Day: January 9, 2006

No court alone can do the job of protecting liberty from the exercise of executive power. For that most important of tasks, the people’s elected representatives need to be actively involved. When we let them abdicate this role, the violations start to multiply, and we get the secret surveillance and the classified renditions and the unnamed torture that we all recognize as un-American. Our Constitution has changed enormously over the last two centuries, and it is sure to change much more in the future. Just how it changes, though, is up to us.

Feldman details how presidential power has increased and changed over the centuries since the framing of the Constitution. He points out that “the framers would no sooner have been governed by a democratically elected president than by a king who got his job through royal succession.” (He also does a good job of explaining why the 2nd ammendment really isn’t about guns, but was rather a safety-check against the fear “that a standing army at the president’s beck and call would encourage him to subvert legislative independence by force”.)

But he also offers solutions for a re-assertion of Congressional authority — something that’s vitally important when we have a sitting President who continues to thumbs his nose at the very idea of that authority, when he continues to think of himself and his administration as above the law. Bush didn’t invent the idea of the independent president, the chief executive with the authority to act without the approval of Congress. But he’s taken it to an absurd and dangerous level.

John is right: the time has come for Bush supporters to explain how George W. Bush is not a dictator.