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The Legislative and Judicial Branches are Overrated Anyway
The Bush administration’s crusade to expand executive power beyond all reckoning has continued unabated. And, on Wednesday, when President Bush signed the homeland security bill passed by Congress last week, he reserved the right, in one of his infamous signing statements, to disregard at least 36 provisions in the legislation. Among them is a new law establishing the minimum job qualifications for future FEMA directors, which would prevent the president from appointing someone based on politics not experience (i.e. Michael Brown). It's not as if the requirements are that stiff. The candidate, according to the law, must have "a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management" and "not less than five years of executive leadership." Seems reasonable, but apparently the president found these prerequisites too restrictive. According to the Boston Globe, the president also took aim at "a provision that empowers the FEMA director to tell Congress about the nation's emergency management needs without White House permission."
Last week, Bush challenged 16 provisions in the 2007 military budget bill. The Globe reports:
The bill bars the Pentagon from using any intelligence that was collected illegally, including information about Americans that was gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable government surveillance.
In Bush's signing statement, he suggested that he alone could decide whether the Pentagon could use such information. His signing statement instructed the military to view the law in light of "the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief, including for the conduct of intelligence operations, and to supervise the unitary executive branch."
A recent report from the Congressional Research Service, which notes that legal claims made in some of the president’s signing statements are “generally unsupported by established legal principles,” states that “the broad and persistent nature of the claims of executive authority forwarded by President Bush appear designed to inure Congress, as well as others, to the belief that the President in fact possesses expansive and exclusive powers upon which the other branches may not intrude.” Not that we really needed a CRS report to tell us that.
Posted by Daniel Schulman on 10/06/06 at 7:49 AM | E-mail | Print | Digg | de.licio.us | Reddit | Newsvine | Yahoo! MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Netscape | Google |
Comments
Actually I hold the entire Republican Party totally responsible for all the atrocities and illegal acts that G.W. Bush has committed. Like Sean Penn stated, "these people (Republican's) are out and out cowards and liars."
Posted by: David J. on 10/06/06 at 5:01 PM
Interesting article on trying to find the balance:
Have We Gone Surveillance Crazy?
http://americaninventorspot.com/being_watched
Posted by: Michelle on 10/08/06 at 7:12 AM
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The U.S. Constitution states that the President shall take care that the laws are properly enforced, so..., how is it that, "President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws..."
The fact of the matter is that we have an option here; in the instance where the Administration has ignored major violations of the Voting Rights Act the ANSWER is for everyone (and his brother) to send a copy of the following letter to the United Nations.
Name:
Address:
Telephone:
Commission/Sub-Commission Team (1503 Procedure)
Support Services Branch
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
United Nations Office at Geneva
1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland
Fax: +41 22 9179011
E-mail: 1503.hchr@unog.ch
To the United Nations Commission on Civil Rights:
Major violations of the United States Voting Rights Act marred the critically important 2000 Florida and 2004 Ohio Presidential Elections, thus I'm requesting a United Nations Civil Rights investigation (the 1503 Procedure).
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report on the 2000 Florida election states, "...violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act occured in Florida. ...widespread voter disenfranchisement--not the dead-heat contest--was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election."
However, the U.S. Dep't of Justice's investigation of such fraud was unfruitful--limited to the approximately two dozen citizen complaints directly addressed to the DOJ, the Commission's report went entirely ignored.
Note that in the 2000 election a consulting company was primarily responsible for the widespread voter disenfranchisement, while in 2004 a consulting company was discovered shredding Democratic registrations in Ohio (Robert F. Kennedy, Rolling Stone Magazine, Was The 2004 Election Stolen?). Kennedy states, "One quarter of the Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 were not listed on the rolls, yet the DOJ turned a blind eye.
Important here, recently the U.S. DC Circuit affirmed dismissal of a lawsuit requesting a grand jury investigation into the President's and the U.S. Attorney General's involvement in the 2000 Florida election fraud, and the U.S. Supreme Court DENIED certorari (Michael L. Wagner v. Kenneth Wainstain, US Attorney). Note that the District Court's disposition read, "The Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute," an argument the cited Court decided against!
Most worrisome of all here is the fact that the U.S. Congress repeatedly turned a blind eye itself to the voting fraud--indeed, the new commonly implemented electronic voting sustems are vulnerable to tampering.
Clearly Congress is failing to perform its duty where in 2003 researchers from John Hopkins University went public because of concerns that "election fraud will almost certainly occur if weaknesses in the electronic voting systems are not addressed before many more jurisdictions move to this method of voting" (John Hopkins University Information Security Institute Technical Report, July 23, 2003).
Dated:_________Signed:_______
Posted by: Michael L. Wagner on 10/06/06 at 1:29 PM