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US Presidents on Presidential Power
Tod Landis writes "Responding to George Bush's statement that he will preserve executive power for his "predecessors", I've assembled a
collection of quotes from those predecessors. Most saw executive power differently..."
Poetateoe
politics.slashdot.org = Bush Bashing?
Smooth.
What, has slashdot become so anti-Bush that we're taking plain text documents written by the submitter as "news" in the politics section now?
While I admit this is a good resource, the predecessor mistake was *YEARS* ago- this is hardly new or any more relevant than yet another "Bush is an idiot" post. Those of us who care about intelligence in a president already know Bush is an idiot- those who don't care just like the fact that they've got a president with the same intelligence and learning disabilities that they have. This issue isn't going to change anybody's vote one way or the other.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I'm no fan of the Dub, but any collection of quotes can easily manipulated to suit your viewpoint via selection bias. It would be better to examine the actions previous presidents took with regard to defending the presidential "turf."
Ceci n'est pas un post.
These quotes seem to suggest it's unconstitutional for anyone other than Congress to declare war.
Congress still has (and did have) the right to declare war, and they turned it over to Bush to use at his disposal. (In theory, at least, I don't think he actually declared anything.)
Why not a collection of quotes about how Congresspeople are lemmings?
gears? we don't need no stinking gears.
Can someone please provide context for that quote by Bush?
I can only find quotes of that individual sentence. I can't even tell what executive powers he says he's preserving, so, as a raving liberal, I can't even tell why this quote means I should hate Bush.
What executive powers?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I'm sitting here with a book on my desk call "Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents" by Richard E. Neustadt. Perhaps you should read it. It's very easy to pick & choose random quotes & show an agreement that's really not there. Give me a few minutes & I could create a list of quotes that shows that Bush has a very conservative view of President Power.
In case you're seriously interested, a few other good books are
"The Paradox of the American Presidency" by Thomas E. Cronin
and
"The Ferocious Engine of Democracy" (2 volumes) by Michael P. Riccards.
Is the the Politics section of /. or the Kerry cheering section? I thought that the editors said they would have a balanced selection of stories in this section?
/.? I wish they would hurry up and close the pending sale.
WTF has happened to
Doesn't CmdrTaco have a personal blog somewhere to bash Bush instead of doing so on what was once a good news site?
Not only are the quotes out of context, but they are used in error. Furthermore, congress hasn't declared war since WWII, so it's hard to pretend that Bush doesn't have any precedent if he did go in without approval. Of course, there was approval so this whole "news story" is a farce. Way to go and pull a Dan Rather. At least he finally had to apologize.
Can we mod an entire article as -1 flamebait? Please? And I don't even like the shrub....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
This article has nothing to do with "executive power".
The President has the power to write "Executive Orders". These were meant to be used as quick action rules to act on certain situations before congress and the Senate could debate and decide on a proper strategy (because committees are slow).
Congress has been trying to restrict those abilities and THAT'S what Bush is defending.
WAR POWERS (which W is NOT talking about in his quote) are a still hotly debated topic. Executive Orders can be used to facilitate combat (as has been done with Iraq) but the President has combat powers above and beyond the Executive Orders so restricting those doesn't necessarily stop the other.
Bush is not the first to have done this. Clinton did it with Bosnia, Bush Sr. did it with Panama, Reagan did it with Grenada, etc;
The whole power structure of wars, waging wars, military action, etc is still a hotly debated topic in congress and this article does no justice in bringing out the real issues.
Oh, well. At least the color scheme here doesn't make you blind.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Notice that there are no quotes that occurred in the last 30 years. I'm pretty sure that when Bush refers to his predecessors, he's thinking more of Clinton/Bush/Reagan/Carter, not Washington/Adams/Jefferson.
I think he, Bush, isn't as familiar with the first group as he is with the second. Congress alone has the power to declare war, that's why you see modern American wars called anything but that. Police Actions? Use it in a sentence? Yes, history recalls the tragic mistake of the "Vietnam Police Action".
Orwellian really.
-dameron
---- DailyHaiku.com saying more in 17 syllables than Bill O'Reilly says all day.
And I have gone to the trouble of examining each quote only to find it misapplied.
You mean that Bush should have ... gotten congressional authority before he went to war? You mean ... like he did in Iraq and Afghanistan?
"You mean that Bush should have ... gotten congressional authority before he went to war? You mean ... like he did in Iraq and Afghanistan?"
"You mean that Bush should have ... gotten congressional authority before he went to war? You mean ... like he did in Iraq and Afghanistan?"
"You mean that Bush should have ... gotten congressional authority before he went to war? You mean ... like he did in Iraq and Afghanistan?"
"You mean that Bush should have ... gotten congressional authority before he went to war? You mean ... like he did in Iraq and Afghanistan?"
"You mean that Bush should have ... gotten congressional authority before he went to war? You mean ... like he did in Iraq and Afghanistan?"
"You mean that Bush should have ... gotten congressional authority before he went to war? You mean ... like he did in Iraq and Afghanistan?"
"You mean that Bush should have ... gotten congressional authority before he went to war? You mean ... like he did in Iraq and Afg
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
authorized Bush to go after Iraq. He did not make the choice on his own. The House of Representatives voted 296-133 in favor and the Senate voted 77-23 in favor. How was this a unilateral decision on Bush's part?
/.
More Bush Bashing on
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
Despite my consummate dislike for Bush (Sr, Jr, whatever), I don't read the same "Bushism" into his statement. You have to consider that Presidents, whether in power or out of power, have quite a lot of executive protection that extends well past their term(s) in office. I suggest that perhaps Bush was simply stating that he intended to protect these extended post-term executive powers. This is actually a fairly common statement, since the current president would want the same treatment once he/she is no longer in office.
I am getting quite tired of the baseless claims that people are making. We complain and complain because of the poison that is in politics. Well, let's get our act together and fix it.
Starting right now, let's all be a lot more civil.
Despite our political differences, we are all countrymen, in the national sense and in the sense that we all live in this world. We should respect each other and never ever attack someone's character. Let their actions speak for their character. People will be smart enough to judge for themselves. This includes everyone from John Kerry to George Bush to Saddam Hussein down to everybody in this forum.
We are all able to share our opinions. When we do, let's be clear by prefacing such statements with "I believe" or "I think" or "My opinion is". Let's never ever try to represent opinion as fact.
When we do discuss fact and logic, let's be very careful to get things right the first time. Quote your sources accurately.
The way you attack factual and logical arguments is by attacking the individual claims. For instance, if I claimed that Sadr City is now peaceful, you would attack that claim by showing me reports that it is not. You wouldn't attack that claim by calling me a liar.
If you want to end the poison in politics, you end it with yourself first. Here are my points again.
1. NEVER attack a person or their character.
2. ALWAYS preface your opinions with "It is my opinion that..." or "I feel that...".
3. ALWAYS support claims of fact with evidence, and always quote that evidence accurately. Show your logic in clear steps.
4. ALWAYS attack the claims and the logical steps people make with more or contrary evidence.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Aiieee! The boomers are coming! The boomers are coming!
Sound the alarm! Bring out our boomers! Yeah, even the baby boomers!
Fellowship 9/11
Okay, so there's a bunch of quotes from previous United States Presidents about how the president can only send troops to war if Congress has approved such military action.
Exactly as they did in the case of Iraq.
As one Senator in particular put it, in a September 2002 New York times op-ed, "If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement... even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act."
On October 11, that Senator voted to authorize military action in Iraq. A majority of his colleagues on Capitol Hill did likewise, and Congress passed the measure authorizing Bush to use military force in Iraq. The Constitutional process was followed, just as the elder statesmen in the article would have had it.
As for the Senator quoted above, he later began to wildly flip-flop on the issue, and several others, in an attempt to stake out political ground for a Presidential bid. His name is John Kerry.
Did i accidentaly type cbs.slashdot.org instead of politics.slashdot.org?
ALWAYS preface your opinions with "It is my opinion that..." or "I feel that...".
Not "I feel that...". Rather, "I think that". Opinions are not feelings. Emotions are feelings. People say "I feel that..." when they know their opinions are on shaky ground, because people don't have to justify "feelings". You're entitled to feel however you want to about something and there's no wrong way to "feel". But thoughts and opinions can be disputed and shown to be wrong, so people try to let their thoughts off the hook, and make them not subject to dispute, by calling them "feelings". It's a cop-out. You can say "I feel happy", or "I feel angry", but if you start off saying "I feel that", chances are that you're trying to disguise your belief as an impugnable feeling.
We need to re-instate congress into the war approval process. The reason the executive branch has been able to use this power since WWII is because no president has been punished for its abuse. I'm not saying that we should punish this president for going into war, as we had plenty of precident to use force without a declaration of war, but perhaps this country needs to look into stiffer punishments for presidents who use force without declarations of war.
No, there is no question of this. The bill, signed in October 2002, authorized the President to use military force, explicitly.There was a question for whether this bill SHOULD authorize military force, but require the President to come back to Congress before using force. But that was decided against.
There is simply no question but that Congress authorized the President to use force against Iraq.
Actually boomer = nuclear missile submarine. Like the Typhoon (remember "the hunt for Red October?). However the grandparent is still BSing; the cold war is over and the policies that made sense then are no longer sound.
Nothing, and I do mean _nothing_, the president of the united states can do in five minutes will make the slightest difference in the "war on terror". The conflict at the moment is over civilians launching terror attacks against targets on US (and other nations) soil. Really the people who will make the US safe are not the prez and the dept of homeland security, but rather the law enforcement/intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI etc). These are the people who can stop the terrorist, not some HomeSec gestapo. And Bush has damaged the credibility of the States' military intelligence with the whole weapons of mass destruction lie.
You want to stop the terrorists? Then stop electing warmongering cowboys. Really, the United States need not fuel the hatred of extremists by giving them free propaganda. Acting out of fear, and allowing yourselves to be cowed by a snake oil salesmen who claims he will make you "safe" will only make things worse. Kick the bum out of office. And stop picking fights with pissant countries a fraction of your size; it makes you look like a schoolyard bully.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
If I hire Dick Cheney to tell you and 74 of your friends that some person is going to bomb Washington with anthrax drones that don't acutally exist, aluminum centrifuge tubes that don't actually exist, and yellowcake from Nigeria that doesn't actually exist, and you all vote to bomb that person first, does that mean you authorized it?
YES, it does- and it means you're as bad at checking your facts as Dan Rather.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.