The Abdication of George W. Bush Email
http://www.politicalcortex.com/story/2006/5/13/82335/
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By Devilstower 05/13/2006 08:23:35 AM EST We have no president.
This isn't a treatise on unlawful rulings around Florida 2000, or election chicanery in Ohio 2004. Neither is it a metaphorical thing, I'm not saying that 'this man is not my president.' No, I'm saying the role of America president is vacant.
It wasn't the left that created this void. There's been no citizen's impeachment. It's not even the shrinking percentage of Americans that have any faith in this administration that left the office empty.
George W. Bush abdicated his role.
Most people are all too familiar with the idea that the American government is broken into three branches. They're even pretty handy at defining the roles of the legislative branch (crafting the laws) and the judicial branch (interpreting how those laws apply to specific situations). But when it comes to the executive branch, that's when things get muddy for a lot of Americans.
Presidents lead, they inspire, they... what is it they do?
The actual role of the executive branch is as easily defined as that of the other branches: the president is charged with seeing that the laws are carried out. Though the title of 'chief law enforcement officer' is now often associated with the attorney general, in truth that's not only one of the president's roles, it's his principle role. The president may hold the 'bully pulpit' to advocate for changes in the laws, but he neither creates them nor determines how the laws are to be applied. The president is the nation's top policeman.
The president serves other purposes, but seeing that the laws are carried out is his principle authority. He is not an executive in the sense of a corporate CEO. He's an executive because it's his job to see that the laws are executed. It's this role that George W. Bush has abandoned.
Instead, Bush has taken the role of both legislative and judicial branches by placing his own interpretation on hundreds of laws and declaring that he will not enforce them as written.
President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.
Having a top law enforcement officer who refuses to enforce the law seems worthy of investigation, but Bush has also seen to it that the gears of justice have been jammed. Nowhere does this show more clearly than in the astounding end to the Bush justice department's investigation into the NSA spying case.
In a letter to [Representative] Hinchey , who has been the most dogged congressional advocate for investigation of the spying program, Office of Professional Responsibility counsel H. Marshall Jarrett explained that he had closed the Justice Department probe on Tuesday because his office's requests for security clearances to conduct the investigation had been denied.
'I am writing to inform you that we have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,' Jarrett explained in his letter to Hinchey. 'Beginning in January 2006, this office made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. On May 9, 2006, we were informed that our requests had been denied. Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation.'
Be clear what is happening here. The NSA, which is part of the executive branch, refused to allow the Justice Department, also part of the executive, the ability to investigate whether laws had been broken. This has never happened in the history of the OPR office. Never.
If this were a city government, and the police chief refused to enforce the law, decided he could operate under his own laws, and blocked his own officers from investigating crime, would that city regard such a person as still being the chief of police? Can you be a law enforcement officer when you've taken the 'law enforcement' from your portfolio?
On a national level, there is a name for someone who refuses to operate under the law, refuses to be subject to the strictures of authority, and who refuses to allow any scrutiny of his rulings. But that name is not President.
KEYWORDS: seperation of powers, law enforcement, NSA, executive powers
