto-socialist with sinister designs on our liberties, yet it's vitally important that he have the authority to wiretap Americans at will and assassinate them while they're abroad.
Commander in Chief of the U.S. Economy
"We need a president," [then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton] told a Pennsylvania audience, "who is ready on day one to be commander in chief of our economy!"
We had a good laugh about that one at the Cato Institute. "We eagerly await your orders, ma'am," my colleague Jerry Taylor snarked on the Cato blog.
Lately, though, like many Americans, we've been wondering whether the joke was on us.
After all, when the president can summarily fire the CEO of General Motors and bypass the normal rules of bankruptcy to give his political ally, the United Auto Workers, a substantial stake in Chrysler — "CINC of our economy" sounds appallingly accurate.
"Ordinary people" still struggle with nearly 10 percent unemployment, but the struggle for a greener economy goes on. Obama is busily imposing costly CO2 restrictions on American companies despite the fact that Congress long ago rejected "cap and trade."
Last month, in another effort to "improve the lives of ordinary people" and/or reward political allies, Obama's National Labor Relations Board put more than 1,000 jobs at risk trying to stop Boeing Co. from moving a jet factory from pro-union Washington to South Carolina, a right-to-work state. The underlying plan, according to a recently leaked NLRB memo, is to make labor an "equal partner" with capital.
Obama is currently contemplating an executive order that would force any company doing business with the federal government to reveal its top executives' political contributions — in case they're thinking about funding ads against incumbents. That's despite the fact that last year Congress rejected legislation mandating such disclosures.
But Obama didn't invent the notion of the president as "CINC of our economy," and the powers he's accrued won't disappear when he retires to Hawaii, Chicago or McLean.
It's worth remembering that it was President George W. Bush who demanded, and got, a $700 billion blank check from Congress to, in his words, "save the free-market system."
And it was Bush who — Congress be damned — gave GM and Chrysler $17 billion in TARP funds immediately after Congress voted down the auto bailout. As Bush spokesman Tony Fratto explained: "Congress lost its opportunity to be a partner because they couldn't get their job done."
But He's Our Imperial President!
Sometimes it's hard to remember that the presidency was supposed to be a constitutionally limited office. George Washington didn't imagine himself "commander in chief of our economy," in Hillary Clinton's bizarre formulation; our first president doubted that his powers as CINC even allowed him to attack hostile Indian tribes without congressional authorization.
Nor did Washington refer to himself by his military title, preferring to call the office the "chief magistracy," a far humbler term.
As historian Bernard Bailyn explains in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the Founders knew human nature far too well ever to trust one fallible human being with the vast powers presidents claim today.
Given man's "susceptibility to corruption and his lust for self-aggrandizement," they considered unchecked power "a malignant force," Bailyn says.
By 1789, our Constitution's Framers were convinced that the Republic needed "an effective national executive," Bailyn writes, but "they continued to believe, as deeply as any of the militants of '76, that power corrupts [and] any release of the constraints on the executive — any executive — was an invitation to disaster."
Today, that healthy skepticism has been eroded by the spirit of faction. Red Team/Blue Team partisanship so clouds our vision that many of us only fear the executive unbound when the scepter and crown pass to the "other team."
Conservatives who defended every excess of the Bush administration now rail against Obama's Imperial Presidency, and liberals who considered the Bush era one long descent into the dark night of fascism seem blithely indifferent to the present Oval Office occupant's multiplying executive power grabs.
Either you think the assortment of powers outlined here is a problem or you don't, and both are coherent positions. What's incoherent and absurd is only worrying about it every four to eight years.
The problem is not who sits in the Oval Office. The problem is the Oval Office itself!
Unless we're willing to radically strip the Executive Branch of its unconstitutional powers - all of them! - voting Democratic or Republican is but a waste of time and energy, that will provide little more than false hope at best.
America’s Imperial Presidency Problem is a post from: The Classic Liberal Blog