Presidential Prerogatives

Presidential Prerogatives

… “We have the remarkable spectacle
of a wartime President who, by a series of doubtful legal strategies, has squandered
his credibility in the federal courts,” says Eugene Fidell, a Washington
lawyer who heads the National Institute of Military Justice. “The judges
are in as grumpy a mood as I can remember.” There will be more trouble
to come. Government officials have been telling reporters that the disputed
NSA wiretaps played a part in building the case that led to guilty pleas by
two plotters: Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver who admitted checking out means
of destroying the Brooklyn Bridge, and Mohammed Junaid Babar, a New York City
man who acknowledged smuggling money and supplies to an al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan,
among other things. Now Faris' attorney and dozens of other lawyers involved
in some major terrorism cases are planning to file court challenges to see where
the information on their clients came from. Miami attorney Kenneth Swartz represents
Adham Amin Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian who lived in Broward County,
Fla., and has been charged, along with Padilla, in an alleged conspiracy to
commit terrorist acts abroad. Swartz says if any of the wiretaps used to build
a case against his client were done “without legal authority, it would
be a real constitutional issue.” … Has
Bush Gone Too Far?

Yes. Next question.

Well, it's not so much a question as a mirror into our president's
soul or lack thereof.

… On one day in the spring of 2004,
White House chief of staff Andy Card and the then White House Counsel Alberto
Gonzales made a bedside visit to John Ashcroft, attorney general at the time,
who was stricken with a rare and painful pancreatic disease, to try—without
success—to get him to reverse his deputy, Acting Attorney General James
Comey, who was balking at the warrantless eavesdropping. Miffed that Comey,
a straitlaced, by-the-book former U.S. attorney from New York, was not a “team
player” on this and other issues, President George W. Bush dubbed him
with a derisive nickname, “Cuomo,” after Mario Cuomo, the New York
governor who vacillated over running for president in the 1980s. (The White
House denies this; Comey declined to comment.) Full
Speed Ahead

Now there is a new definition for “team player,” according to Terror
Guy. Anyone who plays ball and doesn't care about the price, which in this case
would be going against the Constitution. For that, Comey is dubbed “Cuomo,”
as if this is a bad thing. Only in Bushworld, baby.

The Newsweek article states what we all knew implicitly: “It
does not appear that President Bush—determined to stand tall in the war
on terror—or Vice President Cheney, a staunch believer in executive power,
hesitated to circumvent FISA.”

But recently, it was Tom Daschle who shed the most light on exactly
what Bush felt he had to tell Congress and what they actually knew.

When the NSA eavesdropping story leaked,
the Bush administration immediately claimed that it had briefed congressional
leaders on several occasions. But the briefings appear to have been sketchy
and ultra-secretive. Sen. Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader at the
time, recalled being briefed in 2002 and again in 2004. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK,
he was reluctant to get into classified details, but he did say, “The
presentation was quite different from what is now being reported in the press.
I would argue that there were omissions of consequence.” At his briefing
in the White House Situation Room, Daschle was forbidden to take notes, bring
staff or speak with anyone about what he had been told. “You're so disadvantaged,”
Daschle says. “They know so much more than you do. You don't even know
what questions to ask.”

It is not by accident that two of the men most responsible for
the executive power pump up are two men who were involved when the presidency was
being cut down to size because of Nixon. Those two men are Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld, both of whom believe the presidency and executive branch hold a special
inherent power because of the broad elected mandate of the office. As Newsweek explains, that's one reason Terror Guy isn't about to admit he needs to ask Congress for squat. Hey, babe, he's president, so he can act as he likes, all in the name of “national security.”

The presidential prerogatives W.'s Dick and Rummy believe are
built into Bush's office smell of imperial hubris and the notion that big brother
knows better. So far, that has not been the case. It's time for Congress to
wake up, come back and make a stand on the grounds the Constitution granted to
them as a co-equal branch of government. The rest of us just have to keep shouting.