1 Boring Old Man

While we’ve lamented the one sided nature of our government under the Republican President with a Republican Congress, there’s been a much more ominous destruction of our system of government that’s gone on in the background – something called "signing statements." I have no notion of where such a thing came from, but essentially, President Bush has used this mechanism to basically ignore the Legislative Branch of the government. He has issued 750 of these, more than all presidents in our history. In these statements, he says how he is going to interpret the Congressional actions – often how he is going to ignore what they say. This is apparently a concerted effort, lead by Vice President Cheney, to undermine the Separation of Powers. There’s a summary by Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post today. The journalist who has followed this issue most closely is Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe. Now, the American Bar Association has just voted to study this end-around tactic and its Constitutionality.

Recently, there’s been a lot  more focus on the Administration’s practice of always having some superfluous issue on the front burner. Right now, it’s the Gay Marriage Ban. But our focus has been on the content of the issue of the day – pandering to the Religious Right in this case. What we haven’t honed in on is what has been going on in the background – Cheney’s systematic undermining of the Separation of Powers and our Constitutional form of government. He has some notion that this is a bad thing, and has brazenly gone about changing things in his own image: Change the Courts, use "signing statements" to ignore the Congress, setting up the N.S.A. as "Big Brother," ignoring the C.I.A., ignoring any regulation by the U.N. One wonders if the whole Iraq War is a diversion to keep our attention away from what he’s doing to further strengthen the "unitary executive".

Cheney’s "God Complex" may be the death of our government as it was intended. That seems to be his intent…