Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 11, 2007 10:12:53 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: "Co-President" Cheney's MONARCHIC RULE (Pray Nothing
Happens to Bush!)
Cheney's view on the Presidency: "monarchical notions of prerogative"
The quote above is from the minority report of the Iran-Contra
Committee. The minority was headed by then Rep. Dick Cheney.
Among the report's signers was then-Rep. Dick Cheney, who led the
group. They rejected the idea that separation of powers would
"preclude the exercise of arbitrary power" and argued that the
president needed to act expeditiously and secretly to achieve
American aims in a dangerous world. Their solution to executive
abuse was to water down congressional and judicial oversight. The
minority report referred approvingly to "monarchical notions of
prerogative that will permit [presidents] to exceed the law" if
Congress tried to exercise oversight on national security matters.
Cheney later insisted in an interview that "you have to preserve
the prerogative of the president in extraordinary circumstances,"
by not notifying Congress of intelligence operations.
Cheney's views have not shifted since then. In December 2005, he
referred reporters to the minority report for his view of "the
president's prerogatives." And for the first time in U.S. history,
executive branch lawyers have argued that the president has power
to "suspend" laws permanently in the name of national security. In
signing statements for new laws, President Bush has repeatedly
asserted this broad power.
In internal legal opinions on torture, Justice Department lawyers
have proposed that the president can set aside laws that conflict
with his ideas of national security. Under this logic, laws against
torture, warrantless surveillance and transfers of detainees to
governments that torture all buckle.
------------
CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
By Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Huq
San Jose Mercury News, 04/08/2007 01:56:44 AM PDT
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_5621627?nclick_check=1
Thirty years ago, a Senate committee headed by the late Sen. Frank
Church exposed widespread abuses by law enforcement and
intelligence agencies dating to the Franklin D. Roosevelt
administration. In the name of "national security," the FBI, CIA
and National Security Agency spied on politicians, protest groups
and civil rights activists; illegally opened mail; and sponsored
scores of covert operations abroad, many of which imperiled
democracy in foreign countries.
The sheer magnitude of the abuses unearthed by the committee
shocked the nation, led to broad reforms and embarrassed Congress,
whose feckless oversight over decades was plain for all to see. As
a result, Congress required presidents to report covert operations
to permanent new intelligence committees and created the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, which squarely repudiated the idea
of inherent executive power to spy on Americans without obtaining
warrants. New guidelines were issued for FBI investigations.
For those of us involved in that effort to bring accountability and
sunshine back to government, it is discouraging to read daily
accounts of a new era of intelligence power abuses, growing out of
a "war" on terrorism that is invoked to justify almost any secret
measure.
During the past five years, we have learned that the executive
branch has circumvented federal bans on torture, abandoned the
Geneva Conventions, monitored Americans' phone conversations
without the required warrants and "outsourced" torture through
"extraordinary rendition" to several foreign governments. Recently
we learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation recklessly
abused its power to secure documents through emergency national
security letters.
Once again, congressional oversight of the growing national
security, intelligence and law enforcement establishments has
fallen short. But there are now obstacles to re-establishing
effective oversight that did not exist three decades ago.
For one thing, the country and Congress are far more polarized.
There was a high degree of bipartisan unity on the Church
Committee, and Republican President Gerald R. Ford generally
cooperated in the effort to expose abuses and create remedies. The
committee, formally known as the Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,
was created in Watergate's wake and had a Democratic majority. But
it focused on abuses by administrations of both parties. Indeed,
its inquiries revealed that three Democratic presidents -
Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson - all knew about,
or approved, questionable activities. Howard Baker Jr., a senior
Senate Republican who served on the panel, disagreed with some
proposals but said it had carried out its task "responsibly and
thoroughly."
But Congress now faces an even bigger problem than heightened
partisanship. Past presidents have never claimed that the
Constitution gave them power to set aside statutes permanently.
(Richard M. Nixon was no longer in office when he declared: "When
the president does it, it means that it is not illegal.") The Bush
administration, however, appears committed to eliminating judicial
and congressional oversight of executive action at all costs. This
pernicious idea, at odds with the Founders' vision of checks and
balances, lies at the heart of many of today's abuses.
In some ways, the "Magna Carta" of this combative ideology was the
minority report issued by eight of the Republicans on the Iran-
Contra committee that investigated the Reagan administration's
handling of covert arms sales to Iran and the secret - and illegal
- effort to finance the Contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua.
Among the report's signers was then-Rep. Dick Cheney, who led the
group. They rejected the idea that separation of powers would
"preclude the exercise of arbitrary power" and argued that the
president needed to act expeditiously and secretly to achieve
American aims in a dangerous world. Their solution to executive
abuse was to water down congressional and judicial oversight. The
minority report referred approvingly to "monarchical notions of
prerogative that will permit [presidents] to exceed the law" if
Congress tried to exercise oversight on national security matters.
Cheney later insisted in an interview that "you have to preserve
the prerogative of the president in extraordinary circumstances,"
by not notifying Congress of intelligence operations.
`The president's prerogatives'
Cheney's views have not shifted since then. In December 2005, he
referred reporters to the minority report for his view of "the
president's prerogatives." And for the first time in U.S. history,
executive branch lawyers have argued that the president has power
to "suspend" laws permanently in the name of national security. In
signing statements for new laws, President Bush has repeatedly
asserted this broad power. In internal legal opinions on torture,
Justice Department lawyers have proposed that the president can set
aside laws that conflict with his ideas of national security. Under
this logic, laws against torture, warrantless surveillance and
transfers of detainees to governments that torture all buckle.
We do not know precisely which laws were turned aside, because the
administration still refuses to reveal Justice Department opinions
that define what laws the executive branch will and will not
follow. Such secrecy, which has nothing to do with the legitimate
protection of sources and methods of intelligence agencies, cannot
be justified.
This crisis of constitutional faith did not begin with the current
Republican administration. After a burst of reforms in the 1970s,
Congress quickly fell back into Cold War apathy, finding it easier
to let standards lapse than to hold the executive branch to
account. The Iran-Contra scandal was the first warning that the
Church Committee's lessons had been sidelined by the executive
branch. Attorneys general issued looser guidelines on FBI
investigations. The White House became a keen user of unilateral
executive orders that bypassed Congress.
President Bill Clinton's stint in the White House proved no
exception. He broadly interpreted his war powers and aggressively
used executive orders to bypass Congress - for example, ignoring a
House vote opposing intervention in Kosovo. Clinton issued 107
presidential directives on policy, according to Harvard Law School
Dean Elena Kagan. Reagan issued nine and George H.W. Bush just four.
Today, the argument for unchecked presidential power is starkly
different from earlier invocations. While previous administrations
have violated civil liberties - as in the post-World War I Palmer
raids and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War
II - such actions were public and short term. When Confederate
troops neared Washington in the Civil War and mobs in Baltimore
attacked Union troops, President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas
corpus - the principal legal protection against unlawful detention.
As Baltimore's mayor threatened to blow up railroad bridges used by
Union troops, Lincoln acted without waiting for Congress to return
from recess. Yet he subsequently sought and received congressional
approval.
Unlike Lincoln and other past chief executives, President Bush
asserts that he has the power to set aside fundamental laws
permanently - including those that ban torture and domestic spying.
The White House today argues that there will never be a day of
reckoning in Congress or the courts. To the contrary, it does all
it can to shield its use of unilateral detention, torture and
spying powers from the review of any other branch of government.
Even after five years, the lawfulness of incarcerating hundreds of
detainees at Guanta`namo Bay, Cuba, has not been reviewed by
another branch.
Unprecedented power grab
Never before in U.S. history, we believe, has a president so
readily exploited a crisis to amass unchecked and unreviewed power
unto himself, completely at odds with the Constitution. This
departure from historical practice should deeply concern those in
both parties who care for the Constitution.
Debates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and
in the state ratifying conventions that ensued, conclusively
undercut the current administration's claim to unaccountable power.
Alexander Hamilton, the founding era's foremost advocate of
executive vigor, disdained efforts to equate the new president's
authority with the broad powers of the English monarchs.
And even assuming that Hamilton was wrong in asserting that
presidents have less power than English kings, the British monarchy
had in fact been stripped of power to "suspend" parliamentary laws
after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, about 100 years before the
Constitutional Convention. The Constitution simply contains no
unfettered executive authority to annul laws on a president's
security-related say-so.
There is no reason to abandon the founding generation's skepticism
of unchecked executive power. The Constitution rests on a profound
understanding of human nature. Hamilton, James Madison and the
other framers and ratifiers knew that no single individual, whether
selected by birth or popular vote, could be blindly trusted to
wield power wisely. They knew that both the executive and Congress
would make mistakes.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly backed a strong oversight role for
Congress. "The scope of [Congress'] power of inquiry ... is as
penetrating and far-reaching as the potential power to enact and
appropriate under the Constitution," it wrote in 1975. Congress has
repeatedly met its constitutional responsibility as a coequal
branch, even in times of war, and regardless of partisan interests.
Oversight is not a Republican or Democratic issue. In World War II,
then-Sen. Harry S. Truman coordinated aggressive inquiries into the
Democratic administration's mismanagement of war procurement.
During the Civil War, Republicans in Congress drove Lincoln's first
secretary of war from office by their investigations.
Today's questions about presidential power are certainly not ones
that have Republican or Democratic answers. The institutional
imbalance that is evident today should trouble legislators of both
parties. We believe most Americans still would agree with the
Church Committee when it stated: "The United States must not adopt
the tactics of the enemy," for "each time we do so, each time the
means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength that makes
us free, is lessened."
See what's free at AOL.com.