Lemur
01-10-2012, 23:16
This sort of belongs in News of the Weird, but in the end I figured it was too political. Anyway (http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/bushs-torture-lawyers-agree-obama-mad-power):
President Barack Obama has finally done something that makes even the Bush administration attorneys who helped craft the legal rationales for torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention tremble with fear: Last week, he made recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. [...]
David Addington, the former legal counsel to then-Vice President Dick Cheney who helped construct the legal justifications for Bush-era torture policies, argued the president had the "inherent" authority to ignore federal law when spying on American citizens, and put forth the novel view that the vice president's office is not a part of the executive branch and therefore not subject to congressional oversight, told the New York Times that Obama's recess appointments were "flabbergasting and, to be honest, a little chilling."
John Yoo, the former attorney with the Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel who suggested the president could order a child's testicles crushed, massacre a village of civilians or unilaterally suspend free speech in the event of a terrorist attack, also fears for the future of the republic if the president is able to bypass Senate procedural gimmicks meant to block recess appointments. At National Review, Yoo attacks Obama for his "abuse" of executive power in appointing Richard Cordray to head the CFPB.
There's a genuine legal argument over whether or not Obama has the authority to make recess appointments when the Senate is in pro forma sessions, even those explicitly designed to foil such appointments. As the New York Times' Charlie Savage has written, the appointments raise a number of questions: Whether the Senate is technically in session when it is incapable of conducting business, and what should happen when the Senate's constitutional authority to make its own rules clashes with the president's constitutional responsibility to keep the federal government running properly. At the very least, Democrats may come to regret setting this precedent when Republicans regain control of the White House, which could be very soon.
But John Yoo and David Addington are not good people to make these arguments. Watching two men who argued for years that the president could pick and choose which laws to follow wring their hands over Obama's recess appointments as an abuse of power is so absurd that one practically has to reach into fiction to find parallel analogies. If we could only get Lex Luthor's feelings on financial regulation or Emperor Palpatine's thoughts on the importance of checks and balances.
The Lemur's take: The senate should be able to stymie the executive branch, but they should pay a price for doing so. They want to filibuster? Fine, do it. Speak for eight hours at a time and days on end. Don't "indicate" that you'd like to filibuster and move on. That's for wimps.
Likewise, they want to prevent the executive from making recess appointments? Fine, but that means they have to stay in session, with a quorum of Senators not going on vacation. It's absurd that they can have virtual pretend sessions and declare that they're still in business.
If they want to block the business of governing the country, that's their right, but they can't do it the lazy way.
-edit-
And it's worth noting that this sort of dedicated obstructionism was what led another Senate (http://www.the-orb.net/textbooks/westciv/romanrevolution.html) to pave the way for dictatorship. Not saying that will happen here, just noting that when you actively demonstrate that an elected body can't get the job done, people become receptive to other methods of governance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar). Grover Norquist and his Optimate minions have a whiff of Cato about them.
President Barack Obama has finally done something that makes even the Bush administration attorneys who helped craft the legal rationales for torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention tremble with fear: Last week, he made recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. [...]
David Addington, the former legal counsel to then-Vice President Dick Cheney who helped construct the legal justifications for Bush-era torture policies, argued the president had the "inherent" authority to ignore federal law when spying on American citizens, and put forth the novel view that the vice president's office is not a part of the executive branch and therefore not subject to congressional oversight, told the New York Times that Obama's recess appointments were "flabbergasting and, to be honest, a little chilling."
John Yoo, the former attorney with the Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel who suggested the president could order a child's testicles crushed, massacre a village of civilians or unilaterally suspend free speech in the event of a terrorist attack, also fears for the future of the republic if the president is able to bypass Senate procedural gimmicks meant to block recess appointments. At National Review, Yoo attacks Obama for his "abuse" of executive power in appointing Richard Cordray to head the CFPB.
There's a genuine legal argument over whether or not Obama has the authority to make recess appointments when the Senate is in pro forma sessions, even those explicitly designed to foil such appointments. As the New York Times' Charlie Savage has written, the appointments raise a number of questions: Whether the Senate is technically in session when it is incapable of conducting business, and what should happen when the Senate's constitutional authority to make its own rules clashes with the president's constitutional responsibility to keep the federal government running properly. At the very least, Democrats may come to regret setting this precedent when Republicans regain control of the White House, which could be very soon.
But John Yoo and David Addington are not good people to make these arguments. Watching two men who argued for years that the president could pick and choose which laws to follow wring their hands over Obama's recess appointments as an abuse of power is so absurd that one practically has to reach into fiction to find parallel analogies. If we could only get Lex Luthor's feelings on financial regulation or Emperor Palpatine's thoughts on the importance of checks and balances.
The Lemur's take: The senate should be able to stymie the executive branch, but they should pay a price for doing so. They want to filibuster? Fine, do it. Speak for eight hours at a time and days on end. Don't "indicate" that you'd like to filibuster and move on. That's for wimps.
Likewise, they want to prevent the executive from making recess appointments? Fine, but that means they have to stay in session, with a quorum of Senators not going on vacation. It's absurd that they can have virtual pretend sessions and declare that they're still in business.
If they want to block the business of governing the country, that's their right, but they can't do it the lazy way.
-edit-
And it's worth noting that this sort of dedicated obstructionism was what led another Senate (http://www.the-orb.net/textbooks/westciv/romanrevolution.html) to pave the way for dictatorship. Not saying that will happen here, just noting that when you actively demonstrate that an elected body can't get the job done, people become receptive to other methods of governance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar). Grover Norquist and his Optimate minions have a whiff of Cato about them.