The Classic Liberal Blog

Obama Making Plans to Use Executive Power

With much of his legislative agenda stalled in Congress, President Obama and his team are preparing an array of actions using his executive power to advance energy, environmental, fiscal and other domestic policy priorities.

“We are reviewing a list of presidential executive orders and directives to get the job done across a front of issues,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.

Any president has vast authority to influence policy even without legislation, through executive orders, agency rule-making and administrative fiat. And Mr. Obama’s success this week in pressuring the Senate to confirm 27 nominations by threatening to use his recess appointment power demonstrated that executive authority can also be leveraged to force action by Congress.

With the Federal Reserve Act, the 16th and 17th amendments, and executive orders among others (gerrymandering for example) ... Our system of government is much closer to a monarchy than the representative republic bequeathed us.

But hey ... We don't need no stinkin' representative government, we need a STRONG LEADER!

Try looking in the mirror, instead of at some politician who is at best, a character on your TV.

President Obama Signs Law Raising Public Debt Limit from $12.4 Trillion to $14.3 Trillion

Behind closed doors and with no cameras present, President Obama signed into law Friday afternoon the bill raising the public debt limit from $12.394 trillion to $14.294 trillion.

The current national debt is $12.3 trillion. Check out the National Debt Clock, which tells you your share of that -- roughly $40,000 per citizen, $113,000 per taxpayer.

Oh goodie!

Chickens Come Home to Roost ...

Remember back in the day, oh, just a few short years ago? When the other Dear Leader "needed" more power ...

Bush Pushed the Limits of Presidential Power

With Cheney's urging, he insisted that he had that right under the US Constitution, especially during wartime.

Many legal scholars question President Bush's claim to unilateral power as commander in chief in the war on terror. And experts will long debate his aggressive approach to the fight against Al Qaeda – authorizing warrantless wiretaps within the US, secret kidnappings of terror suspects, coercive interrogation tactics, and military commissions with stripped-down legal protections.

But even Mr. Bush's harshest critics must concede that on his watch the country remained free of further terrorist atrocities following the 9/11 attacks.

Um, that's a stretch. Fort Hood? Underwear-bomber?

We're not that partisan to believe these are all Obama's fault, are we?

The deeper question is at what price?

At the heart of the debate over Bush's legacy is a fundamental difference in outlook over what it means to remain faithful to the constitutional protections laid down by America's founding generation.

Critics say the Bush administration's expansive vision of executive power eclipsed the Constitution's mandated system of checks and balances. Some see the Bush years as lurching toward an imperial presidency, posing a direct threat to the essence of American liberty.

"The breadth of the theory that they were articulating is as broad as any theory of presidential power offered by any administration in history," says Gene Healy, a vice president at the Cato Institute in Washington and author of "The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power."

Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush

Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes

• a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech—and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;
• a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;
• a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as "enemy combatants," strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror— in other words, perhaps forever; and
• a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.

President Bush's constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.

Our Founding Fathers tried to warn us about man's lust for power. They distributed power as well as they could throughout the federal government and between the states.

"But it's different this time" ... is one of the oldest excuses man has ever known.

It's always "different this time," and it always leads to tyranny too.

Power corrupts.