Consolidation and the State of the Union

The Administration's systematic efforts to render every other branch of government as subservient to the Executive branch seems to be the most damaging aspect of the Bush Presidency. The goal is to consolidate what Bush and Cheney's cronies see as the presidential powers other administrations have forfeited in the past. So, controversially, the President can reserve the right to obey or disobey law, crafted by the popular representatives in Congress, at his will. Bush and Cheney exert this philosophy through their staunch claims that they have the right to torture detainees or spy on Americans in the War on Terror.

The Administration uses a variety of tactics: presidential "signing statements," which act as a kind of procedural appendum to laws he does sign, where he can declare his own "understanding" of the law or declare when he might or might not choose to honor the very law he's signing; a complicit leadership in Congress who stem any voices of dissent; darkness and secrecy with internal documentation and discussion to simply keep most people out of the know; and sheer agressive assertion that the powers of the President were lost and that they are "reclaiming" them, whether we like it or not.

In Salon [ click through the free day pass preview to read the article ], Sidney Blumenthal gives light to this thus-suspected-but-undocumented effort by the Bush Administration to claim All Power:

At the beginning of the Cold War, the National Security Act of 1947 authorized the creation of new institutions of foreign policy and intelligence, including the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. But Bush has built a secret system, without enabling legislation, justified by executive fiat and presidential findings alone, deliberately operating beyond the oversight of Congress and the courts, and existing outside the law. It is a national security state of torture, ghost detainees, secret prisons, renditions and domestic eavesdropping.

The arguments used to rationalize this system insist that the president as commander in chief is entitled to arbitrary and unaccountable rule. The memos written by John Yoo, former deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, constitute a basic ideology of absolute power.


Congress, at best, is held in contempt as a pest and, at worst, is regarded as an intruder on the president's rightful authority. The Republican chairmen of the House Armed Services and Senate Intelligence committees, Rep. Duncan Hunter of California and Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, have been models of complicity in fending off oversight, attacking other members of Congress, especially Republicans, who have had the temerity to insist on it, using their committees to help the White House suppress essential information about the operations of government, and issuing tilted partisan reports smearing critics. This is the sort of congressional involvement, at White House direction, that the White House believes fulfills the congressional mandate.

During his first term, President Bush issued an unprecedented 108 statements upon signing bills of legislation that expressed his own version of their content. He has countermanded the legislative history, which legally establishes the foundation of their meaning, by executive diktat. In particular, he has rejected parts of legislation that he considered stepped on his power in national security matters. In effect, Bush engages in presidential nullification of any law he sees fit. He then acts as if his gesture supersedes whatever Congress has done.

Political scientist Phillip Cooper, of Portland State University in Oregon, described this innovative grasp of power in a recent article in the Presidential Studies Quarterly. Bush, he wrote, "has very effectively expanded the scope and character of the signing statement not only to address specific provisions of legislation that the White House wishes to nullify, but also in an effort to significantly reposition and strengthen the powers of the presidency relative to the Congress." Moreover, these coups de main not only have overwhelmed the other institutions of government but have taken place almost without notice. "This tour de force has been carried out in such a systematic and careful fashion that few in Congress, the media, or the scholarly community are aware that anything has happened at all."

Not coincidentally, the legal author of this presidential strategy for accreting power was none other than the young Samuel Alito, in 1986 deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Alito's view on unfettered executive power, many close observers believe, was decisive in Bush's nomination of him to the Supreme Court.

Last week, when Bush signed the military appropriations bill containing the amendment forbidding torture that he and Vice President Cheney had fought against, he added his own "signing statement" to it. It amounted to a waiver, authorized by him alone, that he could and would disobey this law whenever he chose. He wrote: "The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks." In short, the president, in the name of national security, claiming to protect the country from terrorism, under war powers granted to him by himself, would follow the law to the extent that he decided he would.

The goal of The Administration seems to be to seize absolute power of government without any accountability, bring your corporate and ideological pals to the feeding trough, and leave us all strung out to dry.

On January 6, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a State of the Union Address to Congress entitled "The Four Freedoms." In the multi-continental, terrible war, FDR concluded by saying this:

If the congress maintains these principles the voters, putting patriotism ahead pocketbooks, will give you their applause. In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression --everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants
--everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor --anywhere in the wold.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception --the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear. Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands, heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women, and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.

To that high concept there can be no end save victory.

The Administration probably feels like they're fulfilling the "defense of democracy" inherent in these ideals set forth by FDR. But in doing so they've negated, and attempted to simply destroy, the Four Freedoms themselves. The've attempted to support the noble fight for democratic freedom [supposedly] by destroying the freedoms themselves.

I'd like to see somebody other than Bush give the State of the Union address this year- or rather, I'd like to see us all give it. I'm sure that each of us, proctoring our own sense of where the country has gone, what we have gained and lost, will be significantly different than Bush's. Where FDR might have inspired hope and investment in the country, Bush's actions have inspired feelings of loss, fear, abandonment, across the board. From the war in Iraq to the still lackluster assistence to Katrina victims to torture and domestic spying.

The current state of the Union, were General Stan to talk about it, is one of fracture, suffering, pain, and discord. And all because one guy heading a group of ideologues wants to consolidate absolute powers for themselves, leaving us all behind.

[hat tip to Bill in Portland Maine's great Rum n Coke Friday Cheers and Jeers for the FDR link]