The role of Congress in checking the power of the president

[babylonsister]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0405/p09s01-coop.html?page=1

The role of Congress in checking the power of the president

Legislators' failure to maintain the balance of powers has contributed to present troubles.
By Pat M. Holt

Page 1 of 2

ARLINGTON, VA. - Poor President Bush. He was only trying to defeat terrorists and spread democracy, and here he is up to his neck in Democrats and bad news.

The Army has shamefully neglected wounded veterans. Many soldiers in Iraq who have not been either killed or wounded have had their tours extended. They are fighting with equipment that is ready for retirement or soon will be. When the president sent more troops, some of them minimally trained, in a surge to end the violence, the violence continued.

The Justice Department fired eight US attorneys and can't get its stories straight about why. Did the initiative originate in Justice or from the White House?

The CIA ran secret prisons abroad where it was beyond the reach of US law. In Iraq, several US soldiers were caught abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The US recently built a new prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where, it says, the president can do as he pleases. The vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, has been convicted of lying about when and how he learned of Valerie Plame's status as a CIA officer. When Mr. Bush traveled to Uruguay, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez went to Argentina to organize anti-American demonstrations. And the FBI has been basing applications for search warrants on inaccurate information. The list goes on.

Some of these are only embarrassments. The misdeeds of the CIA and FBI are more serious. They violate basic American values long enshrined in the Constitution. By thus erasing the difference between us and the enemy, we are already losing the war on terror.

The FBI's behavior reflects the culture embedded in the bureau by its founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, who, in the words of former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "never took orders from an attorney general, rarely from a president, and only occasionally from God." An example is the bureau's harassment of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) during the Iran-contra affair in the 1980s. The Senate Intelligence Committee (those were the days when oversight committees oversaw) reported that the FBI made 178 investigations of people connected with CISPES. These generated files on 1,330 groups and 2,375 individuals. In 1989, Sen. William Cohen (R) of Maine, then ranking minority member of the committee, joined in demanding that the bureau's CISPES files be destroyed. Instead, the bureau sent them to the National Archives. A federal judge found in 1991 that the FBI continued to investigate CISPES after having been ordered to stop in 1985.

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[Bitwit1234]

1. Why don't we do this

contact all the democratic websites. Get them to post the message that we want bush and cheney impeached now...ask them to tell their viewers to send a letter to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid telling them we have had enough and IMPEACHMENT MUST GO ON THE ""TABLE"".

Let us all pick a date... say the first Monday in May - or so on...Have everybody mail a letter to that effect on that date. Of course some will get there sooner and some later but for the whole week they will receive letters requesting impeachment. Can you think what kind of effect that would have on congress. I remember "Mr Smith Goes to Washington" and the effect of all those bags of mail being delivered. The mail won't go to the house floor but it will to there offices. I know we have signed lots of petitions and sent email but this seems like a very effective way to let them know we have had enough. And if all the sites got together can you imagine the volume of mail we could send..

[babylonsister]

2. I actually love that idea; it's getting someone to ride herd on the sites

that might be the problem.
I'll gladly write a letter; give me a date and I'm there!

Edit to add: I loved your reminder of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, having seen the movie recently. The letters surely did have an impact.