The King of Everything: Olbermann’s Commentary Tonight
By SusanUnPC on February 26, 2007 at 2:17 PM in Current Affairs
“The president is always right.”—Steven Bradbury, U.S. Department of Justice lawyer, July 11, 2006.
“It’s not too far from King of Everything, really.”—Jan Frel, AlterNet, October 28, 2005.
– From Sourcewatch’s section on “Unitary Executive Theory,” pushed by Dick Cheney and his man David Addington
Tonight, Keith Olbermann will go after Condoleezza Rice …
Rice chastized the renegades in Congress who would dare to curb a renitent Bush administration by legislating troop withdrawal or revising the 2002 Iraq authorization. Olbermann’s Countdown newsletter quotes Rice on the revision of the authorization:
“It would be like saying that after Adolf Hitler was overthrown, we needed to change then, the resolution that allowed the United States to do that, so that we could deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown.”
If anyone can make sense of her statement, please be my guest. And, Keith, I’ll be watching. …
More from the excellent resource page at SourceWatch:
“Cheney has tried to increase executive power with a series of bold actions — some so audacious that even conservatives on the Supreme Court sympathetic to Cheney’s view have rejected them as overreaching,” Milbank wrote.
Less in the public eye are the sweeping controls over federal agencies, emanating from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). And I hope that Olbermann digs into the OMB story — it must be told. My friend Norma e-mailed this vital piece the other day:
Frank O’Donnell (of Clean Air Watch)
February 22, 2007Though the Senate stumbled in its effort to rein in President Bush’s war plans, at least the issue was thoroughly debated in the House and in the media. Now it’s time for Congress to directly confront the President again-this time on domestic policy.
I am referring specifically to a new executive order from the White House that collects more power in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in a bid to exert a chokehold on federal agencies. At one level, it’s a move that could undermine efforts to achieve such things as clean air and water, safe food and safer cars. But members of the House and Senate need to realize this is also an attempt to wrest power away from Congress. It’s reminiscent the Emperor Augustus’ move to neuter the Roman Senate by eroding its ability to control taxes. Congress needs to push back now-and hard. …
I wrote about the OMB power grab in April 2005 here at Daily Kos:
Dead By Sunset: Kill it, and make it look like an accident
by SusanHu
“Dead by Sunset” is the name of a lurid true crime book by Ann Rule about a sociopathic killer in Portland, Oregon. Brad Cunningham bludgeoned his estranged wife to death and then pushed “her van onto the Sunset Freeway in Oregon hoping cars would pile into the vehicle and the murder would look like a traffic accident.”
Kill it, and make it look like an accident. That’s the modus operandi of a provision of the new budget approved by Congress.
Buried deep in the reams of the new budget is a “sunset” provision that will permit a small commission — it will be a commission comprised of lobbyists and corporate executives — to kill the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, even the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The arch-assassin is Bush’s longtime friend Clay Johnson, “the most influential member of Bush’s inner circle whom you’ve never heard of,” and the Director of the obscure Office of Management and Budget. …
[...]
In “Bush’s Most Radical Plan Yet,” a May 2005 article in Rolling Stone, writer Osha Gray Davidson digs into the facets of the sunset provision and concludes that, “[w]Ith a vote of hand-picked lobbyists, the president could terminate any federal agency he dislikes”:
The proposal, spelled out in three short sentences, would give the president the power to appoint an eight-member panel called the “Sunset Commission,” which would systematically review federal programs every ten years and decide whether they should be eliminated. Any programs that are not “producing results,” in the eyes of the commission, would “automatically terminate unless the Congress took action to continue them.”
Note that the president is given the power to appoint the eight-member panel, which means the Sunset provision commission would “violate the constitutional separation of power between Congress and the executive branch, enabling the president to dismantle programs created by lawmakers.” …
[...]
Clay Johnson is an old hand at seizing power from bureaucratic government entities: …
(Read all.)
Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional law attorney and a popular blogger, has written a book on the unitary presidency: “How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok.” From the Buzzflash review:
BuzzFlash discussed with Greenwald how the modern media lack of attention span beyond a six-hour news cycle aids the Bush Administration in their illegal activities, because each new revelation of Constitutional violations washes away the previous ones. We have become a nation devoid of historical memory beyond the last news cycle.
But there is also the problem that the mainstream media tends to discount Bush lawbreaking, on the whole, because there is no Congressional investigative body or special prosecutor to issue subpoenas and findings of fact that would legally determine that the Bush Administration repeatedly breaks the law. [THIS was written before the Democratic victories in November 2006 and before Henry Waxman began his series of hearings.] In fact, a series of Boston Globe articles about how the White House defiantly has said it will ignore the Congressional intent of more than 750 laws (through aggressive signing statements) has largely been unreported by the rest of the mainstream press.
[...]
None less than the associate deputy general under Ronald Reagan has stated: “President Bush presents a clear and present danger to the rule of law.”
And John Dean, Nixon’s White House Attorney, writes of “How Would a Patriot Act”: “Glenn Greenwald has assembled a devastating bill of particulars against the Bush and Cheney administration’s insistence on operating outside the rule of law. Greenwald has gathered solid information and marshaled a litany of abuses of power that make Richard Nixon’s imperial presidency look timid.”
And I have a hardcore question for all of you. Since presidents — any president — don’t like to cede power, will any of the Democratic candidates to date, if elected, rescind any of Bush’s executive powers? And will they raise the unitary presidency as an issue during the campaigns?
by Ronald Scott
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