President or Tyrant? Bush is the latter.

Also from Juan Cole:

Bush signed a law forbidding him from spending money to make permanent bases in Iraq but at the same time issued a signing statement making clear he had no intention of paying any attention to that or several other provisions in the legislation. What do you call a leader unconstrained by his legislature? An absolute monarch. I thought we had a revolution to get rid of that sort of thing.

George Bush is an un-American tyrant, and our political leaders are either cheering him on or refusing to act as the Constitution directs by impeaching him.

How is the tyrant George Bush any better than a Communist dictator of the kind America fought a four-decade Cold War to avoid? McCain or Romney will be merely a continuation of the same anti-democratic tyrannical government.

As Glenn Greenwald wrote this morning of the new Attorney General:

Mukasey is the federal judge who, when presiding over the Padilla case in 2002, endorsed the most tyrannical and un-American power there is, when he ruled that the President even has the power to imprison U.S. citizens indefinitely, even when detained on U.S. soil, with no process of any kind -- a position he refused to repudiate during his confirmation hearing.

So the new American norm is that the President is above the law, eliminating the Rule of Law. The lack of the Rule of Law guts the Constitution by making it unenforceable. Mukasey's ruling also paves the way to the creation of legal gulags which are recognized under the court approved law.

When these anti-American tyrants come for you, don't say you weren't warned. All you can truthfully say is that you ignored the warnings.

Presidential candidates on Executive Power

Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe, one of the nation's best political reporters, has just reported the results of a survey he conducted with the Presidential candidates on their approach on which of the "checks and balances they would respect, and whether they would reverse the Bush administration's legacy of expanded presidential powers." In other words, how much of the set of expanded Executive Powers that Bush and Cheney have claimed would any of the candidates retain, and what powers do they feel are inappropriate to the Executive in the American Constitutional democracy.

First, Who answered the survey?

Six Democrats and three Republicans provided answers to the Globe survey. Three GOP candidates did not respond to the survey: Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson.

The Giuliani campaign instead provided a general statement by its top legal adviser, former Bush administration solicitor general Ted Olson. He said that a president "must be free to defend the nation," but provided no specific details about what limits, if any, Giuliani believes he would have to obey as president - in national security or otherwise.

This tells us which candidates feel least responsible to the American people, and which candidates view the Presidency as a modern day monarchy - or in Huckabee's case, modern theocracy.

What are the candidates opinion of Bush's approach to Presidential Power?

Of the nine candidates who answered, Romney expressed the most positive view of Bush's approach to presidential power.

"The Bush administration has kept the American people safe since 9/11," Romney said. "The administration's strong view on executive power may well have contributed to that fact."

By contrast, the other two Republicans who responded - McCain and Paul - both expressed reservations about legal claims Bush has made. For example, both rejected the idea that a president, as commander-in-chief, has "inherent" power to wiretap Americans without warrants, regardless of federal statutes, as the administration has argued.

"I don't think the president has the right to disobey any law," said McCain, an Arizona senator.

Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor who studies executive power, said Romney's answers suggest that the former Massachusetts governor will probably embrace the Bush administration's legal theories on executive power.

"It's fair to say that the Democrats, Senator McCain, and Representative Paul are united in supporting a reinvigoration of checks and balances and the reassertion of a meaningful congressional role in national security affairs," said Shane.

I think this also disqualifies Romney as an American President under the Constitution. Romney, Giuliani, Huckabee and Thompson are all telling us the Constitution is a nice idea, but disposable if they decide they don't like it.

The candidates were asked whether they would be restricted by a law passed by Congress that restricted their power to deploy troops.

Among the Democrats, only former North Carolina senator John Edwards refused to say that he would be bound to obey a law limiting troop deployments, instead saying, "I do not envision this scenario arising when I am president."

Similarly, Romney talked generally about a president's need to both "respect" Congress's constitutional powers over war while also remaining "faithful to commander-in-chief powers," but he declined to say whether he believed he could disregard a law capping troop deployments. [Snip]

But the other two leading Democrats - Clinton, a New York senator, and Obama - were both more definitive. Along with Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, and Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Clinton and Obama endorsed a more restrained approach to executive power than Bush.

The Democrats said a president must obey laws and treaties that restrict surveillance and interrogation. They also said that the Constitution does not allow a president to hold US citizens without charges as "enemy combatants" - even though Bush has won court rulings upholding his right to indefinitely imprison citizens suspected of terrorist links.

Then the candidates were asked how they would use Signing Statements.

while all the Democrats condemned Bush's use of signing statements, Clinton, Edwards, and Obama each said that they would use them too - just less aggressively. Obama said the problem with Bush's signing statements is not the device itself, but rather that Bush has invoked legal theories that most constitutional scholars consider "dubious" when reserving his alleged right to bypass certain laws.

"No one doubts that it is appropriate to use signing statements to protect a president's constitutional prerogatives; unfortunately, the Bush administration has gone much further than that," Obama said.

By contrast, Biden, Dodd, and Richardson called for an end to signing statements altogether.

Among the Republicans, their stance was echoed by McCain and Paul, both of whom said they would never issue a signing statement. Romney, by contrast, praised signing statements as "an important presidential practice."

So except for Ron Paul and McCain, the Republicans all approve of how Bush as accumulated more power to the Presidency. That makes all the Republicans other than McCain and Ron Paul primarily anti-Democratic authoritarians. The Republicans consider the Executive Branch to be the supreme branch in the federal government. Combine that with a penchant for secrecy and a refusal to respond to questions from the public and the Republicans are the reactionary party of monarchism.

The Democrats are not as easy to characterize. They support reinvigorating the check and balances established by the Constitution, but are not yet ready to declare Congress as the supreme branch in the federal government. Edwards simply delayed announcing his opinion of the Presidential power to deploy troops contrary to Congressional law which is troubling.

It is interesting that McCain belongs to the camp in which Congress is viewed as a branch of federal government that is equal the Executive branch.

I don't put Ron Paul into either camp, since his Libertarian view is that neither Congress nor the Executive branch have more than minimal functions under his view of the Constitution. That is such an extremist, out-of-the-mainstream view that he cannot be compared to any other candidate.

CQ Politics has an earlier publication on the subject of Presidential powers.

the records and statements of the eight major candidates -- the three Democrats and five Republicans who have had double-digit support in the most recent national polls -- show that the 2008 presidential election is not likely to start a huge shift in the balance of power away from the White House.

That doesn't mean the top candidates would continue all of the Bush administration's practices, and most aren't likely to take the same kind of deliberately confrontational approach to Congress. Also, an upset victory could still go to one of the few candidates whose victory would represent a clear rejection of Bush's overall policies. But there is enough evidence of a preference for strong executive power in the backgrounds of most of the field to suggest that, more likely than not, there will be no U-turn under the next president.

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The only real question is What the Hell is wrong with Charlie Savage asking such stupid questions? Voters don't care what the opinions of the candidates on the limitations of Executive power are! Voters want more reports like the one written by the Washington Post's Robin Ghivan last July in which she wrote the very unflattering description of Hillary Clinton's "cleavage on display." (See The Washington Post doesn't like or respect Democrats) Digby points out what the modern Press wizards all know about how Presidential campaigns should be covered.

We want color and spectacle, not boring policy discussions. Reporters are there just to tell us who they like, so that we can all elect the most likable candidate. Their policy opinions are boring, irrelevant, and totally incomprehensible to reporters and their editors anyway. They have Communications degrees, with majors in hairdos and makeup, not MBA's or Political Science degrees. Who are we mere Plebeian voters to question their professionalism and expertise?

Right?

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Addendum 1 December 23, 9:14 AM CST
Back to the analysis of Charlie Savage's excellent article. Glenn Greenwald weighed in this morning, and here is part of what he said:

...by far the most extraordinary answers come from Mitt Romney. Romney's responses -- not to some of the questions but to every single one of them -- are beyond disturbing. The powers he claims the President possesses are definitively -- literally -- tyrannical, unrecognizable in the pre-2001 American system of government and, in some meaningful ways, even beyond what the Bush/Cheney cadre of authoritarian legal theorists have claimed.

After reviewing those responses, Marty Lederman concluded: "Romney? Let's put it this way: If you've liked Dick Cheney and David Addington, you're gonna love Mitt Romney." Anonymous Liberal similarly observed that his responses reveal that "Romney doesn't believe the president's power to be subject to any serious constraints." To say that the President's powers are not "subject to any serious constraints" -- which is exactly what Romney says -- is, of course, to posit the President as tyrant, not metaphorically or with hyperbole, but by definition.

Each of the questions posed by Savage is devoted to determining the extent of presidential power the candidate believes exists and where the limits are situated. On every issue, Romney either (a) explicitly says that the President has the right to act without limits of any kind or (b) provides blatantly nonresponsive answers strongly insinuating the same thing.

Just go and read what he wrote. It's extraordinary. Other than his cursory and quite creepy concession that U.S. citizens detained by the President are entitled to "at least some type of habeas corpus relief" -- whatever "some type" might mean (Question 5) -- Romney does not recognize a single limit on presidential power. Not one. [Snip]

In a Washington Post Op-Ed this morning, historian and George Washington biographer Joseph Ellis labels Dick Cheney's quest for limitless presidential power "historically myopic" and writes:

Your opinion on the current debate about how much power the executive branch should have will be significantly influenced if you read the debates about the subject in the Constitutional Convention and the states' ratifying conventions. For it will soon become clear that the most palpable fear that haunted all these debates was the specter of monarchy.

Although one would not have thought it possible, a Mitt Romney presidency, by his own description, would remove us still further from those core principles. Romney isn't running to be President, but to be King. Anyone who wants to dispute that ought to try to distinguish the fantasies of power Romney is envisioning from those the British King possessed in the mid-to-late 18th Century.

Apparently others agree with me that Romney sees no significant limitations on the unfettered arbitrary power of the American President. as in so many other things on which he has spoken during this campaign, Romney will say and do anything to become President King.

If Romney is elected President he intends to treat the job as being the Monarch of America with the Divine right to rule in an unfettered, no checks and balances, manner. All Hail King Romney the First!

The conservatives are declining in America

Digby presents her analysis of the recent political history of the U.S. It is a lot more positive than I have felt for a long time.

Here is an excerpt of her superb post:

Rove was hailed as a genius because he told everyone he was a genius. (And there was a certain genius in being able to get such a patently unacceptable candidate [Bush 43] into high office.) But the truth is that he has been swimming against a strong tide for some time. We have all been thinking that the Bush II administration was the high water mark of the conservative era, but it was actually a decade earlier --- around 1994. Then we entered into a period of parity and now, finally, the momentum seems to be on the progressive side.

Miraculously, 9/11 only temporarily stalled that momentum politically but it didn't reverse it, largely because Karl Rove missed the opportunity to actually change the course of that slow moving realignment by having Bush reach out to the Democrats and the rest of the world and forge a new sort of consensus. Rove had Bush go the other way and stoke the base. It was a fatal error. And it is the ultimate proof of Rove's arrogant mediocrity. He was given a chance to possibly accomplish what up to then had only been hype [create a permanent Republican majority.] and he made the wrong choice, most likely because he couldn't give up the idea that he could make it happen through his own strength of will. (We don't need no stinking consensus...) [snip]

Until they reinvent themselves into something new, their movement is moribund and has been that way for a lot longer than all of us realized. For the Republican party it's always morning in America, 1984. They are a nostalgia act and don't even know it.

If Digby's argument is correct, then the Republicans (and especially the White House) have known they were declining at least since Bush 43 was appointed President in 2001. That would explain the major efforts to steal elections. They are in decline, and they reached the pinnacle using Rove's idea that a critical margin of voters would vote for perceived winners. That's the bandwagon effect. But it only works for you as long as you are perceived to be a winner.

I'd guess that Katrina sounded the death knell for that "winner" perception, and it first showed up in the polls with loss of the independent vote. The election of 2006 confirmed that loss, and the 2008 election is going to be a blood-bath.

The wave of Republican retirements from the House that is just beginning is a strong indication that the Republican Congressmen have seen the writing on the wall. [The Senate, being evenly divided at present, still leaves Republican Senators hope that they can perhaps get back into the majority. There is also the fact that being a U.S. Senator, even in the minority, is itself a very powerful position.]

So I feel reasonably certain that the conservative movement is dead, or at least moribund in the foreseeable future.

For the more extended period, however, I an really concerned about the shift of power away from Congress to the President. How much of what the Bush administration has done to create the "Unitary Presidency" can be reversed - ever?

The Cold War saw a period in which the Presidency took on a number of wartime powers beginning in WW II (see, for example Unilateral Presidential Powers: Significant Executive Orders, 1949-99 by Kenneth R. Mayer and Kevin Price) and never gave them up. Add the recent power-grab by Cheney-Bush to that, and the Constitution is beginning to look quite lopsided in favor of the President. The founders intended that Congress be the source of national power and the President be their executive officer.

In any case, I strongly recommend that you read the article Nostalgia Act by Digby.

Congress can trim Bush's wings without impeachment

Mark Kleiman makes a good case that impeaching Bush and Cheney is an impossibility - and is not particularly useful anyway. As Mark says, just because Broder opposes an idea does not necessarily make it a good one. So he suggests an interesting Plan B.

Congressional Democrats create a crisis around the executive privilege/contempt citation issue by issuing a subpoena to Libby (with a grant of immunity), voting a contempt citatation when he doesn't show up on Bush's orders, making a referral to the U.S. Attorney that Bush blocks, and then voting a Congressional arrest warrant.

If Bush moves to block Libby's arrest, I doubt the courts would back him; the precedents for Congressional arrest are old (none since 1934) but still valid. It's hard for Bush to claim that Libby's arrest would impinge on Presidential power, since Libby doesn't work for him anymore.

So either Libby turns himself in and either testifies or sits in the DC jail, or he stays out, a fugitive from justice. Since LIbby doesn't have Secret Service protection, the arrest warrant could be served without an armed confrontation. Either way, he's not a sympathetic character.

In the meantime, one of the two Appropriations Committees zeroes out Cheneys White House office (leaving him his Senate office) and takes 95% cuts in the White House press office, political affairs office, personnel office, and whatever unit holds the agency liaisons, and forbidding details to any of the units getting a cut. That actually works, meaning that Bush and Cheney have much less actual capacity to do harm. Constitutionally, no one doubts Congress has the power to refuse to appropriate money. Substantively, the cuts are fully justified by the fact that the units being cut are units over which Bush says Congress can't exercise oversight, because of his claims of executive privilege.

This would seem to make Bush's recent claim that the Department of Justice not be allowed to prosecute individuals who are in contempt of Congress for ignoring the subpoena if the President claims Executive Privilege.