Earlier this month, Bush received a new homeland security law from the US congress requiring the next head of FEMA (a presidential appointed position) to have at least five years of experience in disaster management. Bush’s signing statement said he reserves the right to appoint anybody he wants and he wouldn’t allow this new bill to cut into his authority.
Resident Bush is notable for issuing more “signing statements” than all 42 previous US presidents combined - over 750 of them. A signing statement is the signer’s way of saying “here are the reasons why I may not follow this” law or mandate.
The signing statements are a good thing. The President shouldn’t be giving away the authority he has. The future Presidents (including the future Democrat Presidents) will be thanking him.
These aren’t Congressional appointments. They’re Presidential appointments. The President has the right and the expectation to make a cabinet and administration as he sees fit. Congress can keep their grubby desires out of it. To give in to Congress meddling like that just weakens the Presidency.
Now whether the President chooses wisely is another matter. But that’s up to the President.
And it doesn’t change the fact that Louisiana, New Orleans, and the surrounding area brought much of the failures on themselves through poor planning and poor preparation and poor enforcement of proper levee design and construction.
I’m not falling for it, JC. The executive wasn’t ever intended to wield the level of power Resident Bush and VP Satan, er, Cheney claim for themselves. They are angling toward monarchy at this point.
Congress is always trying to exert power and influence over the Presidency. And the Presidency is likewise always aiming to do the same to Congress. They’re always gaming even when they’re the same party. Both branches want what’s in their best interest.
It would be a failure of a President to give in to all demands and grubby meddling by the Congress. And that’s not the kind of failure you want. One day you’ll have a Democrat President and that President will be hating things if the previous Presidents all gave in and rolled over for Congress.
So I don’t see it as a bad thing when a President sticks up for the office through the use of executive orders, signing statements, and the like. I may not always agree with the executive orders and such, but the fact that the President can do it is part of being President.
In the article cited by Steve Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a republican said:
“Congress sets job requirements for officials from the U.S. solicitor general to the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”
I called Sen. Collins’ office. They were unable to provide a citation in law for the statement but stood by it. They referred me to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and transferred me there. A staffer there also couldn’t cite the law but said it was based on the Advice and Consent clause of the U.S. Constitution.
They referred me to the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and transferred me there. The staffer there agreed that the law was such that the Senate can set requirements for cabinet and agency staff, but again could not cite the law. I was transferred to the chief counsel for the committee where I left a message asking for a citation of the law that gives the congress the right to legislate agency and cabinet job requirements.
What you call gaming, John, I think is commonly referred to as checks and balances. The framers of the constitution expected and recognized the inevitability of power grabbing and tried to design a document to deal with it.
It is a matter of opinion, of course, but it is my opinion that our current president is not so much interested in protecting the Presidency as he is in protecting the president and his administration. Certainly he is not interested in protecting the citizenry. It has taken quite some time but even members of his own party in congress, who for too long to the detriment of their own branch of government walked lock step in line with him, are finally coming around.
I’m not proposing to do away with checks and balances. I do, however, believe that a strong Presidency is better than a weak one. If the Presidents allow Congress to continually chip away then gradually the Presidency will get weaker.
The President only gets 4 years (actually a little less since they have to prepare for re-election after the 3 year mark) to have an impact and get their vision and platform in action. If you have a weakened Presidency then not much will be able to get done.
In the balance of power struggle I tend to favor the Presidency. It is still very important to have the checks and balances and they need to work. But in the general gaming of interpreting rules and laws to favor Congress or the Presidency I will tend to side with the Presidency.
Yes I’ll complain about Presidential powers when a Democrat is in office, but you take the good with the bad. I’m principled enough about this that I realize you can’t say Presidential powers for me (Republicans) but not for you (Democrats).
First of all, the signing statements are chipping away the other direction. That is, they’re taking constitutional power AWAY from congress and giving more than was intended to the exec.
The best argument against giving the exec. extra powers is that Bush’s “vision and platform” is in action. The disastrous last 6 years is why the exec shouldn’t have extra power.
For the record, I don’t want dem or repub presidents to have a right to signing statements or line-item vetos.
Isn’t that usually a right wing complaint, Billy? I swear it comes word for word from any random right wing talk radio transcript.
Further, as I recall, Louisiana had been trying and failing to get the levees upgraded and repaired for quite some time, and more recently has complained that the new levees are as poorly built as the old ones.
Speaking of checks and balances; where does the New York Extreme Court get off mandating that the legislature of New York pass a gay marriage / union law within 90 days.
I should think that the legislature would “friz up” like a halloween cat at the very thought that the court would order them to pass any law regardless of how they think about the issues involved.
Will the New York Extreme Court hold the legislature in contempt if they don’t pass one? What penalties can they impose?
It is not a belief I begrudge you, but I would favor the balance of power to tip toward the larger body of legislators rather than an individual, or pair of individuals, since Cheney has raised the bar of VP power.
I don’t agree. Where the president is an individual, it’s easy to point a finger and say “Hey, you’re getting out of line.” If Congress gets out of line, they can sit there and point fingers at each other for years before actually deviating from their out-of-line path. Congress has the advantage of longer terms, but the disadvantage (to us) of anonymity.
That’s the impression I get as well. They are buliding themselves a little castle, and though they talk about long-term concepts (like “staying the course”), I’ve never noticed any mention of the balance of power generically. It seems personal, just like his choice of the pre-Katrina director of FEMA. Any argument about whether or not he sucked? Yes, New Orleans was ill-prepared for the disaster, but all the more reason FEMA should be able to cope–or at least communicate–when the need arose.
Republican lawyer investigator Stuart W. Brown sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges and exposed disastrously poor construction work by Haliburton.
He discovered the military did not properly track thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.
Bush just fired Brown for embarrassing the Bush administration.
Front page, today, NYTimes Headline: Auditor in Iraq finds job gone after exposes. House G.O.P. quietly, is closing agency.
Editorial Desk; SECTA
As Bechtel Goes ---- By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times via Factiva News and Business Information Service November 3, 2006
Bechtel, the giant engineering company, is leaving Iraq. Its mission – to rebuild power, water and sewage plants – wasn’t accomplished: Baghdad received less than six hours a day of electricity last month, and much of Iraq’s population lives with untreated sewage and without clean water. But Bechtel, having received $2.3 billion of taxpayers’ money and having lost the lives of 52 employees, has come to the end of its last government contract.
As Bechtel goes, so goes the whole reconstruction effort. Whatever our leaders may say about their determination to stay the course complete the mission, when it comes to rebuilding Iraq they’ve already cut and run. The $21 billion allocated for reconstruction over the last three years has been spent, much of it on security rather than its intended purpose, and there’s no more money in the pipeline.
The failure of reconstruction in Iraq raises three questions. First, how much did that failure contribute to the overall failure of the war? Second, how was it that America, the great can-do nation, in this case couldn’t and didn’t? Finally, if we’ve given up on rebuilding Iraq, what are our troops dying for?
There’s no definitive way to answer the first question. You can make a good case that the invasion of Iraq was doomed no matter what, because we never had enough military manpower to provide security. But the lack of electricity and clean water did a lot to dissipate any initial good will the Iraqis may have felt toward the occupation. And Iraqis are well aware that the billions squandered by American contractors included a lot of Iraqi oil revenue as well as U.S. taxpayers’ dollars.
Consider the symbolism of Iraq’s new police academy, which Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, has called ‘‘the most essential civil security project in the country.’’ It was built at a cost of $75 million by Parsons Corporation, which received a total of about $1 billion for Iraq reconstruction projects. But the academy was so badly built that feces and urine leak from the ceilings in the student barracks.
Think about it. We want the Iraqis to stand up so we can stand down. But if they do stand up, we’ll dump excrement on their heads.
As for how this could have happened, that’s easy: major contractors believed, correctly, that their political connections insulated them from accountability. Halliburton and other companies with huge Iraq contracts were basically in the same position as Donald Rumsfeld: they were so closely identified with President Bush and, especially, Vice President Cheney that firing or even disciplining them would have been seen as an admission of personal failure on the part of top elected officials.
As a result, the administration and its allies in Congress fought accountability all the way. Administration officials have made repeated backdoor efforts to close the office of Mr. Bowen, whose job is to oversee the use of reconstruction money. Just this past May, with the failed reconstruction already winding down, the White House arranged for the last $1.5 billion of reconstruction money to be placed outside Mr. Bowen’s jurisdiction. And now, finally, Congress has passed a bill whose provisions include the complete elimination of his agency next October.
The bottom line is that those charged with rebuilding Iraq had no incentive to do the job right, so they didn’t.
You can see, by the way, why a Democratic takeover of the House, if it happens next week, would be such a pivotal event: suddenly, committee chairmen with subpoena power would be in a position to investigate where all the Iraq money went.
But that’s all in the past. What about the future?
Back in June, after a photo-op trip to Iraq, Mr. Bush said something I agree with. ‘‘You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered,’’ he declared. ‘‘You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on behalf of the Iraqi people.’’ But what those measures actually show is the absence of progress. By any material measure, Iraqis are worse off than they were under Saddam.
And we’re not planning to do anything about it: the U.S.-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is basically over. I don’t know whether the administration is afraid to ask U.S. voters for more money, or simply considers the situation hopeless. Either way, the United States has accepted defeat on reconstruction.
Yet Americans are still fighting and dying in Iraq. For what? — Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
The Senate has longer terms, but the House has shorter terms.