King George Swats Pesky Congressional Flies

As if the revelations of the President's signing statement on the Patriot Act (in which he exempted himself from its requirements and limitations) wasn't worrisome enough, there is plenty more news today on the King George front.

Major revelations continue to unfold in the background...

Glenn Greenwald has details-

The Republicans and Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee submitted detailed questions to the Bush Administration regarding the NSA program, and the DoJ's responses to both the Democrats' questions and its responses to the Republicans' are now available.

There are numerous noteworthy items, but the most significant, by far, is that the DoJ made clear to Congress that even if Congress passes some sort of newly amended FISA of the type which Sen. DeWine introduced, and even if the President "agrees" to it and signs it into law, the President still has the power to violate that law if he wants to. Put another way, the Administration is telling the Congress -- again -- that they can go and pass all the laws they want which purport to liberalize or restrict the President's powers, and it does not matter, because the President has and intends to preserve the power to do whatever he wants regardless of what those laws provide...

Greenwald looks at the answer to the question on "whether President Carter's signature on FISA in 1978, together with his signing statement" meant the law was binding. The answer Republicans got from the Department of Justice stated that it didn't. The response stated specifically that the Constitution grants the President his "inherent" (and apparently, unlimited) powers and that no law made (even if the President signs and agrees to it) ultimately supercedes that inherent power,.

Scary, no?

Greenwald shares thoughts on that response-

None of [what Congress does] matters, because no matter what Congress or even the President do with regard to the law, the law does not restrict what the President can do in any way. They are telling the Congress to its face that all of the grand debates it is having and the negotiations it is conducting are all irrelevant farces, because no matter what happens, the President retains unlimited power and nothing that Congress does can affect that power in any way.

He also looks at the answer to a question on whether the President exceeded his power by interpreting the laws rather than simply just executing them as stated (in our system Congress makes the laws, the courts interpret them, and the President executes them). The Department of Justice's response (not surprisingly) was that he hadn't exceeded his authority. They state the President must be able to interpret laws as he sees fit in order to "defend the Constitution" as his job requires.

Paging Mr. Orwell, paging Mr. Orwell...

Of course, as Greenwald notes, the administration's power grab is not a shock. They came into office via a power grab and we've always known this the way they prefer to operate- above the Congress, above the courts, above the Constitution, and above the American people. What is shocking, though is the way that Congress and the media have reacted to all of this... ie., they haven't reacted much at all. Glenn ends with thoughts on this underlying problem-

[T]he most amazing aspect of all of this is not that the Administration is claiming these powers. It is that even as it claims them as expressly and clearly as can be, the Congress continues to ignore it and pretend that it still retains power to restrict the Administration by the laws it passes. And the media continues to fail in its duty to inform the country about the powers the Administration has seized, likely because they are so extreme that people still do not really believe that the Administration means what they are saying.

They mean it all right.

The President and his administration may the ones committing the deed, but unless the press or the Congress attempt to stop him, they are willing accomplices to the unraveling of the American system of government we were all taught in school was the bedrock of our democracy.