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Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The Imperial President at War

The Imperial President at War
Barack Obama continues the long, shameful trend of expanding executive power
Steve Chapman | April 11, 2011

After the 2008 election, Barack Obama was pondering the growth of presidential power. So, ABC News reported, he met with former Secretaries of State James Baker and Warren Christopher "about how to achieve more meaningful consultation between the president and Congress on the use of military force." Yes, he did. Then he went home and laughed till his ribs hurt.

Today, we know Obama's idea of "meaningful consultation" with Congress on such matters: First, he goes to war, and then he makes a rude gesture in the direction of Capitol Hill. Consult this, Boehner!

In this hypocrisy, I should note, he is indistinguishable from most of his former colleagues in Congress. When their party occupies the White House, they defend the president's absolute right to invade, bomb, or strafe any country on Earth. When the other party is in power, they whine and grouse, while doing nothing to impede him.

It's hard to decide which party is more unfaithful to its own principles. Obama, of course, said in 2008 that the president "does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." Last month, he blithely exercised that nonexistent power.

Democrats were largely responsible for the 1973 War Powers Act, which says that when the president sends U.S. forces into battle, he must get approval from Congress within 60 days or bring them home. It is a modest requirement that Obama evidently plans to ignore.

In a recent meeting with members of Congress, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked if the administration would respect the 60-day deadline, and she repeatedly dodged the question. When it was asked of Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, he said, "It's a question that cannot be answered in the abstract." Translation: Make me.

Republicans, meanwhile, have acquired a strange new respect for the notion that there are limits to the president's use of military force. This is a sentiment that surfaces in the GOP only when a Democrat becomes president.

It was Republican Richard Nixon, after all, who vetoed the War Powers Act, only to be overridden by Congress. When he sent troops into Lebanon, Ronald Reagan balked at complying.

Then there was George W. Bush, whose legal advisers insisted that the president has virtually unlimited authority in this realm. He requested congressional authorization for the Iraq war while insisting the Constitution gave him the right to invade on his own.

But after losing an election, the GOP takes a less expansive view. When President Clinton bombed Serbia in the 1999 Kosovo war, a group of mostly Republican members of Congress filed a lawsuit to make him end the war within 60 days, as mandated by the War Powers Act. (The courts threw it out.)

The bombing of Libya revived this desire to restrict White House discretion. Ten Republican senators voted for a resolution saying Obama had exceeded his constitutional authority.

You would think conservatives on Capitol Hill would be the most vocal opponents of letting the president make war anytime he wants. They believe judges should interpret the Constitution according to the intent of the framers, and the framers were not champions of the imperial presidency, particularly when it came to military matters.

It's been argued that Congress gets to decide only whether to "declare" war, an empty formality. But Abraham Sofaer, the top State Department lawyer under Reagan, wrote that nothing in the text "signifies an intent to allow the president a general authority to 'make' war in the absence of a declaration."

Those who drafted the Constitution "regarded war and peace as being as much, if not more, a legislative responsibility as an executive one," writes Jack Rakove of Stanford University, author of a history of the Constitutional Convention. "Nothing was left to prerogative but the president's implicit power 'to repel sudden attacks.'"

Save it for the faculty club, professor. In Washington, nobody cares. Today, war is at the sole whim of whoever sits in the Oval Office. One president after another has bulldozed the fences confining him, and each time, legislators have cheered him on or let him get away with it.

The result is that the Constitution's limits on the president have become a quaint irrelevance. Congress may not know much about the constitutional division of war powers, but it knows how to surrender.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/04/11/the-imperial-president-at-war

Re: 250 Legal Scholars Condemn Obama’s Treatment of Bradley Manning

So, can we then assume when the government comes for you, you are willing to surrender to their whims without having your day in court? Oh, ye who hides behind a moniker.

"'My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

On 04/12/2011 02:58 PM, Sage2 wrote:

             The scholars should be questioning Manning's culpability and mockery of himself and his country when he turned " quisling "! Not so long ago he would have faced a firing squad for treason. There is no " mockery " here ! He decided to expose various Government documents and know he is the one being exposed naked. Just getting a little of his own medicine.  ***************************************************************************************************************************************  On Apr 12, 2:58 pm, Jonathan Ashley <jonathanashle...@lavabit.com> wrote:

*250 Legal Scholars Condemn Obamaï¿½s Treatment of Bradley Manning*http://www.independent.org/blog/index.php?p=10140  "The Obama administration has detained the alleged Wikileaks whistleblower (sic) under torturous conditionsï¿½for almost a year, he has been subjected to solitary confinement in a windowless 6ï¿½12 cell for 23 hours a day, under constant surveillance, prevented from exercising, lacking a pillow or sheets. For the remaining hour every day, he is allowed to walk in circles in a somewhat larger cell, still without any human company. Every five minutes he is asked, ï¿½Are you OK?ï¿½ and must answer yes. Now he is being forced to sleep naked. Put together, his treatment constitutes cruel and unusual punishment without trial, protest 250 legal scholars, including preemenent (sic) liberal law professor Laurence Tribe, a man who taught Obama constitutional law, supported his 2008 campaign, and until recently worked as a Justice Department legal adviser. The letter draws scathing conclusions about his treatment, as well as about Obamaï¿½s personal culpability in this mockery of justice:"  ------------------------------------------------------------------------  Freedom Is Always Illegal.  Learn How To Protect Your Identity And Prevent Identity Theft <http://8f7ab0ybg8rx5p6mloffi9yw8t.hop.clickbank.net/>

Freedom Is Always Illegal.

Learn How To Protect Your Identity And Prevent Identity Theft

Re: 250 Legal Scholars Condemn Obama’s Treatment of Bradley Manning

The scholars should be questioning Manning's culpability
and mockery of himself and his country when he turned " quisling "!
Not so long ago he would have faced a firing squad for treason. There
is no " mockery " here !
He decided to expose various Government documents and know he is the
one being exposed naked. Just getting a little of his own medicine.

***************************************************************************************************************************************

On Apr 12, 2:58 pm, Jonathan Ashley <jonathanashle...@lavabit.com>
wrote:
> *250 Legal Scholars Condemn Obamaï¿½s Treatment of Bradley Manning*http://www.independent.org/blog/index.php?p=10140
>
> "The Obama administration has detained the alleged Wikileaks
> whistleblower (sic) under torturous conditionsï¿½for almost a year, he has
> been subjected to solitary confinement in a windowless 6ï¿½12 cell for 23
> hours a day, under constant surveillance, prevented from exercising,
> lacking a pillow or sheets. For the remaining hour every day, he is
> allowed to walk in circles in a somewhat larger cell, still without any
> human company. Every five minutes he is asked, ï¿½Are you OK?ï¿½ and must
> answer yes. Now he is being forced to sleep naked. Put together, his
> treatment constitutes cruel and unusual punishment without trial,
> protest 250 legal scholars, including preemenent (sic) liberal law
> professor Laurence Tribe, a man who taught Obama constitutional law,
> supported his 2008 campaign, and until recently worked as a Justice
> Department legal adviser. The letter draws scathing conclusions about
> his treatment, as well as about Obamaï¿½s personal culpability in this
> mockery of justice:"
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Freedom Is Always Illegal.
>
> Learn How To Protect Your Identity And Prevent Identity Theft
> <http://8f7ab0ybg8rx5p6mloffi9yw8t.hop.clickbank.net/>

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Fwd: Obama out front

Obama out front

Last week's threatened government shut down ended after midnight Friday with an extension of federal funding. It had something for everyone, with NPR and Planned Parenthood continuing to receive tax loot (even though NPR says it doesn't need it and the supporters of Planned Parenthood may spend more donating to candidates and campaigns who advocate tax funding for Planned Parenthood than the amount of the actual tax funding Planned Parenthood receives). But it trimmed $38 billion, though this deceptively includes a $12 billion cut from the earlier continuing resolution. This is a miniscule sum, compared to the $14 trillion federal debt, which is currently increasing several billion dollars a day. But President Obama adopted alien themes, disavowing his own budget proposal of 2 months ago, attempting to co-opt tea party language. and trying to appear to be leading the charge for deficit reduction. Though no one in the tea party believes in the sincerity of his semi-conversion, his language this week is anti-thetical to the Keynesian nostrums of Democratic guru, Nobel Laureate, and ENRON economic advisor Paul Krugman. Tea partiers were not fooled, and are now singing the Johnny Mathis standard "Too much, too little, too late" to both Obama and the Democrats and Boehner and the GOP incumbotacracy.

President Obama tried to claim victory by photo-op by doing a Rocky Balboa sprint up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (the Memorial was scheduled to be auctioned off to the Left's new boogeymen, the demonic Koch brothers, who were going to reassemble it on their private estate in Wichita, Kansas, had the government actually shut down).

The problem for Obama is that there are still budgets to be passed and budget debates acoming as well as a debate over raising the debt ceiling. How much will the Tea Party caucus cut in the next budget session? Obama's polls continue to slide (only 27% approve of his handling of the deficit), and aside from inflating asset prices (stocks, oil and other commodity futures), the economy remains moribund (with the exception of rents and real estate prices in the DC metropolitan area, a disparity not missed by voters and tax payers in fly over country).

Last week a columnist at the Blade excoriated gay voters in Maryland (a state with pro-gay lobby, "liberal" Democratic politicians like Senator Barbara Mikulski and Governor Martin O'Malley) for being too lazy to get gay marriage passed in the legislature. But perhaps gay (and other socially liberal) voters are simply more concerned with other issues: rising taxes, exploding debt, stagnant (un)employment, failing educrat-ran schools, accelerating inflation.

To date Obama's project has been to sell the public on the ideas, as Keynes said, "of some long-dead economist." But these ideas and policies have been questioned by a growing part of the electorate, who want to know: when you tax, borrow, or inflate (via the Federal Reserve) a dollar of purchasing power out of the economy to pay for "stimulus" projects, what happened to the job that dollar previously supported?

It's easy to see why gay voters who work in DC for government, lobbyists, and Beltway bandits have an interest in debt and "stimulus." But given that the party of debt may be losing the Senate and more gubernatorial and Congressional seats in 2012, why should voters in the rest of the country lash themselves to the mast of a sinking ship?

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Re: What the Hell is a Palestinian anyway?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbMvSdGloW0&feature=related

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