Salon.com: The Power Of King George (Bush Exec Order Power Grab)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/02/01/presidential_power/

The power of King George
This week Bush made another executive power grab -- and our own Constitution is largely to blame.
By Garrett Epps

Feb. 01, 2007 | Washington was treated to a curious American spectacle on Monday. A president repudiated by virtually every sector of the political system has responded by arrogating more power to himself.

Under the executive order Bush signed Monday, federal regulators will answer to a new set of Bush appointees in each agency, who will determine whether their proposed rules properly serve the Bush agenda. As Peter Strauss of the Columbia Law School told the New York Times, "Having lost control of Congress, the president is doing what he can to increase his control of the executive branch."

Bush's administrative power grab points to a serious flaw in the American system: our uniquely powerful, politically unaccountable executive. Americans take this system for granted -- we are taught in high school that it was designed by far-seeing statesmen. We seldom even notice how often it misfires, with results ranging from opera buffa (like the Clinton impeachment) to dangerous constitutional crisis (like the Nixon impeachment).

Crisis is what we are facing now. Public opinion has decisively turned against the president's war in Iraq, with voters dissenting where our system says they should -- at the polls. Congress, the supposed locus of the power to "declare war," is belatedly registering its disapproval of Bush's inept conduct of that war. Even the normally secretive military and national-security bureaucracies are busily signaling their objections to the commander in chief's plans.

In virtually any other advanced democracy in the world, government personnel and policy would by now reflect this political earthquake: Either the chief executive would have resigned, or the parties would have coalesced in a government of national unity. But here, the repudiated leader is escalating his war and proclaiming, "I'm the decision maker." Regarding Congress, Bush said during a recent "60 Minutes" interview, "They could try to stop me from doing it. But I made my decision, and we're going forward." And now the president appears to be barreling toward a confrontation with Iran.

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been appointed. The question is who will bell the cat.

His lapdog Congress is in the minority now but rest assured they are still following an agenda he dictates. Junior's been whining about earmarks, something he never talked about before. That's because earmarks are a form of Congressional authority over the executive. Stop all earmarks, clutch at power.

And what was the first thing Senate Publicans did this year? Tried to attach a line item veto amendment to S.1, the ethics reform bill. Get the line item veto, clutch at power.

But it seems to me that even with the incredibly low approval ratings, most Americans do not grasp how insidious the people in charge the past six years are - I think most Americans think that Bush is just incompetent. The attacks on Bush, even from the right-wing, veil the fact, thus working in its favor, that this has been and still is a powerful radical right-wing conspiracy to remake the country and undermine the Constitution.

You and I focus quite a bit on these issues but most Americans would rather think aobout things like which one of the Nascar drivers could whip all the rest of them, or what Paris Hilton is up to.

In 1846, President James K. Polk ordered American troops into a part of Texas claimed by both Mexico and the United States. When Mexican troops attacked them, Polk demanded and got a declaration of war on the grounds that Mexico had started it. At the outset of the Civil War, Lincoln unilaterally proclaimed a blockade on the seceding states and raised an army (a clear congressional power) without any authorization. Afterward, he all but dared Congress to disavow his acts, which it did not. Harry Truman refused to ask Congress for any authorization for the war in Korea, claiming that the U.N. Charter empowered him to use U.S. troops there as he saw fit. Bill Clinton did the same thing in Kosovo, relying on a vote of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Both the Bushes consulted Congress before their Gulf wars -- but both also publicly warned that they would simply ignore a "no" vote.

The framers had attempted to design something the world had never seen before: an elected chief magistrate for a self-governing republic. The major models they had before them were high-handed monarchs on the one hand and the relatively impotent governors of the states on the other. We shouldn't be surprised that they got almost everything about the presidency wrong. But if the presidency were a car, Americans would be asking for their money back. It's hard to start, hard to steer -- and nearly impossible to stop.

The Iraq crisis will continue to absorb much of our energy; it may be the most dangerous clash among the executive branch, the Congress and the American people in our lifetime. Still, this crisis differs from others -- the Nixon impeachment, the 1995 government shutdown, the Clinton impeachment, the prolonged Florida crisis with the 2000 election -- in degree, not in kind. They all stem from serious design flaws in the Constitution. It would behoove us in the months ahead to spend some time designing changes in our system that will prevent such crises from happening over and over. The system of presidential election, inauguration and succession has already required no less than three amendments, and it still doesn't work very well. As Bush has proved to painfully sharp degree, more amendments may well be in order.

Impeach Bush