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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neeka who wrote (55010)	11/9/2008 2:18:43 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 224648

neeka, that's a very good point. The Executive Branch has gained WAY too much power under the Bush Administration and that is something which is very hard to roll back, because human nature is such that it will be a very special person who will restrain himself and give power back to the people. The path to dictatorship is a slippery slope. Once a President gets too powerful and we start electing Congress along with a President all from the same party, as we have just done, then the President can start to change the laws to suit his desires. We need to get more overtly protective of our Constitutional rights. I'll highlight a particularly truthful section of the article you posted... As it turned out, the power of the president soared to new heights under Bush. Many of the administration's most aggressive moves came in the realm of national security and the war on terror in particular. The Bush administration claimed the authority to deny captured combatants — U.S. citizens and aliens alike — such basic due-process rights as access to a lawyer. It created a detention facility on Guantánamo Bay that it declared was outside the jurisdiction of the federal courts and built a new legal system — without any input from Congress — to try enemy combatants. And it argued that the president's commander-in-chief powers gave him the authority to violate America's laws and treaties, including the Geneva Conventions. The assertion and expansion of presidential power is arguably the defining feature of the Bush years. Come January, the current administration will pass on to its successor a vast infrastructure for electronic surveillance, secret sites for detention and interrogation and a sheaf of legal opinions empowering the executive to do whatever he feels necessary to protect the country. The new administration will also be the beneficiary of Congress's recent history of complacency, which amounts to a tacit acceptance of the Bush administration's expansive views of executive authority. For that matter, thanks to the recent economic bailout, Bush's successor will inherit control over much of the banking industry. "The next president will enter office as the most powerful president who has ever sat in the White House," Jack Balkin, a constitutional law professor at Yale and an influential legal blogger, told me a few weeks ago.