No Checks, Many Imbalances By George F. Will

[kpete]

No Checks, Many Imbalances

By George F. Will
Thursday, February 16, 2006; Page A27

The next time a president asks Congress to pass something akin to what Congress passed on Sept. 14, 2001 -- the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) -- the resulting legislation might be longer than Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Congress, remembering what is happening today, might stipulate all the statutes and constitutional understandings that it does not intend the act to repeal or supersede.

But, then, perhaps no future president will ask for such congressional involvement in the gravest decision government makes -- going to war. Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be. This monarchical doctrine emerges from the administration's stance that warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency targeting American citizens on American soil is a legal exercise of the president's inherent powers as commander in chief, even though it violates the clear language of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was written to regulate wartime surveillance.

Administration supporters incoherently argue that the AUMF also authorized the NSA surveillance -- and that if the administration had asked, Congress would have refused to authorize it. The first assertion is implausible: None of the 518 legislators who voted for the AUMF has said that he or she then thought it contained the permissiveness the administration discerns in it. Did the administration, until the program became known two months ago? Or was the AUMF then seized upon as a justification? Equally implausible is the idea that in the months after Sept. 11, Congress would have refused to revise the 1978 law in ways that would authorize, with some supervision, NSA surveillance that, even in today's more contentious climate, most serious people consider conducive to national security.

Anyway, the argument that the AUMF contained a completely unexpressed congressional intent to empower the president to disregard the FISA regime is risible coming from this administration. It famously opposes those who discover unstated meanings in the Constitution's text and do not strictly construe the language of statutes.

The administration's argument about the legality of the NSA program also has been discordant with its argument about the urgency of extending the USA Patriot Act. Many provisions of that act are superfluous if a president's wartime powers are as far-reaching as today's president says they are.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/15/AR2006021502003.html

[Burried News]

1. Jeebus - saints be preserved, even George Shill has had enough.

http://www.e-gnu.com/country_info/south_africa/imagessouthafrica/highveld/madikwe/DungBeetle_Jaci'sSafariLodge.jpg

[FearofFutility]

9. I couldn't believe it when I read it this am

I thought maybe he was a different George Will.

[Burried News]

10. George Will is afraid of an unchecked Dick.

PS I had to pull the article before I could believe that the willfully obstinate Will actually wrote it.

[screembloodymurder]

13. Me too!

I never thought he'd speak out against the regime, but I think he's starting to see imminent the destruction of our system.

[kentuck]

11. Read the last two paragraphs...

<snip>
Immediately after Sept. 11, the president rightly did what he thought the emergency required, and rightly thought that the 1978 law was inadequate to new threats posed by a new kind of enemy using new technologies of communication. Arguably he should have begun surveillance of domestic-to-domestic calls -- the kind the Sept. 11 terrorists made.

But 53 months later, Congress should make all necessary actions lawful by authorizing the president to take those actions, with suitable supervision. It should do so with language that does not stigmatize what he has been doing, but that implicitly refutes the doctrine that the authorization is superfluous.

[Burried News]

14. Ughh - the details are in the CONvolutions. nt

[txindy]

15. So, in other words, Junior has been right all along, but Congress is slow?

They haven't given him their rubber stamp fast enough? Is that what he's saying?

[rodeodance]

2. pass it on to friend and foe alike.

[Inland]

3. Well, duh.

With this president, anything congress does or doesn't do is bandied about as justification for what the president might want to do, not that he is obligated to say what that might be, just that it has been legally okayed in the abstract.

Thanks for stating the obvious from the day the torture memos leaked. This president acts lawlessly.

[underpants]

6. Their cut 'n' paster arguments actually make LESS since

than Dick's timeline and that is saying something.

Even Will can't back that BS.

[underpants]

4. ob·du·ra·cy

ob·du·ra·cy (bdr--s, -dyr-) KEY

NOUN:

The state or quality of being intractable or hardened

http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/obduracy

[HereSince1628]

5. So who listens to paleocons, anyway?

Republicans are about to win an infamous place in history, if they don't do something besides provide Bush with ex post facto relief from his illegal behavior.

They are going to go down in history as the party which could have stopped but chose to enable the rise of the unitary presidency. You know the presidency with the power of Executive, legislative and judiciary power, the sort of thing people all over the world will recognize as the first US dictatorship.

[Toots]

7. So What? Republican controlled Congress will do nothing so moot point

It is nice to have such a staunch Conservative see things as they should be but nobody will notice...

[Skidmore]

8. These people who pooh-poohed, tut-tutted, and downright insulted

and shouted down any criticism made against * and his crew are deserving special disdain. I detest these people the most. They are the ones who countenanced much deceipt and crime to be associated with power. George Will needs to do much more than write a few dissenting paragraphs--he needs to get out there and actively work to derail this juggernaut that he helped set into motion.

[Burried News]

12. Maybe with Abramoff in jail George Shill isn't getting his usual monthly

check.

When do you turn Tony?

[screembloodymurder]

16. Don't worry he's about to be put on a list.

He'll pay for his dissent.

[Hamlette]

17. the money quote

The administration, in which mere obduracy sometimes serves as political philosophy, pushes the limits of assertion while disdaining collaboration. This faux toughness is folly

arrogant as he is, he does have a way with words.

(As to the last two paragraphs, note that he says "with suitable supervision". That's the diff.)