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.