Dems Repubs both like powerful Presidents

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Accountable
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Joined: Mon May 30, 2005 8:33 am

Dems Repubs both like powerful Presidents

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Our congress needs to read our Constitution every now & then and dial back presidential powers. Our system of checks and balances have grown out of balance ... unchecked.



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Presidential power has grown exponentially in the six decades since Truman augmented the national security apparatus responsive to the president by creating the National Security Council and the CIA. He, however, was crucial to the magnification of the president's war powers.



A 1948 photo here shows Truman delivering a campaign speech in Los Angeles. Seated near the lectern is the man who had introduced Truman, 37-year-old Ronald Reagan. Between Truman's and Reagan's presidencies, between the dawn and dusk of what John Kennedy called the Cold War's “long twilight struggle,” Americans accepted extravagant — or so the Founders would have thought — assertions of presidential powers. These assertions have been made by presidents of both parties, but have been intensified by the current president in the context of “the long war” against terrorists.



At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, only one delegate (from ever-bellicose South Carolina, naturally) favored vesting presidents with an unfettered power to make war. Presidents, it was then thought, could respond on their own only to repel sudden attacks on the nation. “The Founders,” says former Rep. David Skaggs, a Colorado Democrat, “counted on the competitive ambitions of the three branches to make checks and balances work.” Instead, we have seen Congress' powers regarding war “migrate ignominiously to the executive.”



A crucial event in the migration was Truman's decision to wage war in Korea, taken without Congress and never formally ratified by Congress, other than post facto by enabling appropriations, which are not an adequate substitute for the collaborative decision the Constitution's Framers anticipated for war-making. Since Korea, America has engaged in three major wars (Vietnam, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom) and many other exercises of military force, but Congress' constitutional powers relevant to war-making have atrophied from disuse. Both presidents Bush declared congressional assent unnecessary even while they were seeking it, in 1991 and 2002, respectively. Congress' passivity in the face of such constitutional impertinences has amounted to the silent repeal of the relevant constitutional provisions.



Because contemporary conservatism was born partly in reaction against two liberal presidents — against FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society — conservatives, who used to fear concentrations of unchecked power, valued Congress as a bridle on strong chief executives. But, disoriented by their reverence for Reagan, and sedated by Republican victories in seven of the last 10 presidential elections, many conservatives have not just become comfortable with the idea of a strong president, they have embraced the theory of the “unitary executive.”



This theory, refined during the Reagan administration, is that where the Constitution vests power in the executive, especially power over foreign affairs and war, the president is rightfully immune to legislative abridgements of his autonomy. Judicial abridgements are another matter.



When in 1952 Truman, to forestall a strike, cited his “inherent” presidential powers during wartime to seize the steel mills, the Supreme Court rebuked him. In a letter here that he evidently never sent to Justice William Douglas, Truman said, “I don't see how a Court made up of so-called ‘liberals' could do what that Court did to me.” Attention, conservatives: Truman correctly identified a grandiose presidency with the theory and practice of liberalism.

gmc
Posts: 13566
Joined: Sun Aug 29, 2004 9:44 am

Dems Repubs both like powerful Presidents

Post by gmc »

In the interests of provoking amicable if passionate debate.

Dwight d Eisenhower

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.








Benito Mussolini

Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power


So is America in danger of becoming a fascist stete?
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