[Newspoetry] my unpoetic fight against dictators continues

[DL Emerick]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040402445.
html

 

DLE COMMENTS:

Cheney's remarks continue to illustrate his fundamental confusion about the
difference in a republic between a Commander-in-Chief, who executes the will of
the People, and a Supreme-Commander, who executes his own arbitrary will. The
Founders feared Supreme-Commanders -- princes who would wage war when and where
and how they wished, for ends of vanity, if not for other equally foolish
reasons of hubris. They imagined the Presidency as an office only and always
subordinate to the will of the people, the Congress of the United States. They
required him to take an oath of office, to faithfully execute the duties of that
office.

 

Those duties themselves are not particularly enumerated constitutionally, like
the limited powers of Congress. Why? Because the Founders believed that the
Presidents duties always would be defined by legislation that the Congress, in
the name of the people, enacted

 

It should be noted, here, that even the veto power was reluctantly vested in the
Presidency -- its very nature being legislative. That grant appears,
historically, to have been simply a mistake. As for the thesis that there is any
lawful power to appoint interim officials, for a year, when Congress is not in
session, the Founders would have simply been amazed at such a suggestion. They
would have been astounded that Congress would ever pass such an act, without
restricting it to the most narrow and dire exigencies of some grave emergency,
and expiring, even then, upon the resumption of Congress in session.

 

Yes, Cheney has long confused the nature of a corporate CEO office with the much
more humble role the Founders had in mind, when they assented to a Presidency.
For, above all, they believed the Presidency was to be the servant of the will
of the People, through Congress acting as the voice and in the name of the
people. Our democratic-republic has long suffered from the grandiosity of
presidential pretensions.

 

The proper corrective to the ills that flow from advisors like Cheney is for
Congress to remind the people of the United States that they truly and formally
represent and serve the will of the people -- and that the President, properly,
is only Bureaucrat-in-Chief, the chief clerk, even if, among warriors and
warriors alone, he is the leader of the pack of warriors, the highest civilian
Commanding Officer of the military, in the direct chain of orders.

 

By DL_Emerick | Apr 5, 2007 12:33:46 PM

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