King George
Comment King George There comes a time when the nakedness of the emperor can no longer be denied. Such a time is now. George Bush's policy of eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a warrant...
...I think if we're going to be intellectually honest here, this really is the kind of thing that Alexander Hamilton was referring to when impeachment was discussed," said Ornstein...
...Bush specified in a "signing statement" that said he would construe the law "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as commander in chief" with the objective "of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks...
...Of some 19,000 requests for warrants, the court has rejected only five, says James Bamford, an expert on the NSA...
...Many people have been scratching their heads about one paradox in this whole scandal: The FISA court almost never turns the President down...
...Bush may intend to use such "signing statements" to nullify just about any act of Congress he chooses...
...Richard Nixon was impeached, in part, for such power grabs and privacy invasions...
...I believe in a strong, robust executive authority," Cheney said on December 20...
...I do believe there may come an occasion when the Congress might pass a statute that the President may view as unconstitutional," Gonzales told Senator Patrick Leahy...
...But he has been brazenly flouting the law that prohibits domestic spying without a warrant...
...Gonzales is now pursuing the leaker, though he has a double conflict of interest...
...Dick Cheney "The chilling danger created by President Bush's claim of wartime omnipotence to justify the NSA's eavesdropping is that the precedent will lie around like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of the incumbent or any successor who would reduce Congress to an ink blot...
...It is completely and facially unethical for Gonzales to head this investigation," says Jonathan Turley professor of constitutional law at George Washington University...
...Bush's policy "makes a mockery of the principle of separation of powers...
...At a December 19 press conference, he said his Administration bypassed going to a court and getting a warrant, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA), because he wanted to "move faster and quicker...
...Leaving aside the fact that the law already allows the government to move expeditiously and then seek a warrant seventy-two hours after the fact, Bush's excuse could have been used by any President at any time in our history to flout the law in a time of war...
...Instead, he has been vehemently defending that policy, citing both his authority under the Constitution as commander in chief and Congress's authorization to go after A Qaeda...
...This one is not...
...And Cheney fantasizes about a President completely unfettered...
...Faulting Congress for pursuing Reagan in the Iran-Contra scandal, Cheney said, "The President of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy...
...The Supreme Court was especially critical of Bush's end around the courts...
...He's President George Bush, not King George Bush...
...citizens Bush detained without charge or trial for more than two years...
...It may be that the Administration worried that some of its specific requests were simply too intrusive and expansive even for the pliant FISA court, and so Bush's people simply skirted the court...
...The NSAs spying, he added, was "totally appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the President...
...Just as Cheney urged Bush not to go to the United Nations, so, too, he urged Bush not to go to the FISA court...
...Senator Russ Feingold made this point quite well...
...It made what the Justice Department calls substantive modifications' to ninety-four of last year's requests- for example, reducing the scope, timing, or targets in the original application...
...So Bush, with Cheney and Gonzales whispering in each ear, defiantly says he's going to do whatever the hell he wants...
...Nor does he seem to be recusing himself from the leak investigation, as he has an obligation to do...
...that Bush ordered the National Security Agency to monitor "the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years," I expected Bush to deny it or to say he was going to review the policy...
...Second, and more importantly, when he was White House counsel, he was one of the architects of the NSA spying program...
...Even some conservatives who have often supported Bush have come out strongly against the NSA spying (though The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard applauded it...
...Gonzales, the chief law enforcement officer in the country, testified at his confirmation hearing in January 2005 that the President could disregard the law...
...Each is a fetter on Presidential power...
...Geoffrey Stone, University of Chicago law professor "If you're calling Aunt Sadie in Paris, we're probably not really interested...
...When The New York Times revealed on December 16 (after sitting on the story for a year and then omitting details at the request of Administration officials...
...Obviously, a decision as to whether or not to ignore a statute passed by Congress is a very very serious one, and it would be one that I would spend a great deal of time and attention [on] before arriving at a conclusion that, in fact, a President had the authority...
...A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in the court's majority opinion...
...The executive branch cannot unilaterally set the rules and enforce the rules, then eliminate court review of possible civil liberties violations," said Robert Levy, the libertarian Cato Institute's senior fellow in constitutional studies...
...But that didn't give Eisenhower or Kennedy permission to violate a citizen's right to privacy whenever they wanted to...
...citizens without a warrant proves he has placed himself above the law...
...And like Nixon in the Pentagon Papers case, Bush is trying to shift blame to the press and to the whistle-blowers, denouncing the leak as "shameful...
...If you replace Nixon's name with Bush's, the article still stands...
...The court has been subjecting the applications to closer examination," Richard Lacayo of Time magazine reported...
...Bruce Fein, writing in The Washington Times, January 4...
...First, he's an old crony of Bush's...
...Even Ashcroft recused himself from the Karl Rove case...
...But I suspect that the Bush decision to bypass the court had less to do with practicality and more to do with ideology: The Bush folks, especially Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, do not believe the President has to answer to anybody when it comes to his conduct as commander in chief...
...This is not how our democratic system of government works...
...The President believes that he has the power to override the laws that Congress has passed...
...The President's authorizing of NSA to spy on Americans is blatantly unlawful...
...So why didn't the President just go get this rubber stamp...
...The President swears an oath of office that he will uphold the Constitution and faithfully execute the laws of the land...
...Or it may not have wanted to do the paperwork...
...During the Cold War, for instance, Presidents needed to "move faster and quicker," too, since the Soviets had hundreds, then thousands, of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could annihilate the United States...
...Rather than investigating the leaker, Gonzales should be investigating himself-and Bush...
...One of the three articles of impeachment that came out of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 said: "Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens...
...Add this to the long list of other impeachable offenses-lying the country into war, torturing prisoners, exporting detainees for torture, paying columnists to propagandize the American public-that George W Bush has committed, and put it at the top...
...It's more dangerous than Clinton's lying under oath because it jeopardizes our democratic dispensation and civil liberties for the ages...
...The NSA spying scandal cries out for an impeachment inquiry...
...But, of course, he won't do that...
...Matthew Rothschild "Some legal questions are hard...
...The President does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow He is a President, not a king...
...These were the very same rationales that the Bush Administration put forward at the Supreme Court in the 2004 case of Yaser Hamdi, one of the U.S...
...She warned, in her own italics, of the danger of an approach that "serves only to condense power into a single branch of government...
...Our democracy cannot survive the assertion of Presidential power to be above the law...
...We haven't seen such disdain for our system of checks and balances since the days of Richard Nixon...
...Bush, however, keeps invoking the state of war as a justification...
...So much so that he and Chief of Staff Andrew Card had "to make an emergency hospital visit to John Ashcroft, then the Attorney General, to try to persuade him to give his authorization" to continued NSA spying after Ashcroft's deputy, James B. Comey refused to go along, according to The New York Times...
...Conservative legal scholar Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Administration, was even more blunt...
...Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute was on the same program and echoed Fein's comments...
...If President Bush is totally unapologetic and says I continue to maintain that as a wartime President I can do anything I want-I don't need to consult any other branches-that is an impeachable offense," he said on The Diane Rehm Show...
...Nor is he appointing a special prosecutor to look into the matter...
...When he signed the anti-torture law in late December, for instance, Bush reserved the right to ignore it, The Boston Globe reported...
Vol. 70 • February 2006 • No. 2
