I just had to whip off this e-missive to my elected representatives:
Two pieces in the New York Times have grabbed my attention and raised my concern. The first is an article on how the Vice President’s office attempts to circumvent oversight into its operations. The second regards the pattern by which the President signs bills into law and then fails to allocate resources to actually enact them.
One of the most disconcerting trends to me over the last six years has been Congress’ inability to provide proper checks and balances over the executive branch of government.
I ask what steps you will take to bring these problems under control and to ensure that no one area of our government seize undue power.
It is important not to consider this a political story. This is a civics story. It’s about how our system works. This wasn’t a vast left-wing conspiracy developing this report. Read it for yourself. (If you skip the footnotes and the detailed appendices, it’s less than ten pages. Don’t be afraid.)
The GAO carefully classifies the types of objections, but have no doubt that in the public discourse, it will boil down to the debate over the theory of the Unitary Executive. (Note that the aforelinked Wikipedia entry is in search of an expert so if you know any you can send their way…)
The next several pages of hits on a google query for unitary executive are just about exclusively condemnations of the principle. I wonder if it’s a term that has been abandoned by those in its favor as too loaded? This isn’t something I know much about, so I’m not even sure how to search for arguments in favor of the theory. (It doesn’t seem to have been chosen as a topic on ConvinceMe.net yet.)
Kudos to Robert Byrd and John Conyers for soliciting the GAO’s report, and to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
for keeping watch on the Vice President’s office. I wish I saw my representatives names there.
(Curiously, the member list for the Oversight Committee links to each Democratic member’s official web site, but to none of the Republicans. They have their own site, republicans.oversight.house.gov That seems dysfunctional.)
Update: So, I’m still not a constitutional scholar, but I have to say that it took me all of ten minutes to conclude that this unitary executive stuff is hogwash. The language of the Constitution is really not that obscure. I simply reviewed two sections. Begin with Article II, Section 2, in which the powers of the President are enumerated. They are actually fairly limited. Furthermore, Section 3 instructs that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That does not suggest that he judge for himself the law, particularly when the Constitution explicitly grants the responsibility for crafting and interpreting the law to other branches. Finally, Article I, Section 8 specifically calls upon Congress to “make rules for the government.” Even the category of objections to do with the President’s role as Commander in Chief do not hold, as our armed forces are still subject to the law. Feel free to point me to arguments to the contrary — but this all seems fairly clear to me.
Seconding the kudos on the report. That article about Cheney wanting to shut own the NARA oversight office freaks me out. On an only barely related note … today I found out (as in, I never knew, not as in, this is a new development) that Congressional Research Service reports aren’t normally made public. There’s great project sponsored by the Center for Democracy and Technology that’s collecting ones that are leaked or released by members of Congress, and trying to get the practice changed. As is the ALA. Apparently the arguments against this run from wanting to protect the CRS from possibly lobbying and therefore bias, to giving members greater freedom to ask for reports without showing their hand, to just good old privelege. Some of them are pretty fascinating, like the one from last week about just what the oil companies have been doing with all that money they’re making on gas sales lately (linked from the Opencrs site linked above). Sometimes it’s cool hanging around the ALA.
Joe,
You’re right on the facts, but you’re wrong on the intention. The unitary executive theory is not intended to be taken seriously by people who care about the rule of law–it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s intended to be thrown out there as a distraction, as something for Bush partisans to bring up in discussion of his actions so that they can pretend there’s some disagreement about the scope of his powers.
It’s the intelligent design, “teach the controversy” approach to politics. And for six years, with a pliant media and a gutless opposition, it worked like a fucking charm.
Thanks for the feedback!
I guess my thought is that there is room to engage on this as if it isn’t so brazen. I suspect that there are some people who are “Bush sympathizers” if not full-on partisans who might find Levi’s language polarizing, but who if they come to the issue openly, would speak up against it.
Am I just a hopeless optimist?
Levi’s right. This radical regressive takeover has been in the works for decades; as this book review notes:
So I don’t know if you’re a “hopeless optimist” — I’ve found it easier to be a hopeful pessimist.