-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 18, 2007 5:30:18 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Bush Is the President Our Founding Fathers WARNED Us About
King George W: James Madison’s Nightmare
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/
20070717_the_president_we_were_warned_about/
Posted on Jul 17, 2007
By Robert Scheer
George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and
other Founding Fathers of this great Republic warned us about. He
lied the nation into precisely the “foreign entanglements” that
George Washington feared would destroy the experiment in
representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion
of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of
Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of
free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer
of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison
enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
With the “war on terror,” Bush has asserted the right of the
president to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his
whim, because the “terrorists” will always provide a convenient
shadowy target. Just the “continual warfare” that Madison warned
of in justifying the primary role of Congress in initiating and
continuing to finance a war — the very issue now at stake in Bush’s
battle with Congress.
In his “Political Observations,” written years before he served as
fourth president of the United States, Madison went on to
underscore the dangers of an imperial presidency bloated by war
fever. “In war,” Madison wrote in 1795, at a time when the young
Republic still faced its share of dangerous enemies, “the
discretionary power of the Executive is extended and every means of
seducing the mind is added to [methods] for subduing the [will] of
the people.”
How remarkably prescient of Madison to anticipate the specter of
our current King George imperiously undermining Congress’ attempts
to end the Iraq war. When the prime author of the U.S.
Constitution explained why that document grants Congress—not the
president—the exclusive power to declare and fund wars, Madison
wrote, “A delegation of such powers [to the president] would have
struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the
foundation of all well organized and well checked governments.”
Because “[n]o nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of
continual warfare,” Madison urged that the constitutional
separation of powers he had codified be respected. “The
Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the
power of declaring a state of war ... the power of raising armies,”
he wrote. “The separation of the power of raising armies from the
power of commanding them is intended to prevent the raising of
armies for the sake of commanding them.”
That last sentence perfectly describes the threat of what President
Dwight Eisenhower, 165 years later, would describe as the “military-
industrial complex,” a permanent war economy feeding off a
permanent state of insecurity. The collapse of the Soviet Union
deprived the military profiteers and their handsomely rewarded
cheerleaders in the government of a raison d’être for the massive
war economy supposedly created in response to it.
Fortunately for them, Bush found in the 9/11 attack an excuse to
make war even more profitable and longer lasting. The Iraq war,
which the president’s 9/11 Commission concluded never had anything
to do with the terrorist assault, nonetheless has transferred many
hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars into the military
economy. And when Congress seeks to exercise its power to control
the budget, this president asserts that this will not govern his
conduct of the war.
There never was a congressional declaration of war to cover the
invasion of Iraq. Instead, President Bush acted under his claimed
power as commander in chief, which the Supreme Court has held does
allow him to respond to a “state of war” against the United
States. That proviso was clearly a reference to surprise attacks
or sudden emergencies.
The problem is that the “state of war” in question here was an al-
Qaida attack on the U.S. that had nothing whatsoever to do with
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Perhaps to spare Congress the
embarrassment of formally declaring war against a nation that had
not attacked America, Bush settled for a loosely worded resolution
supporting his use of military power if Iraq failed to comply with
U.N. mandates. This was justified by the White House as a means
of strengthening the United Nations in holding Iraq accountable for
its WMD arsenal, but as most of the world looked on in dismay, Bush
invaded Iraq after U.N. inspectors on the ground discovered that
Iraq had no WMD.
Bush betrayed Congress, which in turn betrayed the American people,
just as Madison feared when he wrote: “Of all the enemies to public
liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it
compromises and develops the germ of every other.”
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